• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 19, 2007

Aiming to give average consumers advice about money management, Yahoo today unveiled a new finance section with articles about home mortgages, taxes, college loans and the like. Previously, the Yahoo Finance section focused on stocks.

"All of our users don't manage an investment portfolio, but we all manage a checkbook," Peggy White, general manager of Yahoo Finance, said in a statement.

The site will offer articles from a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, CNNMoney.com and Consumer Reports. And it will include the usual financial calculators, offering instant estimates of loan payments, retirement plan contributions, etc.

Much like Yahoo's recently launched technology and food verticals, the new finance site appears designed for ordinary Web users, as opposed to those with expertise in the subject.

With the new site, Yahoo directly takes on market leader MSN Money for the average-Joe eyeballs, just as its technology site took on CNET last year for that same audience.

While this strategy probably won't hurt the company, neither does it address what many think is Yahoo's weakness--its failure to make real inroads in the social media space. Though Yahoo reportedly has talked with Facebook and Digg, it has yet to make an acquisition on the order of Google's recent $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube. Until Yahoo can beef up its Web 2.0 properties, relaunching vertical sections probably won't do all that much to help the company grow.