I like doing compilation posts because it forces me to take a look back at all posts throughout the past year again to see if I’ve kept everything true to its mission which, on this blog, is financial topics. I hope that the topics have been interesting, even when I’ve gone on a rant.

I also recognize that when one has to evaluate themselves that it’s not as simple as one might think it should be. After all, I had a bunch of posts to go through. And while I was at it, I decided to take a look at the guest posts as well. My criteria on both was pretty tough, to the extent that I only ended up with 7 total posts, and only 2 of those from guest posts.

That doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of good posts; it means that there were more than were fairly straight forward and thus didn’t really stand out as far as personality goes. But since I told myself to the same standard, who can gripe about it?

Since I came up with only 7 posts, this means every month wasn’t represented. In truth, out of the period from last December to this November, only six months are represented, as I felt 2 posts came from the same month. And you’ll notice that only one of the posts in this list is the same as posts in the list to the right. Different criteria; that’s all I have to say. So here we go:

Is Medical Billing A Scam? – Knowing something about the medical billing field, I warned prospects hoping to get into the field just what they might be up against.

Dealing With Hospital Bills – This was another post where I gave tips on how to handle one’s hospital bills when they’re having problems getting them paid.

20 Of the Worst Jobs You Could Ever Have – a tongue-in-cheek post with pictures of jobs that most people might find unbearable, yet they’re necessary.

Combat Rising Gas Prices With Smart Solutions – This was a wonderfully written guest post by Mariana Ashley on ways to get more out of your gas money.

Why Many Financial Issues Are Our Fault – This was kind of a rant on why many of the financial problems we have now are our fault, pretty much as the title suggests.

5 Financial Considerations of Death – As my grandmother was passing away and my mother and I had to start making funeral arrangements, it hit me just how expensive an industry death is for consumers.

Ten Commonalities Between Credit Cards and Cigarettes – People seemed to love this post by Tim Cooley comparing smoking to credit card use.
 

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This is the 500th post on Top Finance Blog, and I’m proud of it. Not that I’ve written them all, but I wrote 285 of the first 350, which isn’t so bad, and since December I’ve still written 58% of the posts that have shown up on this blog, so that’s not all that bad either.

Still, it shows what this blog has become, which is a pretty good suppository for articles on financial topics of all types and scopes, and also a breeding ground for showing the world that there are some pretty good writers out there, as most of the guest posts are from contributors outside of the United States, mainly the UK, of all things. I appreciate everyone that’s contributed to making Top Finance Blog a success.

Out of the last 100 posts, the majority of articles have been about either saving money, budgeting money, or even making money. Not the traditional “make money” schemes but talking about why people need to make more money to survive in today’s world and ways they might be able to go about it. I love that the posts have been unconventional, so to speak, while also being somewhat static. By that, I mean that there’s an obvious different between how most people are writing their articles and how I write my articles, and I’ve found that many of the guest posters follow a script that brings legitimacy to this type of blog while I get to freestyle and, my word, “rant” here and there from time to time.

In a week or so there will be a post on what I consider the best written posts of the last year on this blog, but this period of time is a bit shorter since I wrote post #400 at the end of March. Below are the top 5 visited posts, only one written by yours truly, per Google Analytics written during this time:

And one final statistic. Traffic on this blog went up 219% for the last 100 posts from the previous 100 posts, and even though I forgot to mention the 3-year anniversary of this blog, which occurred in December 8th, I’m proud of the growth of this blog over the years, especially in 2011. I can only hope for continued growth and that this blog serves the needs of those people craving the type of information, commentary and news that’s provided here.

Thanks for visiting and keep coming back!
 

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This is the 300th post of Top Finance Blog. It comes just beyond 18 months of ownership after taking it over from someone else who decided after a month that he didn’t have the time for it.

I’ve been giving some consideration as to just where I believe this blog should go. I’ve written many posts on the current news stories of the day, and I’ve written some instructional posts as well. I’m not really sure which types of articles most people really enjoy. For instance, here are the top 5 most visited stories in the past month:

These are the top visited posts in the last 100, mainly duplicates:

And finally, the most visited posts ever on this blog; once again, mainly duplicates:

Finally, the top categories I wrote about:

Overall, it seems that when I write more personal financial things that people respond. Then again, the budgeting posts didn’t seem to go anywhere, which tells me that most people really don’t want to think about budgeting their money, even though, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important things anyone can do for their financial health.

No matter; I believe there’s no real consensus on what this blog should specifically be writing about other than commentary and news, and since those are the goals of this blog anyway, I promise to continue giving a lot more of that, as well as an occasional educational post here and there to break things up. Onward and upward towards post #400; I hope you stick around, and invite friends. The more the merrier.

I wanted to keep everyone up to date on some of the changes that have been made to Top Finance Blog over the last couple of weeks.

For one, I hope you’ve noticed the little “Listen Now” tab that’s just under the date of each post. That’s the result of signing up with a company called Odiogo, which creates mini podcasts from each post and allows visitors to listen to what’s being read rather than having to read it all. I believe that might be appreciated for some of my longer posts. The thing is that, when you add Odiogo, it only goes back as far as the last number of posts you have on your main page of your blog. Therefore, none of my earliest posts will be able to be listened to, as far as I know. I say that because there’s an option for subscribing to a post, but I don’t know if that means it’ll create something from one that it didn’t have something for. No matter; it’ll catch everything new.

Second, if you look to the right, you’ll see that I’ve added some news feeds. Since we’re talking finances, I thought it was important to help us keep up with certain financial news. So, those will all show the most current news. As I’ve written this, I’ve got four newsfeeds, and I’m not sure how many more I’ll add, if I do add any more. We’ll see as it goes along.

Third, I wanted to mention the few ads that I have on the site. As with many blogs in today’s world, this one will be monetized to try to make a little bit of cash here and there. No, this won’t end up being one of those million dollar blogs, and it’s not going to have all sorts of ads for products that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. But it will have ads, and right now you see ads there to the right. Both of those concern financial issues, so they fit what this blog is all about. You won’t see anything over there that I don’t believe in; I’m going to leave it at that right now, but trust me, if I write something bad about it, you won’t see it there. However, if the blog grows, I will accept paid advertising at some juncture. What I won’t do, though, is write something positive about any or any company in order to get paid. If I write something nice, you can pretty much bet I’m not being sponsored by them at the time I write something. Now, if they decide they liked what I wrote a month or so later and then wanted to pay me to advertise,… well, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

For the record, I am not a stock broker, so you won’t see me recommending stocks. I will continue with the mission of this blog, which is financial news, information and commentary. You can ask questions if you’d like, but I may not always know the answers. But I can find Justin, who probably can answer the questions; that’s sweet!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the additions to the blog, and please, keep visiting and reading, and invite others to stop by also.

Greetings, and welcome to Top Finance Blog.  I have recently purchased this blog from Justin, the former owner who will still come by and contribute new posts from time to time.

My goal for this blog is to both highlight financial news and make commentary on things related to finances of all sorts.  The commentary may be non-traditional for financial types, yet I hope that it will be thought provoking at times, and will generate comments here and there.

I purchased this blog because Justin didn’t have the time to commit to it.  I hope to be able to write at least a couple of posts a week, since I run two other blogs and four other websites also.  I will also be re-posting Justin’s previous posts here, probably starting with those first.  I have to do it by copying them in here and reformatting the HTML because we had problems with the database during the transfer; such is the internet.

Welcome to Top Finance Blog; I hope I can do it the justice that Justin started.