Blogs are a great way of getting new ideas and staying up to date on topics of interest – our LiveSmartOhio blog certainly falls into this category! There are also a few personal finance blogs that I read carefully, and often use in my student teaching. I wanted to share three of them with you today in the hope that you find them interesting as well.
1. “Squared Away Blog” from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
This blog is a financial behavior blog with a focus on retirement preparedness. It features reviews of new research studies, interesting websites related to retirement planning, and in-house reports from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. In my opinion, it is a great resource to stay up to date on retirement issues. In addition, this blog reminds me to check out other tools on the Center for Retirement Research’s website. I love to play the two interactive retirement planning tools with my undergraduate students (http://crr.bc.edu/special-projects/interactive-tools/). “Curious behavior” is an interactive tool that explains the psychology of retirement savings behavior, and it is very amusing! “Target your retirement” is an interactive calculator for calculating retirement savings.
This blog is written by Professor Jack M. Guttentag, an emeritus faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This blog is focused on housing and its goal is to help the reader avoid commonly made mistakes. The recommendations are hands-on, and include lots of real-life examples that explain the sometimes complex decisions surrounding mortgages and reverse mortgages. The blog posts are short and discuss topics such as “What is a HELOC?” “Buying a new house before selling the old one,” “How to pay off a 30-year mortgage in 15 years – without being scammed.”
3. CFPB Blog
Our colleagues at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have a regularly updated blog that shares posts about current topics in personal finance. The blog posts are often linked to new CFPB resources, which are typically available free of charge. It is a great blog to keep up to date on basic financial literacy.
4. The Scout Report, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Every Friday morning, the Scout Report arrives in my in-box. It provides updates on new websites and web-based resources, and is not focused on a particular topic. Rather, it covers new, interesting, and high-quality websites and web tools for “Research and Education”, “General Interest”, and “Network Tools”. The range of web resources features in each blog is sometimes amazing. Today, the Scout Report presents noteworthy websites on “Met Publications: Books with Full-Text Online” (from the New York’s Metropolitan Museum), “Do credit cards make you gain weight?” (a lesson for high school students from MIT), and “Grammar Bytes” (a website by an English and Humanities professor from Florida). It is my favorite blog of the week!
