Best Personal Finance Magazine?

Empor

Looking for recommendations for a magazine to keep up to date with all things in personal finance. Either weekly or monthly. What's your favourite?

RG2015

MSE and it's updated every second.

:T

ColdIron

CityWire offers a variety of online news and email alerts

LHW99

I have What Investment magazine monthly - but I took out a subscription on one of their offers about 20 years ago, and am still paying the same annual price that I took it out at then

Reaper

I get Shares magazine for free as an investor with AJ Bell/You Invest and was surprised to find I quite like it.

https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk

bowlhead99

RG2015 wrote: »

MSE and it's updated every second.

:T

Actually that's not a bad answer - at least if we're talking about the forums as well as (or instead of) the main site - there are rarely new types of products, new charges to law, new tax regimes or allowances etc that you won't hear about by keeping your ear to the ground on the savings & investments, pensions, cutting tax, or house-buying boards. If you have interest in the very latest rates or features of a certain product type because you're in the market for it like a loan, a new bank account, a mortgage, some insurance etc, then those individual boards can be useful too.

The monthly magazines like what investment, investors chronicle, shares magazine etc can sometimes have interesting stuff in them but probably not worth shelling out the cash month after month just to hear about things that you could have heard on the internet five or six weeks earlier.

The value of those sort of mags is not so much the quality of content or advertorial (which you can find elsewhere for free), or the share or fund tips (which are only opinion and may be out of date by the time you read them); but just having a load of info and ideas in one place that you can sit back and read for a while in s quiet moment when you have nothing better to do, rather than flicking back and forth through loads of independent blogs and forums and newspaper articles etc. They can be a jumping-off point for you to do some research after you've got some general background from them on a range of topics or industries or funds or companies and want more into.

But those mags are all geared around investment rather than "general personal finance". That's true of most blogs as well, they tend to look at one topic area of interest to their author - whether it's investment or something a bit broader like Financial Independence /Retire Early.

It's rare to find a good publication that does everything from the best regular saver accounts and why you might want a LISA to supermarket bargains to CGT or inheritance tax planning to reclaiming PPI to helping your mum cycle £3600 of pension contributions through a SIPP each year etc etc etc. This site does have all that sort of stuff which is why I haven't got too bored of it yet

TBC15

LHW99 wrote: »

I have What Investment magazine monthly - but I took out a subscription on one of their offers about 20 years ago, and am still paying the same annual price that I took it out at then

Me too, do you find it’s utterly worthless and the only reason you have it is that’s it’s a bargain?

RG2015

bowlhead99 wrote: »

It's rare to find a good publication that does everything from the best regular saver accounts and why you might want a LISA to supermarket bargains to CGT or inheritance tax planning to reclaiming PPI to helping your mum cycle £3600 of pension contributions through a SIPP each year etc etc etc. This site does have all that sort of stuff which is why I haven't got too bored of it yet

Yes, you need to filter out the trolls and know-it-alls although they often give me a good laugh. And you can add in the MSE Energy Club and MSE Credit Club.

Empor wrote: »

Looking for recommendations for a magazine to keep up to date with all things in personal finance. Either weekly or monthly. What's your favourite?

Back to the original question though, I think it all depends on what you are looking for in a personal finance magazine. Information, advice, opinion, entertainment even. However you actually asked for keeping up to date with all things personal finance.

I quite like the Money Which supplement to Which? magazine but the data is almost always out of date. For keeping up to date you cannot beat Google and you never know where that is going to take you. As long as you use the correct search criteria you should reach the best information.

And as a further endorsement of this site, a very high proportion of my Google searches lead me back to the MSE forum. Or is this how Google actually works, by taking me back to where I have often been?

bowlhead99

RG2015 wrote: »

For keeping up to date you cannot beat Google and you never know where that is going to take you. As long as you use the correct search criteria you should reach the best information.

That's something I'd endorse too. As probably one of the aforementioned know-it-alls you are referring to above, people do ask me from time to time "how do you know so much about [stuff]"

The answer is basically, I read about stuff and if I want to know more I look it up and find out more; I couldn't tell you everywhere I've been to get the info as I don't use bookmarks as much as I could.

It helps to be the type of person who wants to be able to have an opinion without it being blatantly wrong, so I generally check the facts on the topics that interest me which causes me to visit lots of sources and thereby pick up lots of extraneous info which might be useful later. There's no one site that will have all the stuff one might want to know, unless you count Google as a site that indexes a great deal of it. The downside is that the largest volume of search results are sometimes for things that have been 'well known' for a while and are now either out of date or at least not the whole story. So you have to narrow down the searches to find what you need.

And as a further endorsement of this site, a very high proportion of my Google searches lead me back to the MSE forum. Or is this how Google actually works, by taking me back to where I have often been?

There is usually an element of personalisation on search results. You can try using your browser's privacy setting (incognito, InPrivate, private browsing etc) and perhaps even using a proxy server, to visit the site when cookie-free and logged out - and might get a different mix of predictive search and other results; certainly different adverts.

RG2015

bowlhead99 wrote: »

That's something I'd endorse too. As probably one of the aforementioned know-it-alls you are referring to above, people do ask me from time to time "how do you know so much about [stuff]"

Ha!

My wife says I'm really annoying because I think I'm right all of the time.

It's so unfair. I cannot help it if I am right all of the time.

OldMusicGuy

I subscribed to MoneyWeek a few years back when I started to get serious about preparing for retirement. I was hoping to get advice on investing strategies. Instead, I got opinion pieces that told me very little unless I subscribed to some other stuff they were peddling, or the author was peddling. It was completely useless. I have learnt more by being on MSE than I ever got from MoneyWeek.