The Best Personal Finance Magazine: December, 2005

In August, I started a comparison among the big three personal finance magazines: Money, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, and Smart Money. My methodology was simple: the magazines got one vote for each article that I found useful -- either for me, someone I knew or for this blog. I continued by reviewing them in September, October, and November.

As a reminder, here are the results after four months (the number of useful articles I got out of each of the personal finance magazines):

Money - 48
Kiplinger's - 28
Smart Money - 14

Well, I continued the effort for the December issues, and here's what I got:

Money - 15
Kiplinger's - 4
Smart Money - 1

This gives us a five-month total of:

Money - 63
Kiplinger's - 32
Smart Money - 15

My thoughts:

1. This is why I recommend Money magazine and it's one of my recommended money Christmas present suggestions.

2. I'm declaring Money the champion for this year. We'll start again fresh in the new year.

3. Am I wasting my time on Smart Money?

Comments

[Eric]

I subscribe to all those too
and yes, Money is #1, then Kips, and smart money is crap

[Fly Girl]

I don't think it means that you are wasting your time and/or money on Smart Money. It just means that the return (number of useful articles) on your investment (subscription cost) is different.

Different can still bring value, though, and I would look at it from that point of view before throwing it out.

[fivecentnickel.com]

This pretty much follows what I've always thought about the three magazines.

[srh]

I subscribed to both Smart Money and Money for a couple years (I've never read Kiplingers), and I agree with this assessment.

Smart Money always seems to focus too much on stock picking articles for my liking. Money seems to offer generally valuable suggestions, as long as you know which articles to ignore.

However like most magazines, I have found that if I save Money for a year, I can usually reread it and get about as much value out of 1-year-old magazines as the new ones :)