Quick Friday update.

Recently, I was approached by a mysterious person (man? woman?) about joining the new Debt Bloggers Network.

It seemed like a good idea, so I agreed to join.

Already, things are moving quickly. There’s a new web site… logos are being made… and more.

It’s a solid concept.

Basically, four of us personal finance bloggers have banded together to write about money and debt… and promote each other.

The sum of the parts are greater than the whole kind of thing.

Anyway, check out the new site here:

==> Debt Bloggers Network

Just a quick FYI.

If you haven’t noticed already, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress this morning and installed a new theme.

I’ve never been totally happy with the blog.txt theme, so I’m trying this theme on to see how I like it.

Some of my plug-ins are gone because they were hard-coded into the last theme. So it will take me a couple days to get this looking normal again.

The good news is, I’ll do it all with widgets so that future theme changes or upgrades won’t have any impact on the functionality of the plug-ins.

Also, the pop-over should now be gone since I believe it was one of those features that was hard-coded into my last blog design.

So… do you like it? Leave a comment and let me know. Thanks!

Late Tuesday night, Karen Datko of the MSN Smart Spending blog referenced my debt reduction blog and a few of the articles I’ve written recently. I was super excited, and would’ve mentioned this yesterday, but I was up in the mountains enjoying some fresh snowfall.

As a blogger, it’s sometimes easy to lose motivation and wonder whether you’re making a difference or not. It’s times like these that make it worth it.

With that in mind, I want to thank you for reading this blog, and thank you especially for leaving comments and sharing my writing with others. I deeply appreciate it.

Since October 2007, I’ve been writing this blog and reading about debt and personal finance on other people’s blogs. What has probably struck me the most is the number of anonymous bloggers in this particular area of blogging.

In business and marketing, most bloggers are not afraid to be themselves. Your average blogger will use his or her real name and publish a photo to go along with it.

But things change all of a sudden when the topic turns to money and debt. Why is this? Are people embarrassed by what they earn or how much they owe? Are they afraid somebody may sue them? Is the risk that great?

With this blog, I thought about using a pseudonym. But I didn’t do it. It is too difficult to consistently use a name that isn’t mine. (My business blog uses my real name, too.)

Another thought I had was that readers wouldn’t value my content or advice as much if I didn’t put my real name on it. “After all,” a reader might think, “if he won’t put his name on it, he must be afraid of something.”

Yet very few “PF bloggers” or debt bloggers have chosen to use their real names. Most of them use names like Single Ma or Single Mommy or Bag Lady or PF Blogger or GLBL Guy or MBHunter, etc, etc, etc. These are a few monikers I’m pulling off the top of my head from blogs I read.

I’m certainly not criticizing this approach; I’m simply curious why someone would want to be anonymous. Comments?

My guest post is up on Plonkee’s blog. Since Plonkee lives in England, I decided to borrow a line from Dickens for the title. You can read the post here…

==> A Tale of Two Men