I have subscribed to "Kiplinger's" for a number of years now, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. The magazine is inexpensive, timely, and authoritative, and conveys complex financial concepts in easily comprehensible terms. The magazine is very in favor of long term, high quality stock market investing, and on a monthly basis covers something relevant to current investment issues in the stock market. It also covers important information on taxes, retirement, paying for tuition, mortgages, and making good car buying (or leasing) decisions.

The magazine is a great source of news as it is related to your financial life in ways that are sometimes obvious, and sometimes less so. For instance they have articles on annuities, which you would expect, but also on drug costs, which you might not. They also have extremely useful mutual fund performance charts in every issue, which I find to be among the best features in the magazine. With the passage of different tax laws, "Kiplinger's" writes on the practical implications of the Federal tax code changes as well as regularly looking at state tax issues.

There are many personal financial magazines covering many different areas available today. If you want only one that will give you the overall most valuable information per page, "Kiplinger's" would be tough to beat.

We used to subscribe to Kiplingers Personal Finance. We no longer do, because we couldn't help but notice a definite bias toward stock/bond purchasing over any other type of investing. This advice continued in the face of lower interest rates, the overpriced bull, then bear, market, and record low mortgage rates. Articles urging us to keep putting money into the market continued to appear regardless of market conditions. A quick look at the regular advertisers provides an explanation. In five years of subcribing, some of these same regular advertisers (whose results in the market were below par) never appeared in the "Poor or Worst" performers columns. For an overall, balanced view of things for the average investor, one of the personal finance magazines such as Money or Smart Money might be more helpful.

I have been contacted by mail and phone for renewal, My check for renewal was cashed by you in December 2003. What's up?

My retirement plan sends me a magazine, which is so boring that I don't even bother to open it anymore; Kiplinger's isn't at all like that. The best part of Kiplinger's is that it describes how real people with average salaries, kids, and debts can invest for the future. There are also some great articles for parents about how to teach their kids to manage their money. Everything seems practical, but I've yet to try any of it. The magazine is broken into four sections: 'Ahead' short articles about finance news and current event, 'investing' about investing mostly stocks, 'your money' about ways to invest your money though not as technical as the investing section and more diverse, and 'spending' which is basically general interest about new fun technologies and other ways to spend all the money saved or made through investing.

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine fits right in the middle between the lowest-common denominator approach of Money magazine and the head-in-the-clouds attitude at Worth magazine. Kiplinger's has a nicely balanced style and tone; it never preaches, and I almost always find a tip, suggestion, or tax-saving idea that pays for my year's subscription in every single issue. If that's the measure of the value of a personal finance magazine, then Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine deserves a five-star rating. Good stuff, and a good value!