Dave and Katy’s Travels | An Investment, retirement, and travel blog

I decided when I created the blog that I wouldn’t post unless I had come up with something I really was interested in posting. In other words, I wouldn’t post things on the blog just because it was that time of the week.

I’ve always been impressed with how often some people update their financial type blogs. Some of them manage to post every single day, and most have a weekly type schedule. However, once you actually look at the individual posts, you see huge amounts of garbage, repetitious posts, and complete fluff.

For example, some post titles I’m glancing at while looking for something to read (slightly changed to protect the innocent):

• 25 ways to grow rich
• How to eliminate debt quickly
• 15 ways to spend less money
• 5 most important steps to growing your wealth

What do these blog posts include? Do they have interesting tricks you can use to reduce your spending? Doubtful. Do they have innovative ways to keep track of your expenses? Rarely. What they are is an excuse to post some fluff piece that sounds interesting enough to draw in extra traffic. They’ll state that you should save 10/15/20% of your salary, track your expenses, pay down debt, reduce interest rates, etc. And of course they have mentioned this in 23 other posts on their site, just in different ways.

Now I completely understand that it’s hard to keep saying the same message in different ways, but it still ends up being frustrating. The message is correct, and there are certainly people out there who need to hear that message a few times. The comments on these messages are often scary.. “how can you possibly expect people to save 15% of their salary??”, or “It is unrealistic to expect people to pay off their credit cards each month in full”. Apparently this message is still needed for some. But for those of us who are already well educated, it becomes difficult to find those pieces to bring us to the next level.

I am always interested in hearing concrete tricks/tips that people use for their finances. I’d love to hear something original that someone came up with and couldn’t wait to share with the world. I just wish there was a way to filter out all the fluff.