Managing Your Money : Magazines on Money Know How to Multiply : They can be useful, but many investors need something more specific.

Your financial affairs are scattered like so many dirty socks, and you’re tired of being a financial slob. What you really need is to get organized, pay a few bills, start saving.

Where do you start? If you’re like more than 3 million other people, you get yourself a money-oriented magazine. More of you than ever are about to do this, in fact, because the number of such magazines is growing.

But before you reach for Money, Kiplinger’s or one of the other personal finance magazines that are about to spring forth, take a moment to meet the Maloneys of Minnetonka, Minn.

According to a November, 1990, story in Changing Times (now Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine), this couple picked up a copy of the magazine in 1958, read an article urging the young to adopt a money management system and found their life transformed.

For the last 33 years, the Maloneys have accounted for and budgeted absolutely every dollar that came into their house. They daily recorded every dime they spent.

The moral is that the Maloneys were able to save, buy a house, put six children through college, invest in a tree farm, take great vacations and retire early.

While the Maloneys are the dream of any personal-finance editor, they may sound like a nightmare to the rest of us. But don’t worry. The personal finance magazines know that, and years ago moved away from the tedious to the trendy.

Their pages are a menu of modern financial consumption--money markets, mutual funds, CDs, bond funds, IRAs, credit cards, insurance, real estate, vacations, colleges, cars and coins.

And while they give advice on every financial/lifestyle problem from A to Z, don’t count on knowing what to do after reading Money or Kiplinger’s cover to cover. Their suggestions are often general and geared to a broad audience.

Moreover, the magazines are put together several months before they reach readers, and financial conditions can change in that time. After the stock market crash in October, 1987, it took the personal finance magazines until their December issues to advise fretful readers on what to do.

“The problem with personal finance magazines is that the advice is generic,” says David Geller, a lawyer and certified financial planner in Atlanta.

Sally Livingston, a financial consultant in Springfield, Mass., recalls a client who followed the advice of a personal finance magazine and bought life insurance through a Keogh plan. What the magazine didn’t say was that since the insurance was bought with pretax dollars, the death benefit would be taxed.

Livingston said that, with the estate this client has, federal and state death duties will consume most of the death benefit. The client would have been better off paying the premiums out of the post-tax income.

Still, most people can’t afford a financial consultant, and some information is probably better than none. Says Livingston: “Taken with a grain of salt, most articles (in such magazines) are fine.”

The biggest and boldest of the personal finance magazines is Time Warner Inc.’s Money. With a circulation of about 2 million, Money is more or less the People magazine of personal finance. Even mundane subjects are attacked with vigor.

An article titled “Honey, I Shrunk the Property Taxes!” explains how to challenge your home’s assessment. Money even has its own sort of celebrities--taxes and mutual funds. Just as Princess Di can’t be mentioned too often in People, neither it seems can Money (and for that matter Kiplinger’s) run too many articles on mutual funds and taxes.

Just as People is a chronicler of the popular culture, Money, since its inception in 1972, has been a barometer of the money culture.

In the 1970s, Money astutely told readers that the rules of the game had changed. It pushed high-interest money market accounts instead of low-interest passbook savings. It touted the benefits of mutual funds over stockbrokers. As personal finance grew more complicated, it did a good job of sorting out which new products made sense for small investors.

During the bull market of the 1980s, however, Money tended to get carried away by the good times. Readers could have it all, screamed Money cover stories such as “Going for It All: Winning Strategies for Two-Career Couples Today” (May, 1985); “The Roaring ‘80s: A New Era for Investors” (June, 1986); and “How to Get Rich in America: Eight Who Went for It and Won” (July, 1986).

Now, Money echoes the financial culture’s obsession with the S words--savings and safety. There have been stories on “Your Savings in 1990” and “Nine Great Ways to Get 10% Safely.” Money also ran a story called “Safe Places for Your Cash”--two months before another story titled “Keeping Your Cash Safe,” which offered a reformulation of the same advice. Personal finance magazines do repeat themselves.

In contrast to Money’s glitz, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine thrives on relentless wholesomeness. “Each month we will try to give you trustworthy, sensible counsel on the management of your money,” Knight Kiplinger, editor-in-chief and publisher, said in a July, 1991, letter announcing that the magazine’s name would no longer be Changing Times.

Begun in 1947, Kiplinger’s has a circulation of about 1.1 million. Like Money, it will keep you abreast of every financial trend, but with a kinder, gentler tone.

If you’re tired of the how-tos, you may want to look at one of the new challengers in the personal finance magazine race, Investment Vision. Investment Vision, owned by Fidelity Investments, has been sent free to 865,000 Fidelity customers since 1990.

Fidelity put up the money but has no influence over the content, insists W. Randall Jones, chief executive of Capital Publishing, a Fidelity subsidiary. In an effort to further distance itself from the Boston mutual fund giant, the magazine will soon be sent only to paid subscribers. And the name is being changed to Worth.

Nor will it be the only new kid on the block. Hearst Corp. and Dow Jones & Co. have joined forces to produce a magazine called Smart Money, due out in March. Worth and Smart Money claim to be aimed at wealthier, more sophisticated readers than subscribers to Money and Kiplinger’s.

If Money is the People magazine of personal finance, Investment Vision is the Vanity Fair. Jones calls the how-tos in Money and Kiplinger’s “homework-like, and that’s the last thing any of us want.” Instead, he says, “what we have to do is provide the fabric for understanding.”

One surprising thing Investment Vision offers is entertainment, even humor. You can find out about the education of a stockbroker, the immortals of Wall Street or why Western Union missed the fax machine bandwagon.