Just a few days ago I thought of an idea for a new site which would help sort the wheat from the chaff with money saving tips, breaking them down in to categories, such as saving around the home, saving on travel etc (a kind of “money saving directory”), which allowed users to rate and rank the tips, highlighting the most useful.
Sadly, a rather large web company must have had the same idea before me, and has just launched a very similar idea.
Google’s TipJar is “a collection of money saving tips submitted and ranked by the web community”.
After months of hearing about economic difficulties, a few of us were wondering how Google could help. We realized there were a lot of tips that could help people save money scattered across the web. Why not use Google Moderator to collect and rank them all according to community feedback? And so Tip Jar was born: a list of money-saving tips for users to vote on, and even add to. We hope you like it, and find the tips useful.
There are already 1,000 tips on the site and over 10,000 votes, broken down into categories such as At Home, At Work, Kids & Family and Shopping. From what I’ve seen, most of the tips are pretty good, and tend to be brief, bitesize ideas rather than detailed money saving concepts. It will be interesting to see how useful it will be when there are tens of thousands of tips on there – I guess the voting element will really come into its own when finding the better tips.
A shout out has to go to fellow personal finance bloggers GetRichSlowly.org, iwillteachyoutoberich.com and thesimpledollar.com who were some of the first sites to add tips to the site.