Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Introducing FiLife

It’s time to lay a few things bare.

We don’t talk enough about money. Sure, we listen sometimes, when people shout at us from a television screen or deliver one-size-fits-all advice on the pages of a book or magazine. But how often have any of us had a brutally honest conversation about our financial habits with our friends or family?

It’s easy to explain away the silence. There isn’t much common ground if one friend is an actor and another is about to make partner at a law firm, and it’s uncomfortable when a single friend is on one side of the table while the couple about to have kids is on the other. Then there’s the matter of looking like an idiot. While we all may have the trappings of adulthood, it’s embarrassing to admit that we don’t know the difference between a checking and a money-market account.

Our new blog is written by a handful of personal-finance journalists in their 20’s and 30’s who are committed to talking about this stuff out loud so others can learn from our blunders. We’ll be introducing ourselves individually over the next week, and later on you’ll hear from others who work with us too. Though we’re paid to know better, we don’t always follow our own advice. We make mistakes, we get lazy, we forget stuff. But you wouldn’t know it by reading the things we’ve written in past gigs.

So this is where we’ll come clean about what we’ve messed up, what keeps us up at night and the writing elsewhere on the Web that we wish we’d created ourselves because it really made us think. When things go wrong, we won’t just whine into the ether. We’ll use our contacts and access when we need to – and invite the companies that cause us problems to diagnose the cause. And when we find something that makes it easier to sort our financial lives, we’ll give props to institutions that offer it (and call their competitors to find out why they don’t do it too).

This blog is a production of FiLife, a new personal-finance site that goes live later this year. Until it’s fully baked, please come back again and join the conversation.