Introduction: Why Personal Finance?

I know what you’re thinking: Riddle me this anonymous blog author, Why is personal finance even important? Because let’s be honest, it’s up there with ironing pants, returning library books and going to the DMV as one of the least sexy things ever. Fair question reader, fair question. From a personal standpoint, I work hard for my money, so I'm all for simple and effective ways of ensuring I have more and not less of it. More generally though, I have certain life goals that I want to achieve, and I want to make sure I'm capable of achieving the ones that require money. If you're astute you've probably realized that I haven't actually proven that personal finance is sexy. If it's really that important to you then you can read this blog in your underpants for all I care...as long as you keep doing the reading part.

I'm going to keep this introduction short because nobody reads introductions. There are a few things I hope to do in this blog, and a few things I hope not to do. I detailed them out below not only for you to see, but to also make me more accountable to them. Let's hope that strategy works.

What this blog hopes to do:

• Provide original, high-impact personal finance advice. The first part is pretty simple. If I wrote stuff here that you've read elsewhere, it wouldn't be very useful to you. So what constitutes high-impact advice? Some personal finance blogs fall into the trap of posting about every possible savings opportunity possible. While saving money is great, a lot of the advice, when implemented, results in relatively small savings. I don't play that game here. Although not all my posts will be relevant to all my readers, rest assured I'll try my best to make sure that my recommendations are useful for a good number of people.
• Review innovative personal finance products. There are a lot of new products that have sprung up recently to help people track their finances, find savings and maximize returns. Although there is some coverage of these on other blogs and newspapers, many of these reviews have some serious flaws. Some reviewers have not tried the product they're reviewing. Others explain how it works without actually assessing its usefulness. Here at Cutting Edge, I plan to review products that I have used personally, and if I don't use them myself, be upfront about it and say why. Additionally, I promise to roll up my sleeves, crunch a few numbers and actually show how useful (or useless) these products are.
• Organize posts in such a way for the information you want to be easily accessible. Not everything I post will be relevant to everybody. Here on this blog, I'll do my best to tag articles so that you can find the type of advice you want. That said, I hope you'll explore around and find useful information everywhere! And if you want to stay current, you can check out and follow my twitter account @CuttingEdgePF.

What this blog hopes not to do:

• Repeated hackneyed budgeting advice. How many times have you seen that giving up your daily Starbucks will make you rich? Look, I'm not disputing that if you stop dropping $3.90 on a latte you'll save a lot of money, but I'm pretty sure that's common knowledge at this point. I'll discuss The Latte Method (making cuts to little expenditures that add up over time) in a later post, but with a little more finesse than other sites.
• Tout get rich quick schemes. I'm not going to teach you how to make $90k working from home, pick penny stocks or sign up for pyramid schemes. That's what the rest of the internet is for.
• Make unfounded claims about what products are best for you. Even though there are a select few blogs that don't engage in the top two bulleted behaviors, they are prone to this one. Everybody has a unique financial situation. I'm not going to pretend that I know what products and strategies are best for you, but I am going to give you the tools and information to figure it out yourself. Trust me, the minimal effort on your part will be worth it.

Sounds like a plan, right? Before you traipse around the rest of this blog (or YouTube, let's be realistic) there are a few things you can do for me. Follow the blog on twitter (@CuttingEdgePF), post comments and questions, share with your friends and feel free to e-mail me with feedback or requests at cuttingedgepersonalfinance |at| gmail.com. If at the end of the day, one of my articles has helped at least one person, I'll consider my mission accomplished.

EDIT: I changed some small parts to make them funnier and less repetitive. I hope I succeeded...