1. Have a back up plan: Probably the most significant lesson to take away from the whole credit debacle is that it is important to have a back up plan no matter who you are or what your business. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. If your credit lines are cut or reduced, you suddenly find yourself losing customers or your income level drops dramatically, it is pertinent to maintaining your livelihood that you be ready to react before it is too late.
2. Preparation is key: We now see just how many businesses could have been saved from the credit crunch had they simply sat down and discussed the possibilities of a dramatic loss of business or lack of credit. Creating business plans that involve key members of your operation and ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding their roles during an economic crisis, can save money, jobs, and even your business.
3. Importance of liquidity: Another lesson of the credit mess that weaves itself between having a back up plan and preparation is maintaining available liquidity. We recently saw this lesson applied to everyone from the largest financial firms down to the average investor and business owner. Not having available liquid assets to pay down debt and maintain normal business operations forced many companies out of business and pushed many people from their homes.
4. Save, save, save: While you and your business certainly don’t want to tie too much up in low return cash investments, they can be a real lifesaver if or when a credit crisis occurs. Whether this cushion acts to preserve timeliness on your accounts payable or continues to fund your payroll, cash savings can make the difference between a business that outlasts a crisis or folds under its pressure.
5. It’s not the size of your credit line, but how you use it: Whether it’s a credit card or credit line, it won’t help you survive a credit crisis if you’ve already maxed it out. Having open and available lines of credit with reputable creditors can help you sleep easier at night, but as we learned during the recent crisis, those lines can rapidly be modified or simply vanish altogether. Ensuring that your credit is paid timely, kept at reasonable limits, and is available from multiple sources can help ensure money is available when you need it.
6. Understanding what you sign: When it comes to mortgages, credit cards, lines of credit, or similar forms of lending, it is important to know what words mean – and if you don’t know, ask! Due diligence when it comes to receiving credit means more than just putting your name on the dotted line and assuming the lending company is going to act in your best interest. Remember, when it comes to credit, most companies (unless they are a credit union or owned by a family member) are there to make a profit, not to ensure you get the best deal.
7. A name does not a business make: Lehman Brothers, AIG, Washington Mutual. With massive failures abounding during the credit crisis, we found out just what “Too big to fail,” really meant … not much. Just because a business or company’s name is associated with success, it doesn’t mean the drivers aren’t asleep at the wheel. Conduct your due diligence before first becoming involved with a business, even if it’s well known.
8. Paying people what they are worth: Having a recognized CEO that is pulling in 100 million a year doesn’t mean a company is succeeding or even that this person knows what is truly going on inside the organization. In many cases, we’ve been taught the lesson that the higher paid the executive, the more wary we should be regarding bonus structures, investment risk, and the willingness of leadership to look the other way when it comes to the well-being of their creditors, investors, and company.
9. Optimism vs. blinders: There is a big difference between optimism regarding investments, business trends, and economic forecasts, and just moving blindly ahead assuming that economic conditions will remain positive. Bubbles burst, businesses fail, and jobs are lost. It is a fact of economic life that we often lose sight of risk during the euphoria of the good times, and it can be a costly lesson that is all too clear when we are on the financial downslide.
10. You aren’t in control: More recently as we watch credit card companies increase rates, banks penalize their best customers, and governments shift and change policies on a regular basis we learned another valuable lesson: credit should be used as a safety net, not a crutch. With guidelines and terms of use left largely to the whims of corporate giants and legislators, you can be left feeling like a puppet on a string. The big lesson here: it’s their game, and they can change the rules whenever they want.

About the author

Kris is student of business and finance who writes for an Australian money comparison website. You can read more of his work on their blog.

Here are twenty-five awesome quotes from the man himself. I find these quotes to be especially comforting when you’re ‘financially depressed’–after all, he views a market slump as a good thing!–so I hope these can remind everyone that we just need to do the basics, and we”ll be OK. Be a consistent net saver, buy the market through ups and downs, be a decent human being, and rest easy.

On Investing

1. “Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”
2. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
3. “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
4. “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
5. “Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”.”

On Success

1. “Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”
2. “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”
3. “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”
4. “Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.”
5. “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

On Helping Others

1. “If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
2. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
3. “I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don’t do that though. I don’t use very many of those claim checks. There’s nothing material I want very much. And I’m going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”
4. “It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.”
5. “My family won’t receive huge amounts of my net worth. That doesn’t mean they’ll get nothing. My children have already received some money from me and Susie and will receive more. I still believe in the philosophy – FORTUNE quoted me saying this 20 years ago – that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.”

On Life

1. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
2. “We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”
3. “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
4. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
5. “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”

Funny Ones

1. “A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.”
2. “When they open that envelope, the first instruction is to take my pulse again.”
3. “We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’”
4. “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”
5. “In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.”

More good sources for Warren Buffet quotes:

• Investing School: 52 Must Read Quotes from Legendary Investor – Warren Buffett
• Wikiquote: Warren Buffett

Let’s be clear about one thing though: while peer-to-peer lending sites like Kiva and informational sites like Tip’d cater to all sorts of investors–especially the diversified, buy-and-hold, long-term-view kind–Twitter’s very nature attracts bursty, instantaneous, and fleeting content. And that means, buy-and-hold investors might not find these new platforms interesting. Day traders, on the other hand, seem to be flocking to them.

The question is, which platform should you make your home? With most social media channels, you find a winner-take-all situation. (Why sign up at register at ConnectU, when everyone’s already signed up at Facebook?) So let’s take a look at these two platforms head-to-head, and see which is likely to come out the winner.

Twiticker

Twiticker’s byline is “What are the markets doing?” The site’s homepage features the latest finance-related tweets, though I can’t tell what kind of engine/algorithm they’re using to find and sort the tweets. My impressions of the site are positive, however I can’t help but feel like it’s an Alpha product, not quite ready for primetime. In fairness, Twiticker is promising a revamp in the near future: “We are very excited to announce that Doug Williams has joined Twiticker.com as President. Doug will move Twiticker from an aggregator of stock information into a more robust and consumable hub of financial data. Doug will bring his twelve years of development experience to the team where he will lead business and functional growth.”

• Traffic: A report from Compete.com shows about 1,000 monthly unique visitors. Ouch.
• Press: A Google search brings up coverage from Tweetcrunch and not a whole lot else.
• Features: The site seems like it’s 90% finished, but still needs a little polishing.

StockTwits

Stocktwits launched with greater fanfare, possibly due to co-founder Howard Lindzon’s reputation built at Wallstrip. The site describes itself as “an open, community-powered investment idea and information service. You can think of it as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal. Eavesdrop on what traders and investors are talking about RIGHT NOW or contribute to the conversation and build your reputation and following as a savvy market wizard.”

• Traffic: A report from Compete.com shows about 40,000 monthly unique visitors. Not huge yet, but growing, and not exponentially lower than the traffic levels seen at social finance plays Tip’d and Stockpickr, which have achieved critical mass. (Disclosure: Bankling management has an ownership interest in Tip’d.) In any case, the traffic level is about 3,900% higher than that of Twiticker.
• Press: StockTwits came out with an impressive PR-blitz last Fall. Coverage on WSJ’s The Wallet, NYT’s Bits Blog and even Mashable.
• Features: StockTwits was able to raise $800k in funding, and it looks like they’re making that go far in terms of development. The site is very polished and usable, and they even have a “Digg-style” user-request application, so it’s likely the most coveted feature requests will get implemented in the future.

So which platform should you use?

If I were a betting man, I’d say StockTwits is likely to get to 50,000 users first… and whichever service gets to 50k first will probably get to 500,000 users first… you get the picture. Of course, should Twitter enter this space with an in-house app, they could monopolize the space easily, but I don’t see that as a high probability. For now, I’d say if you’re going to sign up at only one, you’ll probably want to check StockTwits out first.

1. Regulators: for lowering the capital requirements of banks, and for allowing banks and mortgage brokers to lend to bad-credit homebuyers via ARMs that were clearly irresponsible.
2. Myself: for being unwilling, as a voter and taxpayer, to demand–and pay for–a sufficient budget for Federal regulatory agencies.
3. Myself: for securing a mortgage I didn’t understand and buying a home I couldn’t afford; I didn’t bother to read the loan documents, and I bought a home that cost four times my annual income, rather than twice my annual income, which would have been sufficient.
4. Greedy bankers and mortgage brokers: for turning a profit by creating exotic financial instruments, whose risk they couldn’t adequately price. The fact that they couldn’t adequately understand and price the risk involved didn’t matter, since they resold these instruments to “suckers” (e.g., pension funds).
5. Myself: for allowing greed to influence my decision making process. I thought I “needed” a larger home, because my brother-in-law had one. Besides, the real estate market is only going up–a larger house should appreciate even faster, and I’ll make a ton of money when I sell it in seven years!
6. The Fed: for being unwilling to endure even a slight, healthy recession–or a slight, healthy dip in homebuying–and lending money at insanely, artificially low rates for over a decade, which ensured the continued expansion of the bubble.
7. Myself: for thinking 5% mortgage rates were the norm, 7% real estate appreciation rates were the norm, and 2% inflation was the norm. For not calling out our leaders when their two solutions for everything are borrow more money and/or print more money.
8. Myself: for throwing out long-proven financial rules of thumb–such as, my investments in equity vs. bonds should be 100 minus my age–and trying to squeeze every possible dollar of return out of my savings and investments.
9. Myself: for not saving enough; I got a 30% raise three years ago, and instead of regularly saving the pay increase–or even a third of the pay increase–I let my expenses rise 32%. Wants and luxuries turned into needs.
10. Myself: for thinking the present decade was “different”. Historical home ownership rates are ridiculously consistent. (And lower than they are now.) Historical real returns on real estate are ridiculously consistent. (And near zero.) Why should the present decade be wildly different? Why did I lie to myself and say that it was?
11. Myself: for letting stupid people and consumerism influence me. Did I really need to buy a late model Jaguar XJ8? At least I paid cash. Still, I should have stuck with the Lincoln Town Car. And saved the difference.
12. Myself: for participating in a political culture of scapegoating–for taking glee in skewering political figureheads, bank CEOs, and middle managers at AIG. The mess we’re in took fifteen years and 270,000,000 participants to reach its present scale.
13. Myself: for not taking personal responsibility for my finances and for not caring about the ethical, practical and societal consequences of my decisions. For seeking to blame the external, rather than examining the internal.

The first article I read, No Cheap or Free Government Land at About.com, was pretty discouraging.

No matter what you may have heard or read, there is no such thing as “free land from the government.” There is no federal homesteading program and public land the government does sell is sold only at market value.

Ouch. Well, I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope yet. The GetRichSlowly article referred to Kansas, so I figured, even if the Federal government wasn’t giving land away, maybe state or county governments were.

“It’s good to own land.” [Stewie Griffin]

So another search led me to KansasFreeLand.com, which got me excited. Looks like we’ve hit paydirt! The site linked to several county/local Web sites in Kansas which are apparently offering free land. I clicked on to one of them: Discover Osborne.com. Sure enough, there was a link to a “get free land” application for the City of Osborne. Of course, the program has restrictions (but what government entitlement program doesn’t?):

The City of Osborne is excited to offer no cost residential housing lots in the Sunset Addition, north of Main Street. To be eligible for these lots, you must fill out this application for review by the City of Osborne. Once the application is completed and returned, the applicant will be required to meet with the City to form an agreement. Once the agreement is signed, construction may begin within the timeframe designated in the agreement.

Rather than summarize each of the cities’/counties’ programs, I suggest you just check out the Web site yourself: Kansas Free Land.com. You can also read more about getting free land in Kansas in this CNN article, or skip to the end of this article for even more resources.

There’s a Reason It’s Free, Right?

You’re not going to get free land from the government in Manhattan. Or in Boston. Or in LA, Chicago, Miami, Key West, or even Columbus, Ohio. Normally local or state tax breaks (well, free land isn’t a tax break, but it’s the same principle) are given by areas with depressed economies and job markets. Think about it: if they’re bribing people to move to a certain place, that means demand to live in that place must be pretty low.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad place to live. The article at GetRichSlowly which I referenced in the introduction discusses at length why it may actually make sense to live in Kansas. And before you make fun, or claim that a lower salary in another state would more than cancel out the cost of living decrease, please read about the top 10 most hated financial tips at FreeMoneyFinance:

1. Moving to a lower cost-of-living city — This one really puzzles me. Not only is it that people don’t like this idea, but they REALLY don’t like it. As in “you’re the stupidest financial blogger ever” sort of don’t like it. But what do I care? I still have my day job.

It must be the fact that, in general, people love where they live. They like the area of the country, their job, and the fact that they have family nearby.

However, if you move from a high cost-of-living city to a lower cost-of-living city, you can literally save MILLIONS over the course of your lifetime. And yes, that accounts for the fact that you’ll probably make less money in the new city. But your living expenses will drop so much more that you’ll be way better off financially. I know — you don’t want to hear that. I’ll shut up now.

Enough about that. Either you’re open to the idea of moving, or you’re not. If you are, please read on.

Additional Resources for Getting Free Land

It’d be impossible for me to categorize each and every state or local free land offer in the United States. (Plus, I’m guessing a lot of the information on the Web is out of date–I’d recommend contacting the city or county government to confirm that offers you read about online are still in effect.) So, this list of resources isn’t intended to be exhaustive, but hopefully you can get an idea of what kind of grants and offers are out there.

• Alaska Government to Distribute Free Land: A news story at Wayodd.com with information on a free land offer in Alaska.
• GovernmentLand.com: This site claims to have a way to get you free land. They do charge a fee, though, so I’d recommend investigating further before handing them any money.
• KansasFreeLand.com: Links to various city and county Web sites that have free land offerings in the state of Kansas.
• Con artists are peddling bogus lists of ‘free’ government land or property for sale: This article on the LA Times’ site exposes that a lot of the ‘free land’ content out there, is, indeed, pretty scammy. You may want to read this one first!

That’s it for now. If you have any experience investigating free land offers–whether they turned out to be legit, or a scam–please let us know in the comments!

The Madoff Ponzi Scheme

By now everyone has heard of Bernie Madoff and his massive financial scam. What usually isn’t explained however is how he was able to keep investors and regulators in the dark over so much money, over such a long period of time.

If you’re looking for a hundred word, concise summary, you’re probably out of luck. The Madoff scheme came about because of a confluence of many factors, some of which are pretty complex. Still, Lew Rockwell does a pretty good job of pulling it all together in his article, Madoff Explained. He cites the following factors (summarized in my words):

• Bernie Madoff was very smart. Especially with money and finance.
• Bernie Madoff does not appear to have a sufficiently developed moral conscience.
• An extended boom period–in turn caused by many other factors, like artificially cheap money from the Fed (more in the next point)–allowed him to pay off earlier investors, with sufficient return, to keep current and future investors “believing.”
• The Federal Reserve, American people, and US executive branch were unwilling to weather even a slight recession, thereby causing the Fed to keep interest rates low, thereby causing many financial bubbles to continue to inflate.

I might also add two other contributing factors:

• The theme of “deregulation,” which was highly prevalent in the 1990s and 2000s, decreased the authority, manpower, and budget of Federal regulators and investigators to uncover this kind of scheme.
• Federal regulators appear to be, on the whole, extremely incompetent. Choosing to work for the government may in fact be a negative selection bias.

But of course, each of the above bullet points could be expanded to a 900-page thesis. So if you’re interested in reading more about the Bernie Madoff scheme, I’d recommending the following Web pages:

• The US Dept. of Justice: United States vs. Bernard L. Madoff: Official Web site on the court case brought by the DOJ Southern District of New York.
• The New York Times: The Talented Mr. Madoff: An in-depth profile with a lot of information on the man himself, and “why” he did what he did.
• The Wall Street Journal: Bernie Madoff News: A portal with all the latest Wall Street Journal content and news on Madoff, his victims, the trial, etc.
• The Wall Street Journal: Madoff’s Victim List: A helpful visual (geographic and tabular) representation of the victims (including the amount by which each victim was swindled).

Definition of a Ponzi Scheme: What Is It, Exactly?

Alright, so we’ve discussed the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, but still haven’t defined precisely what a “Ponzi scheme” is. A lot of people use the phrase Ponzi scheme incorrectly, when referring to MLM organizations, etc. But according to Webster, the term is actually defined as an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.

But how does this work in practice? Here are some good resources on how Ponzi schemes actually work:

• SEC.gov: Ponzi Schemes: The federal government is probably a good source of information about scams, since they’re often the ones left cleaning up the mess once the scams are uncovered.
• Wikipedia: Ponzi Scheme: I like this page because it has a section on what isn’t considered a Ponzi scheme, including a “bubble,” a “pension fund,” “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” and “Multi-level marketing.”
• TIME Magazine: A Brief History of Ponzi Schemes: The History of Ponzi schemes, from their namesake (Charles Ponzi) to the present day.

The Largest Top Ponzi Schemes: Scams that Echo in History

Ponzi schemes have existed throughout modern history, and we’ll probably never uncover all of them that succeeded. Still, it’s interesting to take a look at the ones that did succeed (and then subsequently collapsed). Business Pundit has a great article on the top Ponzi schemes in history. Here is their top ten:

1. The Namesake: Charles Ponzi
2. Madman Madoff: Bernie Madoff
3. The Retiree Plunderer: Michael Eugene Kelly
4. The Boy Band Bandit: Lou Pearlman
5. The Biblical Bilker: Gerald Payne
6. The Costa Rica Crooks: Enrique, Osvaldo and Freddy Villalobos
7. The Lottery Uprising: The Albanian Government
8. The Scientologist Snake: Reed Slatkin
9. The Haiti Haters: various Haitians?
10. The Fraudulent Feminist: Sarah Howe

Read the entire BusinessPundit article here. HowStuffWorks also has a page on notable Ponzi schemes, though it’s not as in-depth as the BusinessPundit post. Finally, TIME Magazine’s A Brief History of Ponzi Schemes is a nice write-up that features a few more recent scams.

How to Avoid a Ponzi Scheme

Of course, if there’s one thing you should take away from all this, is that it’s probably not a good idea to get involved with, or invest in, a Ponzi scheme. I’d encourage you to remember two investing maxims:

• If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
• Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. (Warren Buffett)

But if you’d like to educate yourself further, here are the resources I’d recommend:

• LectLaw: How to Avoid Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes
• CBS: Tips to Avoid Ponzi Schemes (video)
• FBI: Common Fraud Schemes

All that reading is enough to make me nervous. I’m glad to be sticking with my portolio of Vanguard ETFs, TIPS, and high-yield savings… I’ll leave the “300% returns” to the suckers!

All of this is good for us PF nerds: the big finance portals can duke it out by offering us new features and better user experiences, right? I’ve taken a look at the current versions of each portal and provided my notes below. Note that I don’t really think one is a category-killer at this point: each portal has its pros and cons, and you might prefer one over another due to personal taste and what you use it for.

Google Finance launched to great fanfare in 2006, with many people expecting it would take the number one spot from Yahoo! in short order. Except–they didn’t. In fact, Google Finance hasn’t seen much of anything updated since it first launched, besides some minor tweaks here and there. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Google Finance is, well, Google-y finance, and that means a simple, fast, clean user experience.

My user experience notes on Google Finance:

• Simple, clean, “Google-y” interface
• Shows a lot of coverage from blogs, less from traditional media source
• Easy to use comparison feature on graphs (particular stock vs. S&P, Nasdaq, etc.)
• Very few ads and distractions around the content
• My verdict: clean and simple. That could be good or bad, depending on what you want/need.
• Check out AAPL on Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AAPL

Now onto the original…

Yahoo! Finance is like an old, worn out sofa cushion sporting a comfortable groove where my backside has rested day in and day out for eight long years. It’s an old friend. I can find anything I need in two or three clicks, and it rarely breaks. True, the design is looking a little dated. In fact, the design looked dated three years ago. But content is king, and Yahoo! delivers on the content.

My user experience notes on Yahoo! Finance:

• Shows a lot coverage from traditional media sources (Reuters, MarketWatch, etc.), less from blogs
• Easy circa 2003 usability and design (not necessarily a bad thing)
• Pages are fairly busy: too many ads and distractions?
• The message boards here are highly trafficked (though, I don’t think they’re a great source of information)
• My verdict: The tried and true choice, it will do what you need, if you don’t mind the busy interface.
• Check out AAPL on Yahoo! Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=AAPL

Finally, onto the underdog…

Last but not least we have AOL Finance. OK, admit it: You haven’t had much respect for the AOL brand since you were on dial-up. That’s OK. You have your reasons. But you should also give credit where credit is due: the new AOL Finance portal is pretty darn awesome. It’s clean, it’s pretty, it’s feature rich, it will even help you lose weight and quit smoking (OK, maybe not those things).

My user experience notes on AOL Finance:

• Finally, a design in 2009 that looks like a 2009 design!
• Does a good job of balancing features (a lot of them) with usability (you can find what you need)
• Good browsing engine for blog posts, analyst reports, news stories, etc.
• You can make an easy-to-build customized ‘ROI table’ that shows investment returns for any security and period you select
• My verdict: Good design and feature-rich. If you’re not yet a habitual user of the competitors, you might want to try this one first.
• Check out AAPL on AOL Finance: http://finance.aol.com/quotes/apple-inc/aapl/nas

And that wraps up my comparison. I could’ve included more portals (like CNN Money or MSN Money), but I figured these three are the ones to beat, long term. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Do you have a favorite financial portal? If so, which one, and why?

My first impressions of Recovery.gov are actually pretty good. I’m not one to praise the government for anything (no, really), but I have to admit that federal laws governing accessibility standards of governmental Web sites make for a quality end product. The homepage text and navigation is clear, concise, and to the point–and how many Web sites can claim that, these days? I’d also like to say that I think Recovery.gov was a good pick for the domain name–much superior to Bailout.gov or CanadaRelocationGuide.gov.

Let’s move beyond the homepage and domain name and into the site tour: I’d recommend you check out the following seven pages/features in your quest to learn more about the recovery effort.

1. Where Is Your Money Going? (Graph): This handy little graphic shows you the view from 30,000 feet: how much bailout money is going to health care vs. education vs. tax breaks, etc. Pretty basic stuff, but also useful, and important to see visually. You can also see the same data in a tabular view.
2. “The Bill”: OK, strictly speaking, the “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ isn’t hosted on Recovery.gov, but the site prominently features it and links to it. The entire bill is a 13Mb PDF file (ouch!), but if we’re all going to argue over and opine on the bill, it’d be a good idea to print it out and actually read the thing.(Or, maybe not, if the US Senators are any role models.)
3. Share Your Recovery Story: Well, you could interpret this form in one of two ways: a) it’s a cynical, cheap way to make citizens feel like Uncle Sam gives a damn about their opinions; or, b) it’s the Obama administration making good on its promise to actually listen to citizens and make decisions based on what the people want. Either way you look at it, Recovery.gov promises that “this site will allow you to peruse extensive data that will enable you to measure our progress”–so hopefully, all the submissions through this form will be available at some point in the future. (So go ahead and submit a smart-ass one about how you can’t afford the price of Arugula these days.)
4. Timeline: When I initially loaded the page, I thought “this page isn’t rendering so beautifully in my beloved Firefox 3.0 browser!”, but it turns out I wasn’t using it correctly: place your mouse cursor on the timeline, then click and drag to move the timeline forward. Pretty cool, actually.
5. Estimated Job Effect Graph: This page shows you how many jobs are created/saved by the bailout package, state by state. 269,000 jobs are being created or saved in my state (Texas). Heck, this Web site itself is probably employing 3 or 4 people. If you mouse-over on North Dakota, you’ll see that 8,000 jobs are being created or saved. My question is: How can the entire population of 237 people do all 8,000 jobs? They’d have to each work like 34.5 fulltime jobs, and there aren’t enough hours in the week to do that, unless you don’t sleep and work at 9 jobs simultaneously. Just kidding, North Dakota readers; you know I love you!
6. The Story of the Economic Recovery (Photo Gallery): OK, again, this page isn’t hosted on the recovery.gov domain, but it’s prominently featured throughout. This section links to a whitehouse.gov page, which in turn has a photo gallery widget that contains many old men wearing suits. In all seriousness, it has some decent photos if you’re interested in what “doing government stuff” looks like.
7. The FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions are frequently my favorite page on a Web site. If my little review of Recovery.gov didn’t answer all your questions, you’ll want to start here.

And that’s it for my review and tips on Recovery.gov. If I missed any cool pages or features, please let me know via a comment below!

But just as important, in my opinion, is checking out new blogs. New bloggers with fresh voices (and great articles) pop up every month, and the very best of these are worth subscribing to. Meanwhile, there are still many popular, established PF bloggers that I haven’t had the time to check out yet.

So whether you’re trying to beef up your daily reading list, or trim it down–or even start one anew–I think it’s helpful to look at some of the better “top finance blogger” lists, to sift through the noise and get to the juicy signal. I’ve collected links to the best five such lists that I found, with a note/quote for each list.

Financial Ramblings: 150+ Personal Finance Blogs: who are the busiest bloggers, the longest lasting, and the most popular?

Why go to all this work? Well, it was fun, and some other people thought it was fun, so who am I to get in the way of fun? But practically, I discovered a ton of great blogs! Plus, I re-discovered a few that were not in my feed reader and should have been. Maybe you can find some new blogs, too.

WiseBread: Top 100+ Personal Finance Blogs – Sorted by Alexa Rank

The default view shows the top personal finance blogs ranked by traffic (Alexa). You can also rank these blogs by most incoming blog links, most subscribers, most link authority, and the best Compete Scores. This chart is updated daily.

the Dk report: Top 30 Financial Blogs

I compiled of 30 popular financial blogs. The ranking is measured against all US websites in the Alexa universe, blogs or otherwise… For this list, I excluded the huge financial behemoths, and to make the cut, each blog had to be ranked in the top 1,000,000 most popular US websites.

PopTopRanks: Personal Finance

This is a directory of top sites listed by popularity, where popularity is determined by the number of feed subscribers. Sites are listed according to their subject and we provide the sites’ most recent headlines.

reportonbusiness.com: Best of the Blogs

The popularity of investment blogging continues to grow. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers pumping out timely financial analysis and opinion. So who’s worth reading? Our Globe bloggers, columnists and hedge fund manager/blogger Howard Lindzon share their five favourites.

And there you go. I just created an hour’s worth of homework for you (scanning all of the above lists), and gave you 10 years worth of future reading.

Abandoned Aquarium on Belle Isle (source)

Michican Central Station (source)

Fall Out [on a school building] (source)

Detroit Yacht Club (source)

Hotel Roosevelt (source)

The innards of the abandoned Packard Plant in Detroit (source)

Blown Out Stairwell [Michigan Central Station collection] (source)

All pictures were found on Flickr under the 2.0 Creative Commons License, and each links back to the source. Copyright belongs to the original photographer.