Are you richer than your peers?
Posted on June 12th, 2008 – 11:35 AMBy Kara McGuire
Two web sites that should help you get a better sense of how you compare financially to your pals and co-workers launched public Betas yesterday.
The first is the much anticipated FiLife (think financial high life). Read the welcome message from FiLife President and Minnesota native Dave Kansas.
It’s a purty web site with lots of bells and whistles. You can waste a lot of time with “The Stacker.” Enter how much money you make, how much debt you have, or how much your house is worth, and a chubby stick figure dances into position to show how well you’re doing relative to the rest of the nation, your age range, even your hometown.
Then there are financial tips to improve your financial lot based on how you stack up.
The partnership between IAC — the folks that bring you Ask.com and Lendingtree.com and Dow Jones has been in the works for more than a year now, but has had a presence online as a light-on-content blog for the past few months.
You still need a flashlight and telescope to find the in-house and Wall Street Journal content. I finally found it when I clicked on “FiLife Deals.” The WSJ content is free.
The other site is called Glassdoor.com. It is an anonymous salary-sharing site. It just launched, so the salary information is pretty thin and focused on IT companies. Hopefully that will change.
The site also has a way to share your job perks and peeves with others.
Turns out I make less than a Yahoo software engineer. Go figure!
7 Responses to "Are you richer than your peers?"
I like to use NetworthIQ.com to track my net worth and compare myself to others.
Perhaps this will be a wakeup call for many that their neighbors/coworkers really aren’t doing as well as their leased luxury cars and items purchased with CC would have us to believe. Hopefully it can lead to more contentedness and laying off the need to match up to what our perceptions are…
Ok we suck! I would love to find an online tool that will help us get on track and stay there.
I’m over 5 mil than my average peer.
LDH writes
“Perhaps this will be a wakeup call for many that their neighbors/coworkers really aren’t doing as well as their leased luxury cars and items purchased with CC would have us to believe.”
Indeed. A lot of people out there are fakin’ it.
Stephanie,
There are lots of good tools out there. I’m not sure what your specific challenges are, so it’s tough to point you in any specific direction.
Essentially - track your spending, spend less than you take in, and save the extra wisely. If you need advice on any or all of those three tasks, do some reading. Financial wisdom is simple stuff, but it doesn’t do itself.
Chris
Interesting tool, fun graphics, but limited use. Where’s the net worth section? Or the investments/retirement portfolio section? I really don’t care about how much my car is worth relative to my neighbors.
In other news, first Jonathan Clements left the WSJ Sunday, and now Jeff Opdyke is leaving too. What’s up with my favorite national finance writers all leaving? Thankfully I still have Kara’s column to read on Sunday!
Sorry, random off-topic.
