Financial blogs, vol. 1

The world of financial blogs is rapidly expanding as both blogging professionals and those playing the home version jump into the fray.

Today Praxiomatic takes its first look at just a few to try to get a sense of how wide their range is and of what they offer to the reader.

PFBlog, subtitled "My personal finance journey," is written by a 31-year-old man who positions his blog as "Personal finance observation, musing and decisions in a journey toward financial independence by 36 with at least $1 million." You can watch him chart his progress as he tallies up his cash, brokerage, retirement accounts and stock options (totaling over $723,000 so far — not bad). Overall the layout is cluttered and overstuffed with ads and sponsors, but the appeal of PFBlog is that it is always fun to spy on other people's decision-making processes and especially their financial statements. Recently, nearly a thousand people per day were reading PFBlog. That's a lot of spying.

Similarly, another guy at 2millionblog has set his sights on — you guessed it — $2 million. He describes himself as "a 30yr old IBM engineer and live in Raleigh, NC," and claims to have over 700 readers a day. I liked this blog better because the guy seemed more about the reality of tracking personal finance and less about the cluttering of his blog with an ocean of ads and sponsorships.

Here's a much more thorough overview of personal finance blogs than what you're reading now. It appears to be affiliated with SeekingAlpha, which calls itself a "leading provider of stock market opinion and analysis from blogs, money managers and investment newsletters, and a provider of its own high-value, complementary financial content," noting also that "'Alpha' is a finance term referring to a stock's performance relative to the market; it's used more loosely by fund managers to describe beating their index, so every stock picker is 'seeking alpha'.)"

At over 1,400 readers a day, All Financial Matters features posts like the Top 5 reasons to pay off your mortgage. Author JLP appears to be fond of money "laws" and "rules," such as the rule of 72, which estimates how long it takes to double your money at an assumed rate of interest.

Got any favorites we missed? Post them in Comments.