My name is Daniel and I started Sweating The Big Stuff to share my experiences as a way to learn about personal finance. I am in my early 20s and after graduating college and starting to work in the real world, have started to budget carefully in order to save for short, medium, and long-term goals.
I would like to educate people about ways to improve our finances while maintaining a high quality of life.
- Many personal finance blogs suggest ways to save money that are too disruptive to daily life. I seek to provide financial solutions without feeling the stress of micro-managing each and every financial decision.
- Instead of saving 12 cents on canned beans, I am focused on saving on larger, recurring costs that will have a meaningful impact on our finances.
- Quality of life is extremely important to me, and I would like to help people realize that they can live a healthy financial life while enhancing, not detracting from, our quality of life.
You have a very nicely laid out website here Daniel, nice work – and for being in your early 20′s, you have a head start on a lot of people in their early 20′s, nice job!
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Really important focus! Time is the biggest generator of wealth (if you use it!) so I’m sure you will succeed!!
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Nice focus! I always tall people who stress over every single penny on grocery that it is NOT worth their time to save that little money! After all, saving is for living better; if it takes that much energy to save, then it defeats the whole purpose of it :)
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Hi Daniel,
I am helping out building a ranking system for TotallyMoney (http://www.totallymoney.com/blogs/top-finance-blogs/). We were inspired to start creating it due to some of the shortcomings of the Wisebread rankings. We didn’t quite realise how many different ranking tables there were about until we were too committed to building our own.
It is good to hear your thoughts as we are struggling with the same issues you bring up.
I think we have solved some and are still very much struggling with a few of the others. It would be great if you have a look around and tell us your thoughts.
A few points that have been brought up and how we have tried to combat them.
Page rank – I think this is a very useful metric to have on any list, but as you say it can’t be given too much weight as it updates so infrequently. We have dealt with this by making the scale logarithmic, so higher values carry more weight and not putting as much emphasis onto it as we would like.
Speed of updates – Our table updates every week, I think that weekly or monthly are the two possibilities and any longer doesn’t really work.
Amount of sites listed – I think this is a really good question. Yakezie is great because it allows you to compare directly against your fellow members and Wisebread is great because of its completeness. We have added filtering options to our table, so you can attempt to compare against other blogs.
We allow people to compare results on the basis of Yakezie membership , blogging niche, country and age of blog. I think this is a good start, but it relies on honesty and good categorisation which might become a problem once more sites are listed.
Corporate blog inclusion – This hasn’t really been an issue for us, but hopefully filtering will be able to sort out some of the problems. Deciding when a blog is too big to be allowed would be problematic.
Twitter and Facebook – These are great metrics for showing how influential you are online, but it isn’t really right for everyone. I don’t like the fact that your blog is downgraded if you don’t have a twitter account, because it isn’t really a measure of how successful your blog is. We have put these together in a social reach column. I am sure there is a better solution, but we haven’t got there yet.
Compete and Alexa – We have put these two together under a site traffic column, with the ranking skewed towards Alexa for its completeness. In my experience both are inaccurate (subdomains on a major site xxx.wordpress.com for example), but adding them together fixes a lot of those problems and gets you a better result than either on their own.
Other problems we have come across are incomplete data. We would love to use technorati rankings and feedburner stats, but not everyone uses them. Ideally you would use all the information you can to rank websites, but if you can’t get accurate results it hurts more than it helps.
It would be good to hear your thoughts on our site, remembering that it is very much in its testing phase.
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