It’s easy to get into a rut. I’m in one lately where I make the same boring loop from money site to money site in search of the latest on the stock market and consumer finance.

The Wall Street Journal to Yahoo Finance to MSN Money and back again with a stop once a week or so for a peek at Filife.com, Pfblogs.org and The Consumerist.

Sigh. 

What’s your personal finance information diet? Do you have a blog you read regularly or a writer you always check out? If you do, you know what to do.

Two web sites that should help you get a better sense of how you compare financially to your pals and co-workers launched public Betas yesterday.

The first is the much anticipated FiLife (think financial high life). Read the welcome message from FiLife President and Minnesota native Dave Kansas.

It’s a purty web site with lots of bells and whistles. You can waste a lot of time with “The Stacker.” Enter how much money you make, how much debt you have, or how much your house is worth, and a chubby stick figure dances into position to show how well you’re doing relative to the rest of the nation, your age range, even your hometown.

Then there are financial tips to improve your financial lot based on how you stack up.

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If you do, a new web site may be your ticket to an answer.

ZotFish.com is a web site that allows you to offer up questions you have for celebrities. Then fellow readers vote on the best questions. The celebrity with the most questions and highest ranked questions will be asked to answer first.

Warren Buffett certainly doesn’t have to acknowledge your question, but for a guy who’s nice enough to donate much of his fortune, he might just take the time to send an e-mail. I’m skeptical that many video responses will be coming in, but hey, the experiment is young.

Here’s the philosophy behind the site: (more…)

I’ve been struggling lately with fitting exercise and healthier eating into my life. Add kids and a full-time job to my fondness for for sleep, TV and a daily glass of wine, and going on a run often falls by the wayside.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how the only time in my life that I’ve successfully made working out a priority is in the months leading up to my wedding. My incentive: Looking fabulous in my pricey dress in front of 150 people.

Since then, few incentives look as good as a second piece of carrot cake (man, I’d better get to the point before I sound any more like Cathy).

Enter Stikk.com — a web site created by Yale economists after they successfully lost weight and kept it off by promising each other half a year’s worth of salary if they failed. When I came across this LA Times opinon piece written in January by one of the founders, I hung on every word. Here’s the site’s philosophy:

The concept is grounded on two well-known principles of behavioral economics: (1) people don’t always do what they claim they want to do, and (2) incentives get people to do things.

Here’s the deal. I sign up and make a commitment to exercise regularly, lose a certain amount of weight, even vote. I can make up a commitment of any kind and register it with Stikk.

If I keep my commitment, then good for me. I don’t spend a penny (the site is free). If I fail, then the money I’ve pledged, whether it’s $5 or $500, is transferred to the chum or charity of my choice.

I can pick a referee to monitor my every move and can e-mail friends so they can keep tabs of my progress.

I think it’s a cool concept. So here’s what I’m thinking. Send me an e-mail (kara@startribune.com, subject line: Stikk) and I’ll invite you to watch my progress. If I fail to exercise four times a week for 30 minutes at a time for the next 12 weeks, I’ll randomly pick one of those e-mail address owners to receive my pool of cash. I’m pledging $20 a week, for $240. Call it Kara’s exercise stimulus package.

If looking good in front of 150 people was incentive enough, looking bad in front of all of you should get my feet moving.