My job as critic of personal finance advice is made a lot easier if other writers concisely summarize their points of view in easy to digest and refute bullet points. It gets even better if the other writer is argumentative, taking a neatly delineated position on a question which I can contradict.
So when I saw that Free Money Finance yesterday posted a list of Money Myths, my heart leapt. And I was not disappointed. There were eight myths listed, with bullet point explanations and links to fuller arguments from previous posts. What could be easier?
By my scoring, one of the myths really is untrue, two are so subjective that it could go either way based on interpretation, and five are not myths.
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Time to circle back and discuss the cards, credit and debit, again.
If you are just joining us, I will recap. Debit card transactions now outnumber
credit card transactions in America. Frank doesn’t get it. He has used a debit card maybe three or four times in his life. Although he can imagine several special cases in which a debit card would be preferable to a credit card for a person, he can’t wrap his head around the idea that the majority of people fall into those categories.
Wise Bread today ran a feature comparison of credit versus debit cards. Debit cards did not fare well in the head-to-head, besting credit only on the “Which is better for avoiding credit card debt?” criterion.
This, by far, is the strongest argument in favor of the debit card. If it helps you control your spending and helps you avoid credit card debt, then that one feature alone is as precious as gold. If you currently have credit card debt or are trying to get out of credit card debt, then cutting up the credit card and using a debt card is probably one of the smartest decisions you can make.
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Continuing the seasonal back-to-school theme, two blogs recently addressed essentially the same question, namely are elite colleges worth the elite price?
Last week, Silicon Valley Blogger at The Digerati Life gave us a long and methodical discussion, complete with charts, Should You Invest In An Ivy League College Education? The post tees up the major issues, but stops short of presenting a definitive answer to its own question.
In contrast, Zac Bissonnette’s post at The Consumerist, 5 Reasons Why Every Single College Ranking Is a Pile of Crap, makes it clear where he stands. “A student’s success or failure in college and in life will ultimately be determined by who they are, not which college they attend.”
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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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On Friday WalletPop broke the news that IRS data shows that some millionaires claimed unemployment benefits in 2008. Using the increasingly rare definition of millionaire as a person or household with more than a million
dollars in income, rather than net worth, it disclosed that according to IRS data (found here on table 1.4) 2,840 returns showing more than a million in adjusted gross income reported some unemployment compensation.
So the secret is out. I certainly did not qualify as a millionaire under the income test in 2008, but, as I have previously confessed, using the commonplace net worth criteria I do clear the (lower) bar. And, if you must know, I drew unemployment benefits for pretty much the whole of 2008. Oh, the shame!
I realize that few of you readers are part of my elite economic strata. So let me share some of my world with you. Not only do we fat cats draw unemployment when unemployed, when old we get Social Security and Medicare. Some of us even send our kids to public school. We drive our luxury automobiles on public roads and when our mansions catch on fire we call the municipal fire department to put it out.
Shocking, I know.
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My job as critic of personal finance advice is made a lot easier if other writers concisely summarize their points of view in easy to digest and refute bullet points. It gets even better if the other writer is argumentative, taking a neatly delineated position on a question which I can contradict.
Investing, PF Blogs, The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 21, 2010 2:59 pm | 
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