15 Best Personal Finance Blogs in India (& How to Start Yours)

‘Wealth and Personal finance’ is one of the evergreen blogging niches that can be really profitable if done right.

And a lot of people are doing it and killing it in India.

As a part of one of my articles, I was doing some research on the best personal finance blogs in India.

So, I thought I will use that research to share with you these blogs and also what makes them work.

How did I come up with a list of Personal Finance Blogs?

I started with a list of blogs that I already know and follow. To this list, I added the ones that are listed as the top finance blogs in India by multiple sites.

I also used AHREFs to find out more blogs in the finance niche.

To make sure I only include the best ones, I have used the following criteria to come up with a final list of 15 blogs:

1. Blogs that have lots of informational content on it. I have intentionally left out a few blogs that belong to companies (and not individual bloggers or group of bloggers).
2. It is at least two years old.
3. It has at least 50+ articles.
4. It has a domain rating of 20+ (according to AHREFs) OR traffic of 5K+ (according to AHREFs)
5. It has been updated in the past month (at the time of writing this article)

I wanted to make sure I only include active personal finance blogs that have some traction. Also, I have not included blogs where I couldn’t clealrly find out who is behind it (after scanning the about us /contact us page)

I have excluded blogs that are not self-hosted (i.e., that are made using free platforms such as WordPress or Blogger).

The reason I have chosen organic traffic as one of the criteria is that a lot of people search for personal finance related queries online.

So, I used organic search traffic as a proxy to select the best personal finance blogs in India.

Let’s dive in!

15 Best Personal Finance Blogs in India

Below is a list of the best financial blogs in India (sorted based on traffic from AHREFs).

To get more detail on each of these blogs, click on the name in the below table. For each the blogs, I have covered details that would be useful if you’re a finance blogger or want to start a finance blog.

*Domain rating is a measure of overall authority. This is a metric given by AHREFs, which is a popular SEO tool. A higher Domain Rating is considered better.

**Note that all the traffic number is from AHREFs and are estimates. But in most cases, AHREFs numbers are a good indicator of overall authority and search engine rankings. The real website traffic can vary.

Now, let’s deep dive into each of these personal finance blogs and analyze it from a bloggers perspective.

Chartered Club

I happened to meet Karan Batra (who is the man behind Chartered Club) last year and I am happy to see his finance blog doing extremely well.

Chartered Club is a place where Karan shares tips and articles with an intent to provide information on taxes in India. Articles on this blog are divided into three categories: Income Tax, GST, and Personal Finance.

The articles are written in a way that even someone who is not well versed with finance can also understand it. You can see a lot of effort has gone in getting the site where it is today.

As of writing this article, the blog had ~500 articles.

One of the best things about this blog (from a blogger’s perspective) is that Karan is actively building his email list. As you’ll see later this in this article, not many of the top finance blogs in India are doing that.

How is Chartered Club monetized?

There are multiple ways that Karan has used to monetize this site. These include:

1. Display Ads
2. Selling Ebooks
3. Offering consulting service

This is a great example of content marketing where this blog attracts targeted readers through content and then offer relevant products and services.

Here is Karan’s advice for new finance bloggers:

Money Excel

Money Excel was started by Raviraj with an aim to educate people about finance.

It’s a huge site and as of writing this article, it has more than 1300+ articles. It covers a lot of different categories such as Investments, Personal Finance, Income Tax, Insurance, Stock Market and Mutual Funds.

It also provides downloadable files such as calculators and forms.

How is Money Excel monetized?

The blog clearly mentioned that it doesn’t sell any products and is not affiliated to any broker, insurance or mutual funds.

The only way I see the blog making money is through display ads. This can also explain the reason why you see aggressive use of ads on the articles.

Be Money Aware

This finance blog that is managed by a group of people – Kirti, Shoobha, Sona, and Ritu.

In their own words, they are not experts in finance and most of their articles are meant of average person looking for tips about money and wealth.

This finance blog covers a lot of areas – including some not strictly in the purview of finance (such as blogging, contest, books, videos, and daily life).

It was hard to find who is behind this blog. Their ‘About Us’ section mentions their mission and some stats, but only mentions the bloggers behind it in one line.

How is Be Money Aware making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, it seems to be making money from two sources:

• Display Ads
• Affiliate Ads
• Workshops (it’s not clearly mentioned whether these are paid or not, but I am assuming these are paid).

BasuNivesh

BasuNivesh started as an initiative to educate people in the field of personal finance. Over the years, it has grown to become one of the best finance blogs and resource in India.

It is managed by Basavaraj Tonagatti from Bangalore.

Basavaraj is a SEBI registered investment advisor and a Certified Financial Planner.

This blog covers a lot of finance topics such as Insurance and Investment planning, mutual funds, EPF and PPF, Tax planning, Banking, and Real Estate.

It also has a Q&A forum which seems to be decently active.

How is BasuNivesh making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, it seems to be making money from three sources:

• Display Ads
• Fee-only financial planning (INR 12000 + INR 6000 every year after that)
• Affiliate Income (noticed an affiliate banner in the sidebar)

Here is Basu’s advice for new finance bloggers:

Plan Money Tax

This finance blog is about tax planning and tax saving. It also covers areas such as stock and mutual fund investing and insurance (all of which is again a part of tax planning).

The man behind this blog is Chandrakant Mishra, who is an alumnus of CNBC Awaaz. He currently stays in Allahabad from where he runs this blog, and some other finance blogs as well.

Plan Money Tax also offers some useful calculators (such as income tax calculator or PPF calculator).

How is Plan Money Tax making money?

After exploring the site for a while, here is what I found about the site’s monetization strategy:

• Display Ads
• Direct Ads (where you get paid directly by the company who puts an ad on your site)
• Affiliate Income

Relakhs

Relakhs is a personal finance blog managed by Sreekanth Reddy.

Sreekanth is a Certified Financial Planner and is based out of Bangaluru.

This blog covers a lot of different topics such as insurance, home loans, banking services, mutual funds, tax planning, stock markets, and commodities.

It also has a Q&A forum (which seems to be quite active) and the latest news section (which seems to be updated only once in a while).

How is Relakhs making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, it seems to be making money from the following sources:

• Display Ads
• Affiliate Income

My Investment Ideas

My Investment Ideas is a personal finance blog from Suresh KP from Hyderabad.

This blog focuses on providing investment and money saving tips. Apart from tips, in this blog, Suresh also analyzes mutual funds, stocks, IPO’s, NCD bonds, and insurance products.

Suresh clearly mentions that his initial motivation to start this blog was to make money from blogging. Given that it has grown so much, I am sure he has clearly achieved what he started for.

I spent quite some time analyzing his blog and I really liked the way he has written the articles. These are quite detailed and well structured.

How is My investment Ideas making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, it seems to be making money from the following sources:

• Display Ads
• Affiliate Income (by promoting policies)

Apna Plan

Apna Plan is a finance blog managed by Amit Kumar.

This blog offers a lot of articles on a variety of topics such as Personal Financial Planning, Investments, Insurance, Stock Markets, Credit Cards, Taxation, etc.

Apart from the articles, it also provides various Excel-based calculators such as income tax calculator, home loan calculator, capital gains calculator, etc.

The blog seems to be updated quite often. Based on the recent frequency of articles, it posts 3-5 articles per week (sometimes even more).

How is Apna Plan making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, it seems to be making money from the following sources:

• Display Ads
• Sponsored Ads

Although the site has a dedicated ‘Advertise with Us’, the numbers on it aren’t updated. I am not sure how much is being made through it given it has not been updated in years.

Cash Overflow

Cash Overflow is an award-winning personal finance blog managed by Pardeep Goyal.

What sets this blog apart from others on the list is that it doesn’t focus on publishing too much content. As of writing this article, it only has 57 articles.

It covers a wide range of topics such as credit cards, insurance, online business, and blogging.

Since Pardeep often calls himself a ‘Kanjoos Baniya’ (frugal person), you’ll find a lot of his articles are either about saving money or making money.

It has a clean design and clear structure. It doesn’t use any display ads, which makes the reading experience pleasant.

It’s also one of the few blogs in this list that actively focuses on building an email list.

How is Cash Overflow making money?

Since I have been following Pardeep’s journey closely for more than a year now, I have a fair idea of how the blog is monetized. Also, he has income reports as well where he breaks down his income.

Below are the ways Cash Overflow is monetized:

• Affiliate Marketing (finance and blogging related tools/products)
• Courses
• Paid Newsletter

Here is Pardeep’s advice for new finance bloggers:

One Mint

One Mint is a financial blog by Manshu Verma, who first started blogging with the name IndiaMint and then changed it to One Mint.

On this blog, Manshu mentions that he writes about personal finance, technology, and economics. But when I scanned his past ~100 blog posts, I found it to be mostly about finance.

So, I decided to include his blog to this list of the best personal finance blogs.

The first thing I noticed about this blog is that it’s not actively managed. Yes, it has new articles, but it doesn’t have any categories in the navigation and some of the pages (such as Forum and Archive) are empty.

The contact page seems to be missing the contact form.

Also, it’s the only blog in this list that does not have the SSL certificate installed (i.e., uses HTTP and not HTTPS).

On the positive side, it has no ads within the articles, which makes reading these a pleasant experience.

How is One Mint making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, and as mentioned by Manshu, the site makes money with:

• Display Ads
• Amazon Associates (not a major source though)

Nitin Bhatia

NitinBhatia.in is a blog about real estate and personal finance.

This blog is managed by Nitin Bhatia, who has extensive experience in the finance domain. He has written for an appeared in many news and publications.

The articles on this blog are divided into the following categories: Stocks, Personal Finance, Business, Marketing, and Reviews.

One of the things that makes this blog stand out from others is the use of videos. Nitin does a lot of live streaming on various topics in finance and you can access these from this site. As of writing this article, his Youtube channel had 5 lakh+ subscribers.

Another thing I noticed is that the comments were switched off for all the blog posts. While this is a personal choice of the author, I wonder if this has a negative impact on the SEO (I am quite sure having comments is beneficial for SEO).

How is NitinBhatia.in making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, and as mentioned by Nitin, the site makes money with:

• Display Ads
• Lectures and Workshops
• Telephonic consultation (although it was closed at the time of writing this article)

Get Money Rich

Get Money Rich is a finance blog that primarily covers Stocks and Mutual funds. It also covers topics such as insurance and financial planning.

It also provides some easy to use calculators which are coded in HTML so you don’t need to download a file to use it.

This blog is managed by Manish, who started it after working for 16 years in the corporate world.

A few things that I immediately noticed as soon as I visited this blog was that it had a clean design and it didn’t use display ads (like most of the other finance blogs covered in this list).

Another notable thing about the articles was the smart use of images. These are designed to draw attention and explain concepts and really make this blog stand out.

I also noticed that there is a Youtube channel for this blog, but it seems to be in the nascent stages as of now.

How is Get Money Rich making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, the site makes money by selling an Excel-based stock analysis sheet.

Freefincal

Freefincal is a finance blog that provides articles on personal finance and lot of useful calculators. It also offers some free ebooks (PDFs).

This blog is managed by Pattabiraman (Pattu), who is also a Professor of Physics at IIT Madras.

While this blog has a lot of useful content (including calculators and ebooks), it is extremely aggressive with the use of display ads. The ads are everywhere and often makes finding the content difficult.

This is also one of the few blogs that use YouTube and has a decent following as of writing this article.

Also, it’s actively focussing on building an email list. I can also see the use of Thrive Leads to capture emails (using a box that slides at the bottom-right).

How is Get Money Rich making money?

Based on a quick look at their website, the site makes money with:

• Display ads (it uses Google Adsense and Outbrain)
• Sponsored Ads
• Selling pro versions of calculators
• Amazon book sales

Here is Pattu’s advice for new finance bloggers:

The Financial Literates

The Financial Literates is a blog by Hemant Beniwal, who is a Certified Finance Planner (CFP).

The blog has been around for a lot of years and I could find the first blog post was published in 2009. The design of the blog is good and there are no ads to distract you.

It’s good to see that this blog uses a lot of tools to serve its readers and build an email list. For example, it has an email subscription box within the blog post and in the sidebar of blog posts (it uses Thrive Leads). It also has a chatbot to capture emails.

Apart from this, it uses content upgrades to offer article specific lead magnets and build an email list.

The articles on this site are not very technical and are meant for an average person like you and me.

How is The Financial Literates making money?

After a quick analysis of the site, I could find two sources of income:

1. Selling Financial Planning Solution
2. Selling books on Amazon

Safal Niveshak

Safal Niveshak, which translates into a successful investor, is a blog managed by Vishal Khandelwal. He started this blog in 2011 and writes about investing, business analysis, human behavior, and his life experiences.

You can also find a lot of good interviews on this blog.

This blog is a perfect example of simple design and effective copywriting.

Vishal writes in a conversational tone which keeps you hooked and conveys the message in an effective way. While researching his blog for this article, I ended up reading a lot of his articles because it looked interesting.

And this blog seems to be doing a lot of things right. It has a simple design, no distraction from Ads, and builds an email list.

How is Safal Niveshak making money?

After a quick analysis of the site, I could find the following sources of income:

1. A premium newsletter
2. Selling Books
3. Selling Courses

All these are info products and it’s good to see a blog making use of it to monetize instead of relying on Display Ads. While there is nothing wrong in using display ads, an info product can really help you increase your income and help create a more sustainable business.

[Extra] Jago Investor

Jago Investor is a popular blog and you’ll find it listed in almost all the articles that cover the best personal finance blogs in India.

It’s managed by Manish Chauhan and Nandish Desai, both of which have extensive experience in the finance domain.

As compared to other blogs on this list, where most of those blogs are managed by a single person, this one is an organization. It has a presence in a lot of different areas and has set up offices in Pune and Ahmedabad.

The blog covers a range of topics including financial planning, mutual funds, insurance, and banking.

After scanning so many finance blogs for this article, I find this blog to be a huge change. It looks like a lot of work has been put into making it (and I’ll not be surprised if there are dedicated marketing team managing it).

For a change, it’s one of the blogs that offer a lead magnet in exchange of email address (which hasn’t happened in any of the blogs above).

It has a well-designed sidebar and uses videos effectively to sell their workshops.

How is Jago Investor making money?

Their main sources of income include:

• Personal Finance checkup service
• Mutual fund service
• Workshops
• Selling Books
• Affiliate links for an insurance broking firm

This brings us to the end of the list.

I have really enjoyed writing this blog post and it took 20+ hours of research and I learned so much from analyzing all these different blogs.

While I started with a list of 40+ blogs, I distilled it down to 15 as I only wanted to cover blogs that are doing well and are managed by individuals or groups.

Notable Exclusions / Honorary Mentions

There are however a few blogs that I want to mention (which I did not end up including in this list):

• Tax Guru: While it fits the bill for selecting personal finance blogs, I couldn’t find information about who is behind it on the website. The overall feel of the site of an organization, so I chose not to include it in the main list.
• Paisa Bazaar: It’s an organization and has a good finance blog as well
• Money Life: A finance news and views portal. It’s a multi-author finance blog.
• Fin Gyaan: Has a good finance blog. I couldn’t find information about any specific person/blogger on the site.

What I learned from Analyzing the Top Finance Blogs?

It’s been a great exercise analyzing all these top personal finance blogs (although it took away most of my weekend)

In this section, I want to share some of the things I noticed when analyzing all these blogs:.

Heavy Reliance on Display Ads

Most of the blogs in the list, especially the high traffic ones, are overly reliant on display ads it seems. While I don’t know their income numbers, I could see how aggressive these were by flashing ads everywhere on the blog (be it the article or the sidebar).

It was completely ruining the reading experience.

One of the primary reasons display ads are so prevalent is because of the ease of implementing it. All you need to do is copy and paste the Google Adsense code and it’s good to go.

Since display ads are not high paying, I am sure these blogs can also find other ways to monetize, such as affiliate marketing or info products.

If you’re planning to start a finance blog, think of multiple monetization methods.

Low Focus on Building an Email List

While all the finance blog that I covered in this analysis were building an email list, some had a small box in the sidebar and some are still using Feedburner to get subscribers.

Given that email is a great way to increase income and build a sustainable business, it’s surprising to see not many blogs doing it right.

In my personal experience, a lot of bloggers shy away from working on building an email list as there are many new things that need to be put in place. For example, you need to learn how to put the subscription boxes on your blog, how to make the email service provider work, how to send emails and automate stuff.

An Average Blog Design is Good Enough

If you’re planning to start your own personal finance blog, you don’t need a fancy design and all the bells and whistles.

Most of the finance blogs analyzed in this analysis looked as if they were set up before 2010 and have not been redesigned since. And that’s perfectly alright.

The reader of these sites is ok with an average design if the content is good.

High Frequency of Blog Post Publishing

This is not necessarily a best practice, but an observation.

I noticed that most of the blogs were publishing 1-2 times a week. In some cases, it was even 3-4 times a week.

I can not comment on how it affects the traffic or the SEO, but if you want to copy the popular blogs in the finance niche, you may want to publish at least once a week.

Not Many Blogs Use Affiliate For Monetization

While I saw a huge reliance on display ads, not many were using affiliate marketing, which can be equally profitable (without disrupting the reader’s experience)

A quick search gave me some financial products that can easily be promoted through many of the covered finance blogs. For example, if you search on CueLinks or Admitad, you’ll find a couple of good deals to promote.

There are also stand-alone affiliate programs that you can promote. I found a few in less than 5 minutes. I am sure if you’re into financial blogging, you can spend more time and find more.

Not Using Video Content

Apart from two blogs (Nitin Bhatia and Freefincal), I didn’t find any other blogs using video to educate their readers.

It seems to be a huge gap and if you’re thinking of starting a finance blog, definitely do your research and explore video as an area.

Calculators and Templates are Quite Popular

A lot of the personal finance blogs covered in this article are offering downloadable Excel files.

Calculators seem to be really popular in this niche.

If you can create some simple calculators/templates in Excel or Google Sheets, your readers are going to find it useful.

You Don’t Need Very High Authority to Rank

Unlike niches such as blogging or digital marketing, where you need a lot of backlinks and domain authority, the financial blog scene for India is not that competitive.

If you can come up with good content and can work a little bit on link building, you can get a lot of traffic comparatively quickly.

For example,  6 of the 15 blogs covered in this list have a Domain Authority less than or equal to 25 (which is not very difficult to achieve).

Planning to Start a Personal Finance Blog? Here are some tips

Starting a personal finance blog is a lot like starting a blog any niche.

There are a few things, however, that can be helpful when you plan to start one.

Choose a Laser Focussed Niche

One of the best ways to succeed is to simply copy what others in your niche are doing.

But when it comes to niche selection for a finance blog, you may not want to copy the top finance blogs.

I say this because these blogs have been in existence for many years and over the period of time have written a lot of content on various topics.

But if you’re starting today and want to make a mark fast, start with a sub-niche. For example, don’t start as a personal finance blog. Instead, start as a blog focused on credit cards or mutual funds or real estate.

There is nothing stopping you from expanding the niche later (once you have good traffic and have monetized it).

The reason this is so important is that when you write about one specific topic, your blog builds topical relevancy on that topic. This will help you do much better in search engines.

Do Proper Keyword Research

Even before writing a single word, identify 20-30 topics that are in your chosen niche and are being searched on Google.

You can use free tools such as Keyword Everywhere chrome extension and Answer The Public to find get some keywords.

You can also use paid tools such as AHREFs or SEMRUSH, which will also allow you to analyze what other popular finance blogs in your niche are ranking for.

Analyze the Top 10 Google Results For Your Keyword

As I mentioned, the best way to make sure your blog works is to copy what is already working.

Before writing a blog post, search the keyword on Google (you can also try Bing and Duck Duck Go) and go through all the pages that are raking.

Note down all the headers and sub-headers in each of the top 10 blog posts.

This will help you understand what all topics are covered by the articles that are ranking.

Now, create an outline for your own blog post using the topics you have got from analyzing the top blogs.

Spend some time in finalizing the outline and then write the blog post.

This will ensure that you cover all the topics that Google finds important.

This alone is not going to ensure rankings. You still need to do a good job with On-page and Off-page SEO. But this will ensure that your content doesn’t miss out on anything important.

Note: Use your judgment! You don’t have to necessarily include all the headers/sub-headers used by the articles that are already ranking. But if you see a topic/area getting repeated in multiple articles, it’s a good idea to include it.

Network With Other Finance Bloggers

If you do a quick search, you’ll easily find 100+ finance bloggers in India.

Follow these people on social media.

Subscribe to their email list.

Comment on their articles.

In short – work on building a relationship. It takes time, but it can help you a lot with your finance blog.

Once you have enough social currency with these bloggers, you can ask them to share your content on social media or even approach them for guest posts.

Since you don’t need a lot of authority to rank in the finance niche in India, even a few high-quality backlinks can make a huge difference.

Actively Build an Email List

Almost all the personal finance blogs that I analyzed in this article are building an email list (or at least have an email subscription box somewhere on their blog).

But they can do so much more.

I doubt a lot of them are not even actively sending emails to their email subscribers.

From the very beginning, work on building an email list. All you need is an email service provider (I recommend ConvertKit).

Two bloggers who are doing are a great job with email list are Karan Batra (from Charateredclub.com) and Vishal Khandelwal (from SafalNiveshak.com).

Having an engaged email list allows them to not rely on a huge amount of traffic or ads. On the contrary, they have moved into the space of offering info products, which is far more profitable and sustainable.

Safal Niveshak even have a paid newsletter (yes people pay for exclusive email newsletter access)

As the popular saying goes – the money is in the list!

If you think there is a blog that should have been a part of this list, let me know in the comments section.

Hope this article helps you with your own blogging journey.

Also, I would really appreciate if you could share it someone who may find this useful.