My Financial Advice - Now Open for Business

Over the years I have written a ton of online financial calculators and in doing so have also doled out a lot of financial advice to people across the Internet. A lot of these people tell me I'm a lot better than the real "professionals" they have talked to and that I should go into business for myself. Well, I find it flattering, but I am not about to give up my day job at the university with one child in college and another going to be there in a few years. However, I have been doing a bit of on-line web consulting on the side, and thought why couldn't I expand that to include helping people out with simple financial advice? Since this is not my main source of income I can afford to answer the $10 question someone might have about their mortgage or their retirement plan. People will have to remember my training and experience is in system and software engineering and not finances, but I have self taught myself quite a bit about personal finances. In reality my degrees and experience in engineering may actually be better for some of these numerical analyses than your  typical insurance sales person or stock broker could provide anyway. I am always surprised when some of these "financial professionals" e-mail me for advice in figuring out complicated mortgage analyses or investment projections. Wait a second, why are they e-mailing some computer guy at a university to help them with their jobs? Aren't they supposed to be the experts? Plus many of these financial pros are expecting me to help them out for free when they are trying to answer questions for their paying customers. Sure, I should spend my free time crunching numbers so they can please customers paying for their tailored suits and their BMW lease. Somehow that just does not seem quite right.

So now I am starting up "Hugh's Pick Your Price Financial Advice". You simply e-mail me your questions about mortgages, retirement, investing, taxes or anything, and I will try to answer your questions to the best of my ability. It doesn't get much easier than that. If I tell you something useful that saves you money or points you in the right direction, you should send me some cash, but only however much you feel my advice it worth. That way everybody comes out ahead. If you don't send me anything, oh well, I've been doling out free advice for years anyway. I am just guessing there are some nice people out there, and I know there are since some folk just send me cash donations without any personal interaction at all. Have a question you need answered? Let me know and I can try to help you out! Isn't that the way the Internet is supposed to be anyway?

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