15-year-old Jacksonville, Florida resident Bridget Brown was bored. That happens. It’s August and she’s 15.
She had been saving money for a car, but then a better idea came to her.
Why not make a daytrip to Dollywood with her little brother and a friend, aged 13 and 11, respectively. I think we’d all agree that she’d be better off with the car. And it would have been a good idea to discuss it with her parents first. She didn’t.
Bridget grabbed her cash, called a cab, and headed for the airport with boys in tow. Once there she bought three round-trip tickets to Nashville. They went through security without ID, which is allowed if you are under 18.
Once in Nashville, the trio was confronted with the minor detail that Dollywood was still 200 miles away. (Flying to Knoxville would have been a better choice.) Without an obvious way to get there, they panicked and called home. Not that clever, but hey, she’s 15.
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[Today’s Thursday rerun first appeared June 25, 2009.]
Yesterday’s [6/24/09] New York Times had an article about the simmering controversy over target funds headlined Target-Date Mutual Funds May Miss Their Mark. (Get it? It’s a pun.)
Target date funds have been around for a long time. They are a sub-species of asset allocation funds, mutual funds that, in effect, own other mutual funds in order to create a diversified one-stop-shop for the investor either too busy or too intimidated to pick his own. I’m not a big fan. I think you can do better making your own asset allocations, but that has little to do with the current round of hand wringing in Washington.
To understand what has caused the present consternation, you have to go back a few years.
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The Consumerist is, according to a popular ranking, the #1 personal finance blog. I am not sure that it fits cleanly into the personal finance category but there is no denying that it is a monster in the blog world, linked to by 8,865 other sites. (For context, this blog has 89 inbound links.) I read it every day.
A post last Friday, written by the Consumerist’s managing editor, ~600,000 Chinese Die Making Our Shiny Toys caught my eye. To save you a click, here is pretty much all of it, links included.
Let’s expand our foreign language vocabulary! Can you say, "guolaosi"? It’s a Mandarin word meaning "death from overwork!" The word describes the phenomenon of Chinese workers falling dead on the spot as they toil in sub-Dickensian conditions so you can save a dollar on your next laptop!
China Daily, an English-language state-run publication, says an estimated 600,000 Chinese workers die each year in this fashion, sometimes falling "off their stools bleeding from the ears, nose and anus," as left-leaning mag The Nation reported in 2007.
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It has been months since I last shared confusion over the way everybody else uses credit cards. Today I am back at it.
Over the weekend the New York Times had a report about a new feature
being rolled out by MasterCard and Citigroup. (By which the Times means Citibank.)
The service, called inControl and already in use by some Barclaycard holders in Britain, is a sort of financial chastity belt that offers the potential to prevent a variety of budget sins and other money traps.
Worried about your restaurant habit? If your bank adopts MasterCard’s service, you could tell it to have your debit or credit card reject any restaurant purchase above whatever monthly cap you set.
I must admit I do like the name of the product. “inControl” neatly implies that without it you would be “outofControl” and I think that if this service appeals to you that is likely true.
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I really thought it would take longer than this.
If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that I am generally skeptical of the proposition that we will learn much of anything from the Great Recession. My assumption has long been that given five or ten years we will be the same bunch of ignorant fools we always were, doing the same foolish things.
But I did think that in the shorter term, this year and next, some of the more obviously foolish stuff would be avoided. I didn’t think anybody would be willing to invest in GM in 2010. And I didn’t think that anybody would be discussing taking out new no-money-down mortgages any time soon. I was wrong on both counts.
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Why not make a daytrip to Dollywood with her little brother and a friend, aged 13 and 11, respectively. I think we’d all agree that she’d be better off with the car. And it would have been a good idea to discuss it with her parents first. She didn’t.
Musings | Frank Curmudgeon | 
August 20, 2010 4:59 pm | 
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