As a financial planning nut, I subscribe to the big three personal finance magazines: Money, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, and Smart Money. (I also subscribe to other publications that cover personal finances in part -- Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week -- but the big three are the ones that give the most personal finance coverage by far.) I've subscribed for years to each of these, but have never done a side-by-side comparison to see which I liked best. So this month, I decided to wait until they all arrived, then sit down and compare each to the others to see which I thought was the best. The results surprised me.
Before I give my methodology and results, let me say that there were a number of sideline factors that I could have used to help me decide which I liked best. They all have different designs, different feature sections, different, well-known columnists and the like, and while these impacted me in one way or another, none of them really influenced how I rated the magazines.
My methodology was simple: which one had the most articles that I found useful -- either for me, someone I knew or for this blog. This was rather easy to ascertain since when I look through magazines, I always tear out the articles I like so I can read them later (on a plane, while relaxing, etc.). So all I had to do was count how many articles I tore out from each publication.
Before I started, I thought the magazines would have a close number of useful articles each. If anything, I felt like I'd always liked Kiplinger's the best and Smart Money the least (though they were all useful). Boy was I in for a shock!
Here are the results. For the month of August 2005, here are the number of useful articles I got out of each of the personal finance magazines:
Money - 11
Kiplinger's - 3
Smart Money - 3
A few thoughts on these results:
1. Wow! I would have never guessed that Money was so far ahead of the others!
2. This is only one month. I'll track the next few months to see if this trend holds.
3. At this rate, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week may have as much useful financial information as Kiplinger's and Smart Money. I may add them to the mix.
I always look forward to Money Magazine. Almost every article is useful and entertaining.
Kiplinger is next. Smart Money focus to much on retirement.
Posted by: Rob | August 08, 2005 at 11:59 AM
Ironic you didn't include the cost of each magazine in your review. What would the total cost per useful article be?
Posted by: Dave | August 08, 2005 at 01:01 PM