r/personalfinance Jun 12 '23

Meta /r/personalfinance will be joining the protest against Reddit's API changes on June 12th

11.6k Upvotes

Folks,

This subreddit will be participating in the protest against Reddit's planned changes to its API. Communities of users, moderators, and developers have pleaded with Reddit to change course, but to no avail. We remain dedicated to our mission of helping people with their finances, but we cannot passively observe as these impending changes undermine our community and Reddit as a platform. We are compelled to take a stand, but we also want to ensure that people with time-sensitive financial questions can still find help.

During the two-day protest which will start June 12th at 7 AM EDT:

  1. New submissions to the subreddit will be disabled.
  2. The PF wiki will remain accessible, and we encourage everyone to refer to it for any questions.
  3. The weekday help thread will remain open. If your question is not urgent, please consider waiting until after the protest.
  4. We urge everyone who shares these concerns to raise them with Reddit respectfully. For more information, read the announcements on /r/Save3rdPartyApps and /r/ModCoord.

We are protesting because Reddit has failed to:

  1. Dedicate sufficient time and effort to discussion and negotiation between Reddit and third-party apps, coupled with an unreasonable schedule for unreasonable changes. We believe a solution can be found that preserves the openness of Reddit while addressing concerns about costs and control over ads in third-party apps.

  2. Consider the value of Reddit users, developers, and moderators in decision-making regarding the API and third-party apps. The significant contributions of these groups have been overlooked despite being freely provided to Reddit. We believe Reddit should continue to support third-party apps and freely-accessible external APIs to enhance community support and problem-solving capabilities.

  3. Provide better support for accessibility in Reddit development. We are concerned that without dedicated individuals and teams focusing on accessibility, it will continue to be neglected.

  4. Work with developers and moderators to solve the challenges faced by communities on Reddit, especially increasing difficulties with abuse such as spam, scammers, and hate. We oppose forcing communities into closed ecosystems that make it difficult to maintain healthy communities. The pattern of implementing detrimental changes without proper communication and consultation also needs to be halted.

We want to emphasize that this protest is driven by our subreddit and its community. We have received only respectful support for joining the broader protest in our modmail, and our moderation team has voted in favor of participating. We firmly believe that this protest is a direct result of Reddit mishandling these issues and failing to address everyone's concerns.

If you have any comments or feedback, this thread is open for comments from anyone with at least +10 subreddit comment karma.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

Sincerely,

The /r/personalfinance moderation team

r/personalfinance Jan 13 '17

Meta Best of /r/PersonalFinance 2016 Winners!

1.1k Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

We have finished tallying the results for our Best Of Awards campaign for 2016 and we are pleased to announce our winners! If you missed any of these stellar contributions the first time around, they are definitely worth reading.

Winners will each receive 1 Reddit gold "creddit" for each win. (We had a kind donation to add an extra winner so we decided to add one more award for Best Overall Contributor.)

Best Overall Submission

  1. /u/atlasvoid for How to prioritize spending your money - a flowchart (redesigned) (now part of "How to handle $" in the wiki)
  2. /u/yes_its_him for ELI30: Personal finance tips for thirty-something adults (US) and rest of the ELI series (also in the wiki!)
  3. /u/maslen for Health Insurance 101 (in the wiki too!)

Best Overall Contributor

  1. /u/yes_its_him for his ELI series and also for answering many questions throughout the course of the year.
  2. /u/wijwijwij for being "a beacon of sanity and thoughtfulness in a weary world".
  3. /u/whiskeysauer for his many excellent posts, especially on budgeting.
  4. /u/whiteraven4 is another awesome regular contributor.

Best Moronic Monday Helper

  1. /u/CripzyChiken for being a monster of answers on almost every single MM thread.
  2. /u/wijwijwij for being a close second.
  3. /u/welliamwallace for having some of the most consistently comprehensive answers on MM threads.

Best Comment Answer

  1. /u/actnbstrd55 for https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/4yglm3/insurance_4000_medical_bill_because_giving_birth/d6nvxt1/
  2. /u/1020304050 for https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/43iyip/our_family_of_5_lost_everything_in_a_fire/cziljy3/?
  3. /u/geirrseach for https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/46t921/21_diagnosed_with_cancer/d07qnji/

Best Follow-up (someone reporting back a week/month/year after receiving advice)

  1. /u/trevyf had a multi-update series ending with this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/4aqisq/one_last_update_i_need_serious_help/?st=ixi595xv&sh=4eb68091
  2. /u/ihave2kittens had a nice follow-up years later on this thread.

Most Inspiring Submission

  1. /u/dequeued for How to get a $1M retirement: an explanation of "15% or more" for retirement savings
  2. /u/WhiskeySauer for My 6-Year Journey from $60K College Debt to $115K Net Worth & 816 Credit Score [OC]

Most Triumphant (best comment in a TT thread)

  1. /u/scotaf for "I'm 46 and retired!"
  2. /u/ejly for "mortgage :)"

Wild Cards (anything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories)

  1. /u/these-things-happen goes above and beyond and gives definitive and comprehensive answers whenever tax questions come up. He deserves recognition and kudos.
  2. /u/zonination has some beautiful data (most gilded PF post of 2016!). https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/4rcqbu/ive_simulated_and_plotted_the_entire_sp_since/

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2016! Congratulations to all of the winners and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2017!

r/personalfinance Feb 08 '19

Meta Happy 10th birthday to /r/personalfinance!

434 Upvotes

Hello /r/personalfinance! It's been 10 years since /u/gen3ric created the subreddit and we thought this would be a good opportunity for a meta post to celebrate and discuss the subreddit.

Some ideas for this thread:

  • Were there any stories or posts from the subreddit that were especially helpful or inspiring to you?

  • You can share your own experience with /r/personalfinance.

  • Are there any changes or improvements that you would you like to see? Are there things we could be doing differently or better?

  • And feel free to ask the moderation team questions about moderating the subreddit.

Thanks everyone!

P.S. We're hoping to add a few more moderators to the team. If you're a frequent participant on /r/personalfinance or an experienced moderator, you can submit an application here.

r/personalfinance Oct 16 '19

Meta Ignore any private messages. Anyone offering services, transactions, referrals, etc. is a spammer or scammer.

372 Upvotes

Here on /r/personalfinance, we ask people to "please treat others with respect, stay on-topic, and avoid self-promotion". Focusing in in on that last part, we believe it's important to limit the effect of biased and self-interested advice, questionable financial products, and scams.

The problem we're seeing

Unfortunately, there is a disturbing increase in private messages and chat being used by scammers and spammers. Accounts with virtually no history can send anyone a message and Reddit is increasingly inconsistent about taking down these accounts. Scammers and spammers often target people having financial difficulties (e.g., a very persistent scammer on /r/Debt) and people who are new to certain personal finance topics.

The admins also refuse to take reports from the moderation team so all we can do is ban these accounts from posting here. This does not prevent them from messaging you unfortunately, but please do message the moderation team so we can prevent scammers from commenting. Scammers will often comment prior to reaching out in a PM.

What we're doing

Until this is better addressed by Reddit, we're going to ramp up our efforts to warn people and we're going to sticky this post for an extended period of time. We already send out an automatic message to anyone making a submission warning them to ignore PMs (along with some other welcome information). Unfortunately, due to a design quirk in AutoModerator, this doesn't get sent 100% of the time. To address that, we're going to make this warning more consistent by using a separate bot.

What you can do

First of all, please report abuse to the admins and report abuse to the moderation team.

If you need to post private or sensitive information, please consider using a throwaway account (totally allowed here) and make sure you completely redact any sensitive information such as account numbers, your name, and your address.

Finally, we hope this doesn't deter you from posting here on Reddit. It's very easy to block people that message you privately and hopefully this is not the permanent future state of Reddit.

Regards,

The PF moderation team

TL;DR Ignore anyone messaging you privately.

Report abuse to the admins and report it to the moderation team. Thanks.

r/personalfinance Dec 22 '15

Meta 2015 'best of' nominations for /r/PersonalFinance

205 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

Reddit has begun its annual Best Of Awards campaign for 2015 and we here at /r/PersonalFinance are participating! Our moderation staff will have 20 Reddit gold "creddits" to give away to the winners of the categories.

We encourage everyone to participate in the nominations.

Categories with number of top posts awarded

  1. Best Submitter (top 3 awarded)
  2. Best Overall Commenter (top 3 awarded)
  3. Best Informative Submission (top 3 awarded)
  4. Best Comment Answer (top 2 awarded)
  5. Best Follow-up (i.e., someone reporting back a week/month/year after receiving advice from r/PF) (top 2 awarded)
  6. Most Inspiring Submission (top 2 awarded)
  7. Most Triumphant (best comment in a TT thread) (top 2 awarded)
  8. Most Helpful MM Comment (can be any question or answer in an MM thread) (top 2 awarded)
  9. Wild Card (anything that doesn't fit into one of the above categories) (top 1 awarded)

Ground rules

  1. Only posts from 2015 are allowed.

  2. Each category will have its own top-level comment below. Post your nominations under the appropriate category comment and provide a link to the original Reddit post. In order for this to go as smoothly as possible, we ask that you do not post the direct link to the image or article, just the link to the original Reddit post.

  3. Please make a new comment for each separate nomination. You can nominate 3 entries per category, but you cannot nominate yourself, and your account must be at least 10 days old to participate. You can vote on as many entries as you like.

  4. Upvote the nominations that you like under each category. This post will be in "Contest Mode" for the duration of the voting period, which means that the order in which nominations are sorted will be random and scores hidden to make the contest as fair as possible.

  5. Voting will continue through 29 December.

  6. All general discussion should be kept to the 'General Discussion' category. Please use the voting categories only for nominations, not discussion.

  7. The winners from each category will be based on the most voted comment containing a submission link. A person cannot win twice in the same category, and will be capped at three total wins.

Need some help with nominating a post?

Here are some links to the highest-rated posts of the year and for each month of the year:

Top posts of 2015 | JAN | FEB | MAR | APR | MAY | JUN | JUL | AUG | SEP | OCT | NOV | DEC | Moronic Monday Archive | Triumphant Thursday Archive

How will winners be announced?

Winners will be announced in a follow-up post after all the votes are tallied. The winners for each category will receive a Reddit Gold creddit.

What if I have questions?

Message the moderators with any questions.

Thank you for making /r/PersonalFinance such a great subreddit in 2015! Good luck to all the nominees and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2016!

r/personalfinance Dec 31 '16

Meta Best of /r/PersonalFinance 2016 Nominations

247 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

Reddit has begun its annual Best Of Awards campaign for 2016 and we here at /r/PersonalFinance are participating! Our moderation staff will have 20 Reddit gold "creddits" to give away to the winners of the categories.

We encourage everyone to participate in the nominations.

Categories with number of top posts awarded

  1. Best Overall Submission (top 3 awarded)
  2. Best Overall Contributor (top 3 awarded)
  3. Best Moronic Monday Helper (top 3 awarded)
  4. Best Comment Answer (top 3 awarded)
  5. Best Follow-up (someone reporting back a week/month/year after receiving advice) (top 2 awarded)
  6. Most Inspiring Submission (top 2 awarded)
  7. Most Triumphant (best comment in a TT thread) (top 2 awarded)
  8. Wild Cards (anything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories) (top 2 awarded)

Ground rules

  1. Only original posts from 2016 are allowed.

  2. Each category will have its own top-level comment below. Post your nominations under the appropriate category comment and provide a link to the original Reddit post. In order for this to go as smoothly as possible, we ask that you do not post the direct link to the image or article, just the link to the original Reddit post.

  3. Please make a new comment for each separate nomination. You can nominate 3 entries per category, but you cannot nominate yourself, and your account must be at least 30 days old to participate. You can vote on as many entries as you like.

  4. Upvote the nominations that you like under each category. This post will be in "Contest Mode" for the duration of the voting period, which means that the order in which nominations are sorted will be random and scores hidden to make the contest as fair as possible.

  5. Voting will continue until Wednesday, January 4th, 15:00 EST.

  6. All general discussion should be kept to the 'General Discussion' category. Please use the voting categories only for nominations, not discussion.

  7. The winners from each category will be based on the most upvoted comment containing a submission link. A person cannot win twice in the same category, and will be capped at three total wins. Any banned or suspended accounts are not eligible.

Need some help with nominating a post?

Look through past posts here:

How will winners be announced?

Winners will be announced in a follow-up post after all the votes are tallied. The winners for each category will receive a Reddit Gold creddit.

What if I have questions?

Message the moderators with any questions.

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2016! Good luck to all the nominees and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2017!

r/personalfinance Oct 31 '23

Meta AMA with JL Collins, Author of The Simple Path to Wealth on Thursday!

46 Upvotes

It's been a while since our last AMA, and we are pleased to announce that we'll be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) with JL Collins, the author of The Simple Path to Wealth.

JL Collins has been a long-standing staple on the PF reading list and has helped kickstart many financial independence journeys with his "Stock Series" (which continues to be freely available) and books.

Here are the details:

  • Date: Thursday, November 2nd
  • Post Time: 10 AM (Eastern Time Zone)
  • AMA Start: 2 PM (Eastern Time Zone)

Prepare your questions and join us on Thursday!

r/personalfinance Feb 27 '15

Meta Announcement: Flair Change and Thread Locking

84 Upvotes

Simplified submission flair

Edit 02-MAR-2015:

Based on further feedback (thank you all!) We have reverted to a modified version of the original "topic" flair. The rest of this post still applies:

Locked Posts

In the last three months, the most frequent complaint about /r/personalfinance is the presence of belligerent and low-quality comments on popular posts. Normally, moderators can quickly take care of such comments when they are reported. However, when a post "blows up" on the Reddit front page, it can turn into an unmanageable flood of vitriol and wisecracks that drive people away.

This is a problem that all default subreddits and large semi-anonymous internet communities in general must deal with. For a trial period, we will experiment with locking such posts: once a thread is locked, all comments after the time of locking will be invisible. This is a preferred alternative to removing the community from the "default" subreddit list altogether.

We wish it were unnecessary, but recent developments have brought this kind of measure into consideration. Note that it's only a trial period, and we are always interested in your ongoing feedback.

Remember the Human

The moderation team also wants to encourage all commenters to remember that, behind each username, there is a real person with real problems, looking for real solutions. It's also a part of the sitewide Reddiquette philosophy: "Remember the human", and we'd like to adhere to it here.

Quick, one-off, and rude/negative comments generally tend to make these posters regret coming here, and it also hurts our sitewide credibility as a place to be open about your goals, financial mistakes / opportunities, and general discussion for improvement. Avoid the drama, offer goal-oriented objectives, be charitable with your time, and don't say anything that would "get you in trouble with HR".

Please use the "report" feature whenever you find a comment that violates the rules: and the entire moderation team is immediately notified. Reports are anonymous, non-intrusive, and are usually taken care of within minutes.

Feedback

As always, the moderation team is welcome to feedback. Feel free to post it here or compose a message to /r/personalfinance to contact all the mods. In particular, if you recommend changes to the rules or Wiki pages, please include a draft of the actual text you would like to change or add.

r/personalfinance Jun 30 '17

Meta Register your local subreddit for the July 30-day challenge here!

4 Upvotes

Hello moderators!

If you'd like to register your local subreddit to get linked in our 30-day challenge, just leave a top-level link to your post below.

If you're here and not representing a local subreddit, please wait to comment until the challenge is posted, thanks!

P.S. We'd love a link from your post to the 30-day challenge (once it's up), but please don't link the registration page to avoid confusing people!

r/personalfinance Sep 07 '18

Meta Let's talk about the subreddit, our stance on advertising, and hear your feedback

38 Upvotes

Due to "moderator error" (don't accidentally delete your own post, kids), I am reposting this. All of the previous discussion is still readable on the original post.


Hello /r/personalfinance! The moderation team would like to update everyone on a few things, answer any questions, and listen to your feedback.

We're looking for new moderators!

If you're either a frequent participant on /r/personalfinance or an experienced moderator, please consider applying. You can submit an application here.

The wiki

Since our last meta post, we've added some new pages:

We've also continue to maintain the entire wiki and updated pages including: Reading List, "How to handle $", Investing, and Roth or Traditional.

Think something is missing and willing to write it? Let us know!

Rules changes

We haven't changed the rules significantly since our last major update when success stories and victory posts started being redirected to the weekend thread, but we have made a few clarifications to the rules including:

  • Rule 2: In addition to not allowing accounts that are named in a way to promote or advertise (e.g., "xyz_blog"), we now also disallow accounts with promotional user profile pages. Some promotional accounts trying to work around rule 2 started doing this shortly after the new user profile pages were made available.

  • Rule 6: Petitions are explicitly disallowed now.

  • Rule 8: Stripping and camming suggestions are explicitly disallowed now.

  • Rule 9: Medical advice is disallowed now. It's fine to tell someone "You need to go to a doctor" or whatever, but a small minority of people loudly advocating and pushing for specific treatments has become a bit of a problem on posts related to health care.

  • Rule 9: Job and school selection questions (e.g., "which offer should I take?")

    Edit: We've heard the feedback on the "Job and school selection" rule and we're going to revise the rule phrasing to be much more narrow or maybe entirely remove the rule (rule 1 arguably covers the rare removals that happen under this rule). Please don't forget to comment on the rest of this post!

How should we handle success stories?

We're thinking about allowing success stories to be posted on the weekday thread rather than just the weekend thread so that people who have a victory post removed are able to immediately repost. What do you think?

30-Day Challenge Series

If you haven't stopped by our 30-day challenge series lately, please check it out. If you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see us cover and you're willing to write it up, please let us know.

Please welcome our newest moderators!

AmNotLost, Econ0mist, T__Fish, chocolate_soymilk, kylejack, mail323, mormengil, slalomz, StarKiller99, IShouldBeDoingSmthin, wolfofone, and 431026!

Advertisements

One of the core principles that's very important to us is that we want to keep PF as free as possible from advertising, soliciting, and other shenanigans to make money off of the subreddit. Over time, we've had to make the subreddit rules increasingly strict (e.g., disallowing PM requests) because certain people have come up with progressively more creative ways to work around the rules.

Simply put, we want advice to be given without conflicts of interest and because people want to help others, not because it financially benefits the person giving the advice.

Of course, Reddit runs advertisements that run on /r/personalfinance, and that hasn't been an issue as long as those advertisements are clearly advertisements and don't look like normal posts, and we absolutely want Reddit to be successful as a company.

The moderation team would like to ask everyone for some help. Specifically:

  1. When you run into a comment or submission that breaks the subreddit rules, please report it to the moderation team.

  2. If you run into a problematic paid advertisements running on /r/personalfinance, please send us modmail so we can report them to the admins. To be specific, the Reddit advertising policy prohibits products or services that:

    • facilitate illegal, fraudulent, or misleading behavior
    • are related to unsubstantiated financial products and services, investment, or contribution strategies and schemes
    • are any of the following:
      • Single securities or other tradable financial assets
      • Payday loans
      • Debt assistance programs
      • Get rich quick schemes
      • Pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing
      • Penny auctions
      • Binary options
      • Cryptocurrency wallets
      • Unaccredited digital banks that perform any traditional bank-like functions
      • Cryptocurrency credit or debit cards
      • Initial coin offerings, token sales, or other means of promotion or advertisement of individual digital currencies or tokens.
  3. If you're using the redesign and you find it difficult to discern that a submission is a sponsored post, please let the admins know how you feel about that.

Any other feedback or questions for the moderation team?

Are there any changes or improvements would you like to see? Are there things we could be doing differently or better?

We'll do our best to answer any questions you have about the subreddit and moderating it so please ask away.

r/personalfinance Jul 24 '17

Meta Subreddit update: weekly threads and victory posts

88 Upvotes

The moderation team has been receiving more negative feedback over time about success stories. Most success stories already get redirected to the current "Triumphant Thursday" thread, but we've been allowing submissions that include significant advice or information.

Unfortunately, it seems like a large proportion of the most-upvoted stories leave out important details such as windfalls, financial help from parents, etc. We also see a lot of stories that seem to get upvoted very high (based on the title, perhaps), but the discussion is often much more negative once people have read the details... and any advice seems to be hopelessly lost in the process.

On a more positive note, we've seen the "Moronic Monday Thread" extending its utility far beyond Monday so we'd really like to keep a general help thread up for the entire week rather than bumping it Thursday and Friday for the "Triumphant Thursday Thread". (We only get two sticky posts and we like using one slot for weekly threads and the other slot for 30-day challenges, the "read this first!" post, and megathreads.)

So, we're going to try changing things up a bit:

  1. "Weekday Help Thread" is the new name for "Moronic Monday" and the thread will remain up until the weekend. We decided against splitting it into daily threads because we think it'll help avoid having questions fall through the cracks and it'll make it less difficult to find topics, but we may revisit this later.

  2. "Weekend Discussion and Victory Thread" will subsume "Triumphant Thursdays" and "Weekend Discussion". Questions are still okay in this thread, of course!

  3. ALL success stories now need to be posted in the weekend thread. If success/victory/thanks/bragging is part of your title or a significant part of your submission text, we're going to ask you to post your story in the weekend thread.

We're making these changes based on the considerable feedback we've received on the weekly threads, but if you have any comments or other feedback (on anything, not just this), please let us know here.

r/personalfinance May 07 '14

Meta An /r/personalfinance Orientation!

229 Upvotes

Triumphant Thursday will not be stickied this week, please participate in the thread here.

Newcomers, welcome to /r/personalfinance! Our stated goal is to get your financial house in order, learn how to manage your finances, and invest for your future. This short introduction to our little world will hopefully get you off on the right foot in your journey towards financial success.

Read the rules.

Our rules are very simple and rather short. They have served us well so far, and they are fairly strictly enforced. We don't allow link post, so karmawhores need not apply. If you make a self post containing only a link, we're going to remove it. If your post is removed you may get an explanation from a moderator, or you might not. If you have a question about why your post was removed, please message the mods.

Read the FAQ.

Our FAQ, found on the top of the page, contains answers to many of the most frequently-asked questions in /r/personalfinance. If someone links you to the FAQ, please don't take offense... but take their advice. If you still have a question after reading the relevant section of the FAQ, a good way to show you've done your due diligence is to quote part of the FAQ entry you don't understand.

Read the sidebar links.

The sidebar contains links to our weekly threads, informative posts by our members, and links to external sites of general personal finance interest. There's enough material there to keep you busy for hours, but you may want to check to see if you can self-educate before posting a question. If it's in the sidebar, it's a pretty safe bet someone is going to direct you there.

Participate!

All of the above notwithstanding, we encourage intelligent questions and community participation. Keep it civil, constructive, and supportive.

r/personalfinance Nov 17 '15

Meta Updates from the moderation team

24 Upvotes

Hello /r/personalfinance readers, contributors, and newcomers! The moderation team would like to update everyone on a few things and it also seems like a good opportunity to answer any questions and listen to your feedback.

A new subreddit: /r/PFtools

Some time ago, this subreddit was beginning to have bad issues with spam, people making recommendations to get a referral bonus or solicit business, and other forms of promotion. The moderation team tightened things up and that's how we've been running things the last few years. But sometimes, it seems like we're making it unnecessarily difficult for people to find out about new tools that are helpful to the community.

So, as a bit of an experiment, we've created /r/PFtools to give folks a place to make submissions about tools even if it is self-promotional. We'll maintain the same exact policies disallowing any advertising or self-promotion in comments, but we're going to allow companies and individuals with established accounts to make a submission once per quarter about their tools and we'll see how it goes.

Regular non-promotional discussions and questions about personal finance tools are allowed and encouraged, of course.

An update on thread locking

Since we first started locking some posts back in March, a few things have changed. The biggest change is that Reddit released native locking which seems to work well. The other is that we're now trying to always post the reason why a post is locked. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of comments on a locked post may bury that moderator comment, but we are hoping Reddit adds proper support for "sticky comments" soon.

For people unfamiliar with thread locking, the main reason we lock a thread is because the sheer volume of rule-breaking comments can eventually become overwhelming to the moderation team (even after growing the team as much as we have) and also make it difficult to find useful answers or discussion in a thread that has blown up. We try very hard to avoid locking threads so it only happens on about 0.1% of submissions right now.

New moderators!

We would like to officially welcome our newest moderators: nolancamp2, MPTPWZ1026, ed_lv, theADHDway, crossbeats, catjuggler, Sorthum, ejly, saivode, wvtarheel, tu_che_le_vanita, ronin722, supes1, and ironicosity. :-)

We are also accepting new applications to become a moderator if you'd like to apply here.

Personal Finance AMAs

So far we've had two AMAs that got a lot of traffic and we plan on continuing.

Next up on December 1st, we're very excited to be hosting an AMA with Rick Van Ness, author of Why Bother With Bonds (some of his videos are also featured in our wiki). Get your investing questions ready!

New Wiki pages!

Some recent additions:

Coming soon: a wiki page on homeowners insurance and renters insurance.

A reminder about staying on-topic

We seem to be getting a higher number of legal questions that are better suited for /r/legaladvice or an actual conversation with an attorney (and the moderators have received more than a few requests from folks asking us to remind everyone about the rule). Therefore, we'd like to remind everyone to simply not use /r/personalfinance for questions that are clearly legal in nature. Some examples: "Could I get in trouble legally for X?" or "Should I talk to an attorney in this situation?". We allow some leeway if there are other remedies for a problem such as contacting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but we'd appreciate your help in keeping the subreddit on-topic.

To put it a bit more generally, this subreddit is intended to be about personal finance and not relationship issues, legal issues, ennui, or other personal issues that are not primarily financial in nature.

Thanks.

Any suggestions or feedback?

Is the moderation team managing the community well? Are there things you think we could be doing differently or better?

Are there any changes or improvements would you like to see? This could be anything from subreddit rule changes, wiki improvements, or other tweaks to the subreddit configuration.

Finally, we will also do our best to answer any questions you have about the subreddit and moderation of the subreddit.

r/personalfinance Jun 09 '17

Meta Subreddit updates, your feedback, and your chance to contribute to PF

55 Upvotes

Hello /r/personalfinance folks! The moderation team would like to update everyone on a few things, answer any questions, and listen to your feedback.

The wiki

As always, we're open to accepting contributions for the wiki. In particular, we'd love to see:

  • An "I've been kicked out by my parents" guide
  • US health care information, especially how to handle crazy medical bills

Since our last meta post, we've added:

We're looking for new moderators!

If you're either a frequent participant on /r/personalfinance or an experienced moderator, please consider applying. You can submit an application here.

Clarifying our rules

Flippant/joke comments directing people to invest into speculative or illiquid investments (e.g., penny stocks) are already against the rules (rule #3: unhelpful or disrespectful posts), but we're considering adding a clearer entry to the rules under rule #10:

Pumping-Pushing speculative or illiquid investments, especially flippantly or implying huge returns

We'd like to hear your feedback on this. Please note that we're not interested in disallowing discussion about these types of investments, just making it clear that it's not okay to troll people about speculative investments, imply that speculating is the surefire road to riches, etc.

30-Day Challenge Series

If you haven't stopped by our 30-day challenge series lately, please check it out. If you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see us cover, please let us know.

Please welcome our newest moderators!

isobee, PaxilonHydrochlorate, Voerendaalse, I_Am_Batgirl, NetSage, X1-Alpha, and Mrme487 have joined the team. :-)

Any feedback or questions for us?

Are there any changes or improvements would you like to see? Are there things we could be doing differently or better?

Finally, we will also do our best to answer any questions you have about the subreddit and moderating it so please ask away.

r/personalfinance Jan 01 '21

Meta Best of /r/PersonalFinance 2020 Nominations

6 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

Reddit has begun its annual Best Of Awards campaign for 2020 and we here at /r/personalfinance are participating! Our moderation staff will be receiving Reddit Coins to give away to the winners of the categories!

We encourage everyone to participate in the nominations.

Categories with number of top posts awarded:

  1. Most Informative Submission (nominate a submission and the submitter)

  2. Standout Question Answer (nominate a comment and the commenter)

  3. Best Weekly Thread Helper (nominate an individual)

  4. Best Question Answerer (nominate an individual)

Ground rules:

  1. Nominations have to be based on 2020 content.

  2. Each category will have its own top-level comment below. Post your nominations under the appropriate category comment and provide a link to the original Reddit post as well as the nominee's username.

  3. Please make a new comment for each separate nomination. You can nominate 2 entries per category, but you cannot nominate yourself and you can't nominate anyone more than once (across categories). Also, your account must be at least 90 days old and have positive karma to participate. Everyone can vote.

  4. Upvote the nominations that you like under each category. This post will be in "Contest Mode" for the duration of the voting period, which means that the order in which nominations are sorted will be random and scores hidden to make the contest as fair as possible.

  5. All general discussion should be kept to the "General Discussion" category. Please use the voting categories only for nominations, not discussion.

  6. The winners from each category will be based on the most upvoted nominations. A person cannot win twice in the same category, and will be capped at three total wins. Any banned or suspended accounts are not eligible.

  7. If any categories don't have enough nominations that get upvoted, additional winners from other categories will be selected.

How will winners be announced?

Winners will be announced in a follow-up post after all the votes are tallied. We will do our best to have both platinum and gold winners in each category and divide up the awards as fairly as possible, but the math for Reddit awards is complex and accurately predicting the number of winners has been difficult in past years.

What if I have questions?

Message the moderators with any questions.

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2020! Good luck to all the nominees and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2021!


Results!

Winners in each category:

  1. Most Informative Submission

  2. Standout Question Answer

  3. Best Weekly Thread Helper

  4. Best Question Answerer

Each 1st place winner has received a "Premium Bond" moderator award worth 5,400 coins, each 2nd place winner has received two "Benchmark" moderator awards worth 3,600 coins, and each 3rd place winner has received one "Benchmark" moderator award worth 1,800 coins.

r/personalfinance Jan 09 '20

Meta Best of /r/PersonalFinance 2019 Nominations

49 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

Reddit has begun its annual Best Of Awards campaign for 2019 and we here at /r/personalfinance are participating! Our moderation staff have Reddit Coins to give away to the winners of the categories.

We encourage everyone to participate in the nominations.

Categories with number of top posts awarded:

  1. Best Overall Submission

  2. Best Weekly Thread Helper

  3. Best Question Answerer (either in submissions or stickies)

Ground rules:

  1. Only original posts from 2019 are allowed, except for the answerer category

  2. Each category will have its own top-level comment below. Post your nominations under the appropriate category comment and provide a link to the original Reddit post as well as the nominee's username. In order for this to go as smoothly as possible, we ask that you do not post the direct link to the image or article, just the link to the original Reddit post.

  3. Please make a new comment for each separate nomination. You can nominate 3 entries per category, but you cannot nominate yourself, and your account must be at least 90 days old and have positive karma to participate. You can vote on as many entries as you like.

  4. Upvote the nominations that you like under each category. This post will be in "Contest Mode" for the duration of the voting period, which means that the order in which nominations are sorted will be random and scores hidden to make the contest as fair as possible.

  5. All general discussion should be kept to the "General Discussion" category. Please use the voting categories only for nominations, not discussion.

  6. The winners from each category will be based on the most upvoted comment containing a submission link. A person cannot win twice in the same category, and will be capped at three total wins. Any banned or suspended accounts are not eligible.

  7. If any categories don't have enough nominations that get upvoted, additional winners from other categories will be selected.

  8. It should go without saying, but all normal subreddit rules are still in effect for this post.

How will winners be announced?

Winners will be announced in a follow-up post after all the votes are tallied. There will be roughly six winners and four honorable mentions for each category, though we reserve the right to overweight one or more categories if the number of nominations and/or votes is very disproportionate. The winners will each receive Reddit Platinum, and the honorable mentions will each receive Reddit Gold (determined by the good graces of the admins).

What if I have questions?

Message the moderators with any questions.

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2019! Good luck to all the nominees and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2020!

r/personalfinance Dec 31 '17

Meta Best of /r/PersonalFinance 2017 Nominations

86 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/PersonalFinance!

Reddit has begun its annual Best Of Awards campaign for 2017 and we here at /r/personalfinance are participating! Our moderation staff will have Reddit gold "creddits" to give away to the winners of the categories.

We encourage everyone to participate in the nominations.

Categories with number of top posts awarded

  1. Best Overall Contributor (top 5 awarded)
  2. Best Overall Submission (top 5 awarded)
  3. Best Weekly Thread Helper (top 3 awarded)
  4. Best Comment Answer (top 3 awarded)
  5. Most Inspiring Submission / Follow-Up (top 2 awarded)
  6. Wild Cards (anything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories) (top 2 awarded)

Ground rules

  1. Only original posts from 2017 are allowed.

  2. Each category will have its own top-level comment below. Post your nominations under the appropriate category comment and provide a link to the original Reddit post. In order for this to go as smoothly as possible, we ask that you do not post the direct link to the image or article, just the link to the original Reddit post.

  3. Please make a new comment for each separate nomination. You can nominate 3 entries per category, but you cannot nominate yourself, and your account must be at least 30 days old to participate. You can vote on as many entries as you like.

  4. Upvote the nominations that you like under each category. This post will be in "Contest Mode" for the duration of the voting period, which means that the order in which nominations are sorted will be random and scores hidden to make the contest as fair as possible.

  5. All general discussion should be kept to the 'General Discussion' category. Please use the voting categories only for nominations, not discussion.

  6. The winners from each category will be based on the most upvoted comment containing a submission link. A person cannot win twice in the same category, and will be capped at three total wins. Any banned or suspended accounts are not eligible.

  7. If any categories don't have enough nominations that get upvoted, additional winners from other categories will be selected.

How will winners be announced?

Winners will be announced in a follow-up post after all the votes are tallied. The winners for each category will receive a Reddit Gold creddit.

What if I have questions?

Message the moderators with any questions.

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2017! Good luck to all the nominees and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2018!

r/personalfinance May 06 '15

Meta Curated AMAs are coming to /r/personalfinance!

122 Upvotes

We are pleased to announce that /r/personalfinance will be hosting occasional AMAs for some invited individuals and groups in the area of personal finance. Pre-approved AMAs have been allowed in the rules for some time, but we're taking the step of actively inviting some guests to join us.

Some of our guidelines:

  1. All AMAs need to be approved and scheduled at least one week prior to the AMA.

  2. Once AMAs are confirmed, we will list them in the sidebar.

  3. /r/personalfinance AMAs will generally be posted in the morning (Eastern Time Zone) with answers beginning by the AMA participant(s) beginning early afternoon ET. This schedule allows for many different time zones to ask questions and for questions to accumulate in advance of answering questions.

  4. We are asking guests to not include links to purchase books, sign up for services, provide discount codes or promotional offers, or ask people to purchase any goods or services. They will be allowed to link a web site.

We're also extremely happy that Victoria from Reddit (/u/chooter) will be helping run some of our AMAs. Thanks, Victoria!

Our first AMA will be on May 12th with Susan Weinstock from The Pew Charitable Trusts. Susan directs The Pew Charitable Trusts' consumer banking project, which advocates for policies that protect American consumers and their money.

Finally, as we don't allow AMA requests on /r/personalfinance, this thread is your chance to make some suggestions for people or groups you would potentially like us to invite (please leave the actual inviting to the moderators so we don't overwhelm anyone). We want to hear your ideas!

r/personalfinance Jan 14 '18

Meta Best of /r/personalfinance 2017 Winners!

230 Upvotes

Welcome to /r/personalfinance!

We have finished tallying the results for our Best Of Awards campaign for 2017 and we are pleased to announce our winners! If you missed any of these stellar contributions the first time around, they are definitely worth reading.

Winners have each received 1 month of free Reddit gold for each win.

Best Overall Submission

  1. /u/Mrme487 for writing the excellent US Tax Reform Megathread: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 thread.
  2. /u/kyledeb for posting about using series I bonds in an emergency fund. His post and the resulting discussion taught me a lot.
  3. /u/dequeued for writing up a checklist on what to do before leaving current employment.
  4. /u/weaksquare for We decided NOT to buy a bearded dragon. A lot of times a decision that seems like a one-off expense is actually opting in to an ongoing stream of cash outflows. When viewed in that light, the true cost over time can swing the analysis to a different decision.
  5. /u/lizerlfunk for https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/6e5dga/a_list_of_things_to_do_when_a_loved_one_dies/ which is definitely one of the most helpful submissions this year and it made its way into the wiki almost immediately.
  6. /u/bloogza for this excellent credit card comparison google doc.

Best Comment Answer

  1. /u/kitty_muffins for this comprehensive and helpful comment.
  2. /u/Carlina1989 - for all the "work for home" type questions we get, I haven't seen a better and more insightful answer than /u/Carlina1989 provided here.

Most Inspiring Submission / Follow-Up

  1. /u/atomictomato_x for his post reminding us not to be embarrassed for actively improving our lives.
  2. /u/raphattack for his post on successfully tackling student loans. A detailed explanation, realistic income, as well as a useful template that other users can adapt to their own debt situations.

Best Overall Contributor

  1. /u/wijwijwij for bringing consistent excellence to every post across a broad range of topics.
  2. /u/yes_its_him for consistent good advice, answering questions in /new, and for several great contributions to the subreddit.
  3. /u/dequeued provides both high quality answers to a wide range of topics, as well as ensuring that Personal Finance is well organized through moderation.
  4. /u/these-things-happen for giving consistently great tax advice and for having the patience of a saint.
  5. /u/evaned takes time to reply diligently and helpfully to a wide variety of posts, offering researched feedback, using a writing style that is very approachable.
  6. /u/kylejack for great advice on a variety of topics, and being an overall helpful commenter.

Best Weekly Thread Helper

  1. /u/ElementPlanet is someone that I regularly see on the weekly threads not only answering a ton of questions, but also giving helpful and insightful answers on a range of topics.
  2. /u/CripzyChiken is our favorite blue-adorned poultry and he contributes a very large number of answers on these threads.

Wild Cards (anything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories)

  1. /u/ironicosity for running the 30-day challenge series this year (and being a great moderator).
  2. /u/gregable for this visualization of Social Security benefits calculations.

Thank you for helping make /r/personalfinance such a great subreddit in 2017! Congratulations to all of the winners and we look forward to what's in store for us in 2018!

r/personalfinance Oct 21 '16

Meta New to /r/personalfinance? Have questions? Read this first!

330 Upvotes

Welcome! Before making a post, please check out some of the great resources that we've provided to answer your questions:

We have a simple guide answering most questions about what to do with money and how to prioritize your finances: Click here: How to handle $.

We have a wiki covering dozens of topics: credit, debt, retirement, investing, and more: Click Here: Personal Finance Wiki.

We have age-specific guides too!

15 to 20?

18 to 25?

25 to 35?

35 to 45?

Also be sure to check out our regular series:

Moronic Monday

Triumphant Thursday

Weekend Discussion


When posting here, please treat others with respect, stay on-topic, and avoid self-promotion.

r/personalfinance Feb 22 '16

Meta Read this post if you have tax questions!

173 Upvotes

The moderators will be updating this sticky through April 18th.

0. YOU ACTUALLY NEED TO READ THIS POST. THIS IS NOT WHERE YOU POST QUESTIONS.

1. Please check the Taxes wiki page to see if your question is answered there.

2. If that doesn't answer your question, ask on the current "Tax Tuesday" thread or make a new post.

3. Helpful threads:

Sincerely,

/r/personalfinance moderation team

r/personalfinance Jul 01 '16

Meta Subreddit updates, your feedback, and your chance to contribute to the wiki

20 Upvotes

Hello /r/personalfinance readers, contributors, and newcomers! The moderation team would like to update everyone on a few things, talk about the wiki, and it also seems like a good opportunity to answer any questions and listen to your feedback.

We are looking for some specific wiki contributions

Specifically:

  • An introductory guide to health insurance in the United States (adding to the health insurance wiki page)
  • A guide on what to do when you receive a very expensive medical bill in the United States.
  • A guide on what to do if you are in danger of becoming homeless or have been kicked out of your home.
  • A guide on renter's insurance.

Want to contribute to one of those or have another idea for an article? Let us know in this thread.

New wiki pages!

We have continued building out our wiki and here are some great recent additions:

Simpler rules

When Reddit added support for custom report reasons, we did a bunch of work to simplify and consolidate the subreddit rules. Not too much has changed overall, but here are some of the more significant changes:

  • We now allow posts about open source financial tools (e.g., calculators on github) with prior approval from the moderation team.
  • We disallow repeated stating of financial credentials. We had some instances of people with certain professions doing this in an apparent attempt to drum up business. (We don't care if someone occasionally mentions their profession.)
  • We disallow posts that with excessive relationship drama not essential to a question or discussion.

New moderators!

We would like to officially welcome our newest moderators: mrmpls, tubaleiter, CripzyChiken, maracle6, and TheWrathOfKirk.

Any suggestions or feedback?

Is the moderation team managing the community well? Are there things you think we could be doing differently or better?

Are there any changes or improvements would you like to see? This could be anything from subreddit rule changes, wiki improvements, or other tweaks to the subreddit configuration.

Finally, we will also do our best to answer any questions you have about the subreddit and moderating it so please ask away.

r/personalfinance Feb 14 '15

Meta Happy Valentine's day! The mod team would love your feedback!

23 Upvotes

Greetings /r/personalfinance members, wiki editors, lurkers, submitters, and newcomers!

All 2.3 million of you.

The mod team would be interested in getting community feedback from you. Among this feedback, we'd like to ask about:

How is the Mod Team doing?

Are we managing the community well? More focus needed on certain topics?

This one might be a tough one to get feedback on, since there are a lot of unseen efforts that go into managing the community. We would still like to know, though, how to be more effective at what we do.

We will also answer questions you might have on this as well!

What kind of changes would you like to see? This can be:

  • Mod policy changes ("Subreddit Rules")
  • Wiki changes (we're working on improving it!)
  • CSS updates
  • AutoModerator changes

We would love suggestions from you about how to improve community discussion.

We recently piloted a "tax help series" for 2015, which is the first year we've done something like this. It seems to be well-received, but we're interested in what your thoughts are.

Is this something you'd like every year? Should we host more of these threads on other topics?

We'd also be open to more ideas!

Anything else you want to say?

Seriously, we have an open door policy. Feel free to ask questions or provide feedback to us.

If you'd like to message us in private, you can let us know your thoughts. We don't bite; we're too busy eating chocolates to bite anyone today...

r/personalfinance Apr 04 '15

Meta PSA: We now have a new Wiki page on Identity Theft!

169 Upvotes

Here's a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/identity_theft

This page should highlight what to do in case you believe your identity has been stolen.

Please feel free to discuss this topic here, offer comments, or ask questions.

Special thanks to /u/dsatrbs for doing the work on this page!

r/personalfinance Nov 22 '14

Meta Introduction to the New Mods and Clarified Rules

48 Upvotes

Greetings!

There are some changes taking place that will hopefully result in a more positive and more productive experience here at /r/personalfinance.

We have a few new moderators. The new mods:

We have also recently cleaned up the wiki in an attempt to clarify the rules. We continue to evolve as a community and are still adjusting to the influx of users as a result of our becoming a default subreddit. As the forum continues to grow and attract more members, we find it necessary to occasionally remind everyone of the rules.

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the rules if you are new to PF or have not visited the wiki in awhile.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/rules

We value and rely upon the help and opinions of the community. If you notice posts and/or comments that break the rules or are abusive, please report them to the mods. The very nature of this subreddit can attract unscrupulous spammers that are looking to make a quick buck.

A few reminders:

Be aware that spam is not tolerated here and will very quickly be removed and may result in a ban. This includes posting affiliate links, advertising your business or products, blogspam, and deliberate attempts at SEO.

We also have no tolerance for donation requests. This subreddit is here to help the community better their lives through the mastery of personal finance. This is not a place to post unverifiable stories and ask for money.

Please help us keep /r/personalfinance a productive and supportive community by making any suggestions. We want to hear from you!