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“Money is gold, and nothing else.” — J.P. Morgan. Image: Gold bars, a free-to-use Pexels image by Michael Steinberg. Cropped.

Personal-Finance Writing for SuperMoney

For a time, I earned part of my freelance income providing editing services, and doing some writing, for the personal-finance site SuperMoney. This document links you to archival copies of my writing for that site. Though I’ve included links to some of my more involved SuperMoney writing on the scholarly and technical editing page, the target audience for SuperMoney materials was a general rather than scholarly or technical readership. Thus, these samples show you a different sort of writing available in my freelance toolbox.

Backstory

Suspicious things were happening as I neared, or had unknowingly reached, the end of my SuperMoney tenure. For instance, a significant number of articles I was assigned to edit were held up in Asana task tracking because the assigned writer had not written drafts. They were all more than a month overdue. When I contacted the writer (or, more properly, the writer’s account on the platform), she said she had been on vacation, was now back, and would start finishing them shortly. This never happened. One possibility is that the “they’re on the way” was faked by an administrative user for some nefarious purpose. This would be out of keeping with my prior experiences with this employer, but some employers do suffer significant paranoia whenever they decide to let someone go who’s done good work for them but doesn’t fit their business plan for one reason or another. As a project-at-a-time freelancer, however, I understand at-will employment very well. Also, my strong libertarian tendencies make me believe that the at-will nature of free-market employment is ultimately better for everyone. Thus, there was never any risk I’d try to get “payback” for this employer’s misguided decision to stop using my services. Ah, well.

Why might I have not fit SuperMoney’s business plan? The General Editor’s, and I believe the CEO’s, focus seemed to be more on quantity (and lower cost) than on quality. As a result, editing often meant either (1) rewriting material by writers with poor English skills (something my past editing experience has made me fairly good at) or (2) doing a lot of research to correct factual errors in articles by hurried writers relying on inaccurate personal opinions or too-quick research. Though these employers were happy to get quality editing and writing (they frequently praised the articles I wrote), I often got the impression they valued high-volume output more. I suppose large numbers of “passable” articles work better for their business model than a low or moderate number of excellent ones. This may explain why Internet content is what it is in this day of search-engine optimization (SEO) and artificial intelligence (AI). If my impression of this company’s preferences and goals is accurate (which, admittedly, it may not be), I would not be surprised to learn that it now employs just a few humans to rewrite and fact-check content generated entirely by AI.

An additional problem that probably added to the decision was a perfect storm of productivity-killing issues near the end of my tenure. For instance, the Google app that I used for two-factor authentication for multiple sites, including the Asana SuperMoney uses for task-tracking and project planning and the Slack platform SuperMoney uses for work-related communications, stopped working. All the codes it provided started being rejected, making it impossible for me to log in to many sites. Administrative help was able to fix the problem with Asana. But I never regained access to Slack. Nor did I ever regain access to the Tableau account where I’d stored a complex data visualization. Though support reestablished my access to the platform itself, the account they gave me access to was empty. It was not the account containing my visualizations. At the same time I ran into these technical problems, wholly unlike any I’d encountered before, I succumbed to severe illnesses, more-or-less one after the other. Sickliness in an employee is tragic and arouses pity, but an employer in the free market can’t reasonably accommodate a sickly worker — even though (come to think of it) several sickly employees could substitute for one healthy, always-available worker, and I was doing what amounted to piecework. While full-time employees were taking paid time off, I was still working if healthy. And when I was not healthy, I was not costing the company any money. But I digress.

About my “About the Author”

My SuperMoney “About the Author” (ATA) went through a few iterations.

Version One: The General Editor’s SEO-Focused Spin

When first creating my ATA, I provided the General Editor with comprehensive information about my educational background, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on, along with my own draft of the ATA. He didn’t like my version and suggested the following.

David Hodges is an editor and writer for SuperMoney. He is an expert in real estate and personal finance and enjoys applying his advanced degrees and background in psychology to the study of mind and behavior and how it relates to saving, spending, and investing decisions.

This was SEO creativity at its finest. The General Editor identified me as “an expert in real estate” because I’d taken a number of real estate classes some years ago. This is a broader definition of “expert” than I’d be inclined to use. I never worked in the real estate industry, unless you count my years as a student worker with my county’s Treasurer-Tax Collector (which collects property taxes and sells off property for unpaid taxes). But, sure, I granted, I did know more about real estate than most random people in the general public. My “background in psychology” was my B.S. with a concentration in Psychology, so it’s accurate enough, I suppose. In fact, since behavior modification (classical and operant conditioning), human motivation, and other forms of psychology I deemed more “scientific” were my focus, it is probably true that what I studied is applicable to personal finance. (The reason I opt for the odd locution “B.S. with a concentration in Psychology” rather than “B.S. in Psychology” is that the school where I completed that second of two baccalaureate degrees, Excelsior University, had “concentrations” at the time rather than majors. Though these concentrations required the same number of upper-division classes as a standard major would, these concentrations didn’t affect the naming of one’s degree. So, my actual degree is properly described as a “B.S. in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Psychology.” That being a bit of a mouthful, I option for “B.S. with a concentration in Psychology.” My first baccalaureate, by the way, was in Literature/Writing. And yes, “B.A. in Literature/Writing” is the actual degree name, odd though it seems that a writing program should use an inelegant slash in its name. If memory serves, the unwieldy “Literature/Writing” actually means “Literature with a concentration in Writing,” but I normally just reproduce the slash-marred wording found on my diploma.

The General Editor’s spin on “applying his advanced degrees” was especially creative. My masters degrees (I have two M.A.s) are in Theology Studies (concentration: Biblical Studies) and Apologetics. The only sense in which I applied what I learned in these to my work with SuperMoney was that I employed the research skills I honed while earning the degrees. A bit of a stretch, I thought, but I decided I could live with it.

Version Two: My Spin-Softening Attempt to Preserve SEO Keywords

As you may be able to tell from the preceding, I was never entirely comfortable with the original wording, which you may find reflected in some of the archival pages linked to below. My first attempt to make the wording better fit my idea of accuracy, without losing SEO keywords added by the General Editor, was as follows:

Before becoming an editor and writer for SuperMoney, David thought he‘d be an academic. He now applies research skills learned from his advanced degrees, and behavioral insights gained from his background in psychology, to personal finance. He has acquired expertise in real estate and enjoys helping readers make better saving, spending, and investing decisions.

In retrospect, my dreams of being an academic were not well in keeping with my temperament. Though I love learning and analysis, I have too much of an “action” orientation to obsessively study a single topic for prolonged periods as academics do. When I’ve read part of a book and think I’ve gotten the gist of it, I start to feel like I need to take some sort of action based on this. Hence the presence on my Web site of multiple preliminary reviews based on partial readings of books. Put another way, academics can be content studying endlessly, seeking to gain a humanly unjustifiable perfect certainty, to build sufficiently cogent arguments to outdo academic competitors, or just to explore different possibilities without choosing among them. I prefer to do a moderate amount of study, make a decision as soon as I feel (pragmatically) justified doing so, then move on to other matters. As acquiring labels has never been that important to me, I’ve never had this assessed by a professional or sought a diagnosis, but this does sound a bit like ADD or ADHD. Though our feminized and therapeuticized culture wants to treat these “neurodivergent conditions” as defects, I tend to think they are the natural style of mental processing and temperamental tendency God has granted some in keeping with their calling. I’m not entirely sure what callings they’re good for, but that’s another issue.

Version Two: My Spin-Softening Attempt to Preserve SEO Keywords

As new SuperMoney work assignments dried up and it became apparent that old but still-pending assignments would never leave pending status, I made a final revision to fully suit my idea of accuracy, exactness, and honesty. Here it is:

David loves learning, doing research, analyzing data, and assessing arguments. Though he has two advanced degrees and some background in psychology, and though he’s learned a great deal in his work with SuperMoney, he considers himself an interpreter of experts, not an expert himself. He enjoys using what he’s learned, and what he’s still learning, to help readers make better saving, spending, and investing decisions.

So ends my SuperMoney “About the Author” saga.

My SuperMoney Contributions

I made two sorts of contributions while writing and editing for SuperMoney: standard articles and encyclopedia articles. The former were routine posts, typically shorter and less detailed. The latter tended to greater length, complexity, and detail. As I was paid by the word in most cases, my later articles lost some of the length, detail, and complexity of earlier work because management had slashed my word allowance. In any case, before listing my two types of contributions, with links to archival copies of them, a few words of

Introduction

There are two things worth keeping in mind when reading these. In my early days at SuperMoney, a dumb-down-your-writing app called Hemingway was popular at SuperMoney. (It may still be.) First, short sentences and simplified vocabulary were the norm, and the complex writing style I started with met with disapproval and (not always eloquent) editorial revision. Though the General Editor was able to point to a respected finance writer whose style reminded him of mine (or, rather, my style reminded him of this writer), he still didn’t like it for the site as it, like the respected finance writer’s, required too much attention and mental effort to read. I hate to think how inscrutable to average readers my writing would be if, instead of consuming significant amounts of popular media, I dedicated more of my time to reading complex materials for advanced readers. (I don’t do nearly as much reading as do some people I know.) Since my reading comprehension test when I started junior high school (sixth grade) ranked me at the twelfth-grade-plus level (meaning, as I understand it, that I exceeded the range of skills for which the exam was designed to test), perhaps I should have seen this coming. (Equivalent reading skills in colonial times would probably have gotten me branded a slow student in need of remediation, but this was not bad for a modern-day public school attendee. Since I learned to read at home from parents, I don’t credit any of my public school teachers for helping this along.)

The second thing worth keeping in mind is that some (not many, but some) of the regular articles for which I’m now the author of record (or was at the time I made archival copies of the work) are rewrites of preexisting articles. These are of two types: (1) assigned recreations of outdated and inadequate old articles, (2) thorough rewrites of poorly written, pervasively defective articles by short-term writers SuperMoney ended up letting go shortly after employing them. As I was not aware I might be made the author of record, I typically tried to retain as much of the original style of the articles as possible. As a result, I left unchanged some wordings I would have changed had I known I’d be on record as their author. No use crying over a spilled byline, though.

Encyclopedia

Some of my articles were so thorough and comprehensive that SuperMoney invented a whole new category of articles to put them in: the Encyclopedia. OK, granted, that’s an unlikely theory, at best. I did have several of my articles end up in the Encyclopedia when it was created, however. Here they are:

Regular

During my SuperMoney tenure, I also wrote a number of “regular” articles. Feel free to peruse them at your leisure. They are as follows:

Closing Thoughts

If you’re a potential client or employer, I hope these samples of personal-finance writing for general readers persuade you that I’m a good match for your pending project or open position. In case you’re worried I may prove too “sickly” for your needs, I note that, thanks to some radical dietary and lifestyle changes, I seem to be in much better health than I was at end of my SuperMoney tenure.