Fools and Sages is a kinder, gentler personal finance blog. I’m not here to browbeat you about your finances, just to educate and nudge you towards independence. Money is everywhere, you can’t get away from it, but ultimately the choices you make in how to earn and spend it should be your own. Join me in a quest to reduce stress, change perspective, improve community, and teach ourselves and our children how to see money as just another tool that we use.

Although I do have Google ads in the sidebar, I don’t choose what they throw in there so please don’t take them to mean anything more than what they are - a computerized filtered guess of what they think you’d be interested in. Sometimes it’s amusing to see what the bots come up with, actually.  

By contrast, I will periodically post products and services that I think are beneficial (and just for fun, sometimes ones that I think are not beneficial at all). Not every product or service will be something that benefits your particular situation and that’s OK - you know yourself better than any guru who uses phrases like “never buy this” or “always do this” and you’re smart enough to make your own decisions. Take what you need and leave the rest. Although I do link to some of those products through Amazon and receive referral fees, please do your own comparison shopping and find the best deal for you - and for books and DVD’s, check your library first! 

As for my personal qualifications, I have been in the financial services industry for over 15 years, mostly in supervisory and compliance roles. That means it has been my job to make sure that representatives follow the rules and I’m happy to say that in the overwhelming majority of cases, financial planners really do have your interests in mind. I don’t really have an interest in doing financial planning myself because my passion is more about helping people “find” money to invest rather than figuring out what to do with it. I believe that in the long run, the person or family that can manage to save consistently is going to be fine. The saving is the key part, not picking the latest hottest investment product.

In addition to purely financial areas, I am very interested in health, food, the environment and politics and probably spend far too much time reading about those topics but if you’ll read these posts completely here you’ll see that all of these topics come back to money as well.  As it says at the top of the page, “it’s all about the money … ”

Thanks for visiting, please come back regularly or sign up for feeds, tell your friends, comment, send news stories that you find interesting or confusing, ask questions, and let’s get this community going!