Personal Finance Ultimate Fighting Championship
April 27, 2007
Are you imagining two guys in a cage fighting for the championship? Where does personal finance fit into this picture? Well the cage is actually this website, the two guys are you readers, and the prize is honor & glory.
The Concept
Inspired by a mixture of Devil’s Advocate and Guest Writer Days I’ve decided to introduce a new series here at Money Smart Life. Most personal finance topics have two sides and I know that many of you readers have something to say about one or the other.
I’ll publish a topic, for example, Renting vs. Owning a Home and two readers that have something to say on the subject will send me a guest post defending or reasoning why one is better than the other based on their personal experience. In order to provide both sides of the equation we’ll need one post for each side.
The Details
This idea is still being hatched so I’m looking for feedback on the details. I’d publish the concept two weeks before it was planned to go live. Anyone interested in arguing their case would contact me with the side they wished to present. The two competitors would have a week to write their views and submit them to me as guest posts. I would publish them either both on the same day, or one Monday and one Tuesday. If only one person submits a guest post, I’ll argue the opposite of whatever position they take.
A new set of head-to-head articles would be published every two weeks. The name of the series is yet to be determined, I just thought the Ultimate Fighting Championship would be a good eye catcher to get some initial feedback; I’m looking for suggestions for the name.
As I mentioned before, the prize is the honor and glory of convincing the world that you’re a personal finance guru. We could vote on the winner via comments or a poll, or we could just let everyone decide in their own minds which approach they prefer and works best for them.
The Feedback
So what are your thoughts? Leave some comments about what you think will work and what could use some tweaking. Thanks!
All posts by Ben Edwards
Thanks everyone for your input. I’m working on the details now and will announce more once I get those figured out.
I thought of the exact same idea, except I was going to call it “personal finance arena” 😛
Thanks for the ideas ispf, yeah, I’m excited about it. I think this will create some good dialog and show how different money decisions are good for different situations.
I think this is a great idea! I like the devil’s advocate posts a lot since they show what’s on the other side of the coin. This idea should be even better since it presents both the sides of the coin at the same time. I would vote for publishing both the sides on the same day since it engages both regular and non-regular readers.
Here are some ideas for topics…
1) Going to college Vs starting a job/business
2) Mortgage: pay off early vs take the longest possible term
3) chap vs frugal
4) Tipping: boon or bane?
5) Youth: Accept money from parents or try to strike it out on own
Looking forward to when this goes live…
A prize wouldn’t be a bad idea. How about this, after a certain number of posts, I’d run a poll to pick the most useful entry and the winner gets the prize?
Nice concept. I think that you should find some way of offering a prize say 6 months down the road, where you pit some of the better articles in the series against one another in a similar fashion to FMF’s march madness. Maybe somebody would be willing to donate something towards.