What's This All About
I've realised through my phenomenal powers of observation that a lot of people don't know an awful lot about how to manage money. They usually get branded as irresponsible, but I've come to believe that the fault lies with our education system. Simply put, almost no education system teaches people how to manage their budgets and save money, this is left to your parents. So if your parents don't know, or are simply poor teachers, you're flat out of luck, and cycle repeats for generations. Since I've had the benefit of parents who were both good with money and decent teachers, plus an accounting education, I decided that I should share a bit of that with Internet. On a side note, since I don't actually expect people to read this, I just think of myself as writing to a person named "Internet." Internet spends way too much money on porn and eBay junk, so I'm hoping she learns something.
What All is Here?
Currently, I am in the middle of writing a 5 part series on the fundamentals of my money management system, called "Money for Beginners." Other than that, there are articles in a blog format on a variety of personal finance topics. I'm told that writing your goals down makes you significantly more likely to meet those goals, so here it is. My goal is to add new articles twice per week, on Sundays and Wednesdays.
Is There More Coming?
Eventually. Along with articles, it's my intention to put my programming knowledge to work and develop some tools - some web tools and some spreadsheets - to help with money management. I am still struggling with design issues on the site, so developing new tools is a long ways off at this point.
The Forum
This website has an attached forum. In the unlikely event that anyone reads my ramblings, I'm inviting everyone to join the forum to discuss the articles and other personal finance topics. There are no comments following the articles, as I find them an unfriendly way to discuss topics. Popular discussions fall off the radar simply because the article gets old, and it's difficult to follow the discussion. Forums are better, as popular discussions stay on top, and functions like the [quote] feature make it easier to respond to others.
Technical Geekdom
A side benefit of starting this site is that it has given me a chance to play with web design a bit. This website is built using the Joomla Content Management System, with a customised version of the Xeano template by XorMedia. The forums are powered by phpBB3. All of these tools are available from Internet at no cost whatsoever, which pleases me greatly, since spending money on something that I don't expect people to read goes quite contrary to the principles that I'm writing about.
