Personal finance web site FiLife closer to reality

The joint venture between The Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones & Co. and IAC/InterActive Corp. aimed at developing a personal finance web site for younger readers by the end of the year is getting closer to reality.

Ron Lieber, the former Journal columnist who is managing editor of the operation, which was announced back in March, tells Talking Biz News that a blog called FiLife written by the venture’s writers started about 10 days ago.

The web site will also have the same name, apparently.

“The blog is rudimentary — we’ll be layering the look and feel on once the design is finished,” wrote Lieber in an e-mail. “But the tone of voice and point of view give a good sense of where we’re headed. We’re looking to launch full-bore before end of year.”

Lieber has hired four staff members. They are Sam Grobart, who previously worked for Money, The Journal, Esquire and New York Magazine; Tara Siegel Bernard, who worked at CNBC.com and was a long-time veteran of Dow Jones Newswires;
Irina Aleksander, who’s six months out of NYU and has a host of internships under her belt; and Mary Pilon, whom Lieber called “our rock star intern” who’s a rising senior at NYU.

Lieber writes that the name of the site is indeed FiLife, which is pronounced FIGH-life. “It’s a semi-mashup of Financial Life and High Life,” he said.

On Wednesday, Lieber posted an item about the costs of switching bank accounts — mainly in time, money and aggravation.

He wrote, “As far as I know, no one has ever tried to quantify the switching costs for consumers switching bank accounts, where the costs are probably larger than those for any other type of switch. So I’m going to give it a shot. I’ll report back here soon on how the switching costs added up.”

In the blog’s original post, Lieber wrote, “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.”