Farewell to SmartMoney Magazine

I just received my September 2012 issue of SmartMoney magazine. I have been reading this magazine for nearly 20 years, and was surprised to find a note on the cover of this latest issue. It seems that the magazine is ceasing publication. SmartMoney says that they would fulfill the remaining issues with the Barron's Magazine.

I know that it is not uncommon for magazines to stop being published. The same thing happened with Business 2.0 magazine several years ago. Over the years, Smart Money has published many great articles. I particularly enjoyed those about early retirement. But, I would also agree that the overall quality of the writing has declined over the years. I remember one such article that touted the largely defunct website Wesabe.com (a financial planning website that nobody used) as the best.

In addition to SmartMoney, we still subscribe to Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Money Magazine. Our subscription to Smart Money was supposed to end in February 2016. By my count, there are 41 issues remaining in my subscription. When they say that they will fulfill my remaining SmartMoney issues with Barron's, I wonder if they will they extend the Barron's subscription to 2/2016.

PFS

Are You Feeling Less Rich?

For a while now, I've had an annual income poll in the sidebar of PFStock that asks readers to respond to the question: "How much do you make?" So far, there have been 70 responses to this poll. Here are the latest poll results for PFStock's current income survey:

How Much Do You Make (July 2012 Results)

Annual Income	2011 Survey	2012 Survey
less than $50k	8%	15%
$50k-$99k	25%	27%
$100k-$149k	27%	28%
$150k-$199k	11%	17%
$200k-$249k	8%	7%
$250k and higher	18%	4%

Note that the percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding. From these statistics, I found that there has been a big decrease in the number of respondents who claim to make more than $200k per year. This makes wonder if people are feeling less rich this year. Does anybody have a comment on this statement?

The last time that I published annual income survey results was in my April 2011 post on the topic. In comparing these statistics, I see that there is a bit of a shift away from the higher income ranges. Does this mean that the economy is once again stagnating in 2012?

If you haven't voted yet, there is still time to have your data included in the final survey. Just cast your vote in the sidebar of my blog.  All data is anonymous. Thanks.

Here are some other interesting related posts:

Annual Income Survey (2/10)
How much do you make? (4/09)
Net Worth Update (8/09)
Net Worth Comparison (6/08)
Are You Wealthy? (3/08)
Calculating Net Worth (9/06)

PFS