Over the last few months, we have worked hard to bring FiLife community members all the features they need to get help with their personal finances. What we have learned is that people have specific questions about their finances, and they want simple, honest, straightforward answers.

We heard you loud and clear, and today we launched a new version of FiLife, focusing on questions and answers.  Ask your personal finance questions and get answers from the FiLife community of experts and members with first-hand experience. All of the great FiLife Guides, stories and tools are still available on the site. They are just organized around specific questions.

For example, ask a question about Social Security and get related guides, stacker polls and calculators.

We also made it easier to post questions from anywhere via Twitter.  Just send a message to @AskFiLife from your Twitter account and we will notify you when you get an answer.

Take a second to ask your pressing (or not so pressing) personal finance question, and let us know what you think about the changes!

The FiLife Team

Over the last few months, we have seen a huge increase in comments and reviews on the site.  Now, FiLife gives you the ability to not just make and respond to comments and reviews, but to rate them as well!  Rating comments gives FiLife the chance to surface them more quickly, giving you and all FiLife community members quick access to the best information. We think this will make comment and reviews even more valuable.

As always, let us know what you think.

The FiLife Team

As part of our focus on family finance, we realize that stocks and mutual funds are an important aspect of your overall financial health.  To make sure we are offering the most complete destination for family finance, we are very excited to announce the inclusion of stock, index and mutual fund quotes from our friends at MarketWatch.

In true FiLife fashion, we took a slightly different twist.  We wanted to make sure it was visually stunning and socially aware.  We added Twitter updates (ok, tweets) about each stock so you can see what people are saying about the company in real time.

Let us know what you think.

The FiLife Team

You’ve been able to find great family finance experts on FiLife, and starting today everyone will be able rack up FiQ points and earn badges. On community member profile pages, you’ll now see levels (bronze, silver, and gold), and you can earn badges (like “Top Critic”, and “Top Pollster”). We’ll keep adding badges to recognize accomplishments in our community.

Are you one of the most active community members? Now you can show off.

Have you asked a question, and are you wondering about the community member who answered? Now you’ll know more from their profile.

It’s easy to start earning FiQ points…start by joining the FiLife community, and then you’ll see points add up as you comment and ask/answer questions, create a Stacker (or better yet embed it on your own pages) or share with a friend. Almost anything you do on the site will get you a point (or more!), so how quickly can you become a gold member?

As always, let us know any feedback you have.

The FiLife Team

We have always had some of the best Family Finance resources online, but it wasn’t very easy to pull it into your favorite RSS Reader and browsers. We have updated all the RSS feeds on the site to make that easier and linked them from the related areas of the site with the trusty orange square .

Click on these around the site to get access to our content wherever and whenever you choose.

Here are some handy links to add to your favorite readers:

• Google Reader
• MyYahoo
• Bloglines
• RSS Feed

The FiLife Team (who we are)

When you are trying to solve a financial problem, you need answers as soon as they are available. To help FiLifers get information quickly, we are pleased announce the ability to follow other FiLifers, topics, guides, articles, questions and forums that interest you. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, it is important to give FiLifers as many options as possible to discover the information they want.

Following something on FiLife results in activity notifications in your profile, and via email if you so choose.

You will also notice many changes to your profile. We improved the look and feel and added an activity stream of the things you follow. FiLifers can now discover more information about their own activity on FiLife as we show you what you most commonly do and the topics where this activity most frequently occurs.

Are you more active in the mortgage topic or retirement? Do you respond to more questions than you ask?

This information can help you find the subject areas that you naturally gravitate toward and highlights what actions on FiLife you find the most interesting.

Take a minute and look around, and tell us what you think about the changes!

The FiLife Team

We are excited to announce two new features on FiLife today, Forums and Groups! This expands on our existing Q&A section and provides users two places to have longer-form conversations about their financial interests.

Our Forums are setup like a traditional forum or message board, so they should feel very familiar - except focused on personal finance!  Anyone can start and participate in a discussion.

Groups are communities of users organized around an interest or theme (e.g. Renters, Green Living) that contain a forum, resources page, member’s section, customizable twitter feeds with more features to come.

We know we can’t cover all the topics that relate to personal finance from all the different perspectives, but the FiLife community can.  As a group creator you can invite users, select FiLife content to feature and have discussions with your fellow group members.

We hope you like then new features.  As always, let us know what you think.

The FiLife Team

Online polls are great.  They let you see how you compare to a broader audience.  But, what is really important is how you compare to your peers, or your circle of friends.  This is especially true when it comes to your personal finance questions.

Because of this, we are very excited to announce that we have connected your Facebook Friends to our interactive polls which we call Stackers.

Here is how it works:

• If you are a Facebook user, login into FiLife with your Facebook Connect account
• Answer a question like How much did you pay to get your taxes prepared?
• When you see the results, all your Facebook friends who have also taken the poll will be grouped by their answers so you can compare yourself
• We don’t show your friends’ actual answers, just their relative grouping

Here is what is looks like with some of your Facebook Friends in the results page:

We think this gives you a much better idea of how you stack up.  So get out there and create some polls.

As always, send us any feedback.

The FiLife Team

As you can see, we have been hard at work getting out lots of new features.  We added another great feature that allows you to use your Facebook information to join the FiLife community.

For all you techies, we integrated with Facebook Connect which is what allows you to login to FiLife using your Facebook email and password.

Anywhere on the site where you needed to login before, you can now click on the button to complete your task.

Also, when you contribute to the FiLife community, that information can be pushed back to your Facebook news feed (but only if you want to) so that your Facebook friends can also contribute.

Here is an example of what it looks like in the Facebook newsfeed.

As always send us any feedback.

The FiLife Team

If there is one consistent piece of feedback, it’s that people love our Stacker characters.  They are cute, affectionate and make financial data a little more fun.

So, we decided to make our Stackers even better.  Over the last few weeks we have been working to make them customizable, portable and easier to understand.

With the new version of the Stacker you can:

• Create a stacker of your very own
• Invite your friends to take it
• Post it to your blog, social network profile or personal page

Ever wonder how much your friends spend on eating out? What about how much they spend at the bar during a weekend? Find out the answers and ask some questions of your own. We’ve also created list of the newest and most popular Stackers.

If you want, you can embed those questions anywhere you want.  Like here.

Got feedback? Let us know what you think via our contact us page.