I saw an article in the New York Times about financial advice geared towards women. The basic gist of the article is that even well-educated, successful women may not have as good a grasp on their finances as men. The author discussed how a lot of writers and companies try to reach out to and teach women about finances. Many recent books seem to be trying to “girly up” finances, to appeal more to women. I suppose the article generalized quite a bit, but it did include some actual data/research to support the general claims.
One resource mentioned in the article was LearnVest. It’s an online program that guides you towards your financial goals. Unlike Mint or Thrive, which uses your imported account information to determine progress towards your goals, LearnVest guides you through checklists of brief educational/informative articles. You start by answering a few questions about your current financial, education, employment, and family status, as well as some goals that you may have. It then presents you with with topics that apply to your current situation and goals, which then organizes and spits out those checklists of articles I mentioned. They also include a lot of calculators and tools you can use to figure out your budget or weigh financial decisions. Many of the calculators/tools are actually from bankrate.com.
So, what do I think of it? For me, I feel like I already know a lot of these ideas. But I like going through it as a refresher, to remind me of tasks or ideas I may have missed or forgotten. And if you’re just starting out, it’s definitely a good way to take control of your finances. The checklist format combined with short articles and tasks makes it easy to do little bits at a time, meaning you wont get overwhelmed. I know that this site is geared towards women (especially looking at the website design, including color scheme/style, images used, and tone of blog posts), but it had good advice and techniques that would be good for anyone, and at any age!
So go ahead and try it out. Let me know what you think of it. I think I’m going to go back and work through a few more checklists!
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