Simple Pound

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A few days ago I added a little gimmick to the sidebar that I thought those of you who are interested in (Personal) Finance would enjoy. Since I assume that most of my readers fall into this category, I hope you will all find it helpful… The new feature I’m talking about is the Library section which gives you an overview of the books I’m reading or have most recently finished.

As I’m going through a tremendous amount of finance-related books these days (in preparation for making a career change), you will find this section updated reasonably frequently. The sidebar gives you a preview of the book I’m currently at while the Library page shows you all the relevant books I’ve read together with a short opinion on how helpful and/or entertaining I thought they were.

All books are linked directly to Amazon should you consider purchasing any one of them.

Now you’re probably wondering why this post is called “Warren Buffet and Institutional Investors” while I spent all my time talking about my new idea. Well… there is an explanation. Since I want to share a particularly good story with you that I have come across in my most recent book, I thought it would make sense to introduce you to the Library along the way. But now it’s time to focus on Warren Buffet’s opinion of Institutional Investors. He quotes the following story in one of his letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (his company):

Originally told by Ben Graham in the 1940s, it is still applicable to the markets today and is a wonderful description of the importance of investor sentiment (no matter how unfounded it might be).

A year ago on Simple Pound: What are we tracking? Top 5 indices to invest in

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Update: The transition to the new theme is nearly done. The site should be back to its usual stability. There are a few things left for me to do (like adding in my net worth progress bar and playing with the colour scheme which I’m not 100% happy with yet), but first I will have to go to work

Let me know what you think of the new design and whether you find any broken pages or links that resulted from the upgrade. I’m curious to hear your opinion!

Just in time for Simple Pound’s birthday, the author of the Wordpress theme I’m using has released a new version compatible with the latest Wordpress installation. I’ve had some minor issues here and there since we upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, so I’m hoping that updating the entire theme will take care of that.

Hence, if you experience any issues within the next hour or so, please bear with me while I’m fiddling with the layout. We should soon be back to normal service

Thanks for your patience!

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It was exactly a year ago that I published my first post on this blog. In fact, it wasn’t just my first post on this blog, it was my first post on any blog. By the time I started this, I had no idea whether or not I woud ever celebrate this 1st anniversary since I had never been terribly good at writing diaries on a regular basis. But here we are!

Inspired by probably one of the most successful Personal Finance blogs (no offence to anyone else… there are strong contenders to this position), I named this blog after The Simple Dollar and started writing whatever I came across. While I don’t have quite as much time to dedicate to this hobby as I had in University (there is no better way of procrastinating than researching blog posts!), I’m still as passionate about the site as ever.

And I’m proud of how far we’ve (me and my blog ) come since the first day I published a post here. Nearly 100 people subscribe to this feed and read my musings about spending, saving and investing. More than 3,500 unique people led to a total of more than 5,000 visits since 1st April 2007. Of those roughly 60% come from the UK with much of the rest being located in the US, but we’ve also had visitors from Canada, Australia, Germany, India and many other countries - 71 in total!

While none of these statistics compare to my US counterparts, I want you to bear in mind that the topic of Personal Finance is much more popular and wide-spread in the US than it is in this country. At the time I started this blog it was next to impossible to find a fellow UK blogger. Fortunately by now I’m joined by plonkee money, UK Moneypot and Moneywatch who has sent a lot of traffic my way.

A big thank you to everyone who has read and commented on this blog in the past or will do so in the future!

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I finally fixed the links section in my sidebar so you can have a peek into my Google Reader to see how I start my day (or end it ).

Here are my favourite blogs that deal with Personal Finance in one way or another:

• Dividend Money
• Fat Pitch Financials
• Get Rich Slowly
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• Money Watch (UK)
• Money, Matter, and More Musings
• My Open Wallet
• My Wealth Builder
• No Credit Needed
• Punny Money
• The Digerati Life
• The Dividend Guy Blog
• The Finance Buff
• The Simple Dollar
• This is Money (UK)
• Well-Heeled
• Wise Bread
• UKMoneyPot

And naturally I can’t forget to mention P-2006, my boyfriend’s website, which I obviously have to read diligently - despite living with him. And yes, he has to read mine too…

I hope you enjoy these blogs as much as I do. Do you have any others that I should know about? Share your favourite blogs in the comments! I’m curious what else is “out there” that I haven’t discovered yet.

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Apologies for my long absence. I graduated last weekend and have since (temporarily) moved to New York City. Unfortunately my arrival was everything but smooth and some issues (including the Internet connection in my apartment) remain to be sorted.

I will be back as soon as possible! Thanks for your patience…

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I can proudly announce that I have worked on my top 5 blogging mistakes (as mentioned here) and as of yesterday all of them have vanished.

There is now an easy way to contact me by using the contact form, which can be found here or simply by clicking on “Contact” in the menu above. I strongly encourage you to make use of it and email all your requests, suggestions and general feedback so I can improve the site and make it as useful as possible for a wide group of readers.

Secondly, I have created a short “About the Author” page which is also accessible directly from the menu and contains some basic information about me, the site and its purpose. I have included a reference to the “Simple Pound Network”, so if you have a financial goal of any sort that you want to track here, give me a shout!

The third mistake of not utilising the blog’s trackback capabilities wasn’t actually a mistake since I was already making use of this. Trackback essentially “informs” other bloggers when you are linking back to their site or a particular post and thus builds, maintains and extends the community (not to mention the extra traffic you’re getting…). The reason I included this mistake was to double-check whether it was activated and to randomly check a couple of sites to see whether the ping-backs show. They did .

To stronger publicise my best posts and hence work on blogging mistake number 4, I have also created a “Best Of…” page, which highlights the top 10 posts written here since the site’s inauguration as well as the month’s top 5. The monthly list will always refer back to last month’s posts (i.e. in June we’ll see a list of the top 5 May posts) because the month obviously has to finish before I can proclaim any “winners”. Thus the “Best Of…” page will get updated along with my financial end of the month review. Since the latter usually attract some good traffic, I have also included an overview of the monthly progress reports for your convenience. Go and check it out!

And finally, I am now proclaiming ownership of this blog by including a link to SimplePound in all my email signatures. I’m quite proud of this site, so it was about time to celebrate it in public…

If you are reading this through a feed reader (the number of subscriptions is growing!), make sure you head over to the site to check out the new pages and let me know what you think!

On a slightly unrelated note: Accelerated by a lot of traffic through the Carnival of Personal Finance, SimplePound has now had over 1,000 visits (1,079 as of 5am this morning) from 566 unique visitors within two and a half months of its existence. I am aware that many bloggers achieve numbers like these within a day or two, but since the personal finance topic is much less popular in the UK than it is in the States, I am nevertheless proud and happy about this achievement.

Special thanks to |[P]| at meewella.com and Rob at money-watch.co.uk for their links to this site, which has generated some decent amounts of traffic over the last weeks.

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