Pros: Solid business and personal information for those ready to invest in the future...
Cons: ...a little too stock happy, but what business mag doesn't brag on its own portfolio?
The Bottom Line: If you’ve moved beyond a basic interest-bearing checking account and actually itemize on your taxes, you can’t go wrong with a subscription.
Joubert's Full Review: SmartMoney Magazine Subscription
My cynical side says that one way to improve your finances is by forsaking all financial magazines since a wealth of information exists at no cost on the web. Sticking with well-known names is one way in which the average family can learn, but sifting through the mountains of data and attempting to determine who is paying co-op dollars and has revenue sharing in place with whom is an ugly process.
SmartMoney, published by Hearst and Dow Jones does much of that legwork, publishing a traditional magazine monthly. The cover price is $2.95, but a year’s subscription is on sale for $15 as of this writing and the proliferation of free magazine sites in exchange for demographic information means that you can find a subscription for a little more than a dollar a month. For convenience’s sake, if nothing else, a subscription provides entertaining and informative content delivered to your real mailbox instead of forcing you to search the web.
Billed as the Wall Street Journal’s Magazine of Personal Business, SmartMoney just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Each issue fits a neat niche between the more stodgy Fortune and Forbes and the tech-happy, do your job better periodicals like Fast Company. There’s a clever mix of business and work related issues, mostly what middle class families puzzling out their financial options will find useful. But don’t let the Wall Street Journal connection scare you off. The magazine has a much more flippant style than the newspaper, combining some of the lighter tone of the Friday Weekend and Marketplace sections with practical advice.
Regular Features
An index is published in each issue, similar to the ones found in Business Week and similar magazines. I find that a handy way to see if any of my investments receive a mention and eagerly flip to the appropriate page when one appears. You’ll find a lot of stock and fund touting going on inside, and the best advice I can give is to remember to read everything before investing. The federal government recently published a web page touting a new company and offering a chance for investors to purchase equity. The company was a front, designed to teach folks that they need to research more before blithely tossing money around an investment account. Thousands of wanna-be-rich web surfers were taught a lesson by the dummy site. While SmartMoney will most likely only report on real companies, all analysts have biases, and you would be better served relying on a variety of sources for specific investment advice.
Consider that warning an introduction to Joubert’s own Ten Things. The real monthly column published by SmartMoney that uses the same name is the magazine’s crown jewel and its most useful section. Every month, the magazine aims at a specific industry and exposes ten of its money-costing secrets while providing appropriate lower cost alternatives. I’ve seen exposes on real estate brokers, contractors and financial planners and the information in them was worth the price of the entire year’s subscription. Practitioners of the target industries invariably write vitriolic letters to the editor, but just as often, someone familiar with the industry writes a letter of support. Naturally, they practice none of those bad things, but lots of other folks do in their opinion, and it was about time that someone ratted them out.
Nowhere near as useful, but very funny nonetheless is the Real Life Index appearing on the back page of every issue. This humorous analysis of what it would cost to create something spectacular usually provides a chuckle or two. You’ll find the costs on creating a dot com employee’s wardrobe (down to razor scooter), an awards show a la The Academy Awards or some other item. Written tongue in cheek, the prices are real, but the items are caricatures of what is truly needed.
Each issue also contains five to eight feature articles and a consumer section that previews lifestyle trends. This latter section has a lot of information on high ticket items, again similar to the “Extraordinary Properties” advertising in the journal, but if one of your pastimes includes something that runs to big money, you’ll no doubt find it covered in this back of the book section.
The Bottom Line, Dog Eared Pages And All
If you’ve moved beyond a basic interest-bearing checking account and actually itemize on your taxes, you can’t go wrong with a subscription, especially at sale rates. Sure you can find most of the information yourself, much of it free on SmartMoney’s web site. But the convenience factor more than pays for itself, making SmartMoney a smart buy.
12 issues - SmartMoney Magazine presents practical, yet highly imaginative strategies for investing, spending and saving. Reporting on a wide range of...More at SuperMagDeals.com
12 issues - SmartMoney Magazine presents practical, yet highly imaginative strategies for investing, spending and saving. Reporting on a wide range of...More at Subscription Addiction
SmartMoney magazine features spending and investing advice from the Wall Street Journal. Find articles on personal finance, lifestyle, business, techn...More at Magazines.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.