My post on Fuzzy Retirement Math made it into this week’s editor’s picks in the Carnival of Personal Finance. There’s lots of other readable stuff there, so have a click at it.
The carnival is hosted this week by Earn What You Spend, a blog I have to admit I haven’t visited before. Shame on me. It looks like a good one.
Carnivals | Frank Curmudgeon | 
May 11, 2009 12:26 pm | 
Comments (47)
Readers of this blog are likely familiar with the Oblivious Investor blog. Its author, Mike Piper, is a frequent commenter here. (He signs as ObliviousInvestor. It’s an SEO thing.) And it’s been on my blogroll for a long while now.
So, naturally, when Mike put out a book version of his blog, Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise
free copy in the hopes that I would say something nice about it. You have to admire his courage. I rarely say nice things.
I was a little worried myself, but truthfully I have only two significant problems with this work.
1) It takes the form of a fictional narrative, which I find annoying.
2) It doesn’t fully explore some topics that I think are interesting.
In other words, it’s not written the way I would have written it, and that’s an objection I have to almost everything.
Books, Investing | Frank Curmudgeon | 8:00 am | Comments (732)
There is another video on the Big Subprime Mess making its way around the personal finance blogosphere. It doesn’t really compare to the now legendary Crisis of Credit Visualized, and in fact most of what it has to do with subprime mortgages is that it is called “Subprime”. But it has appeared on (at least) two blogs, Clever Dude and MoneyNing.
So let’s make that three blogs.
subprime from beeple on Vimeo.
It’s a clever bit of animation. But it’s not exactly a cogent argument that, in the words of MoneyNing “sums up what everyone was doing during the last decade but it also brings up a good point – When is enough really enough?”
Economics, Housing, Robert Shiller | Frank Curmudgeon | May 8, 2009 10:30 am | Comments (20)
This is the 100th post to Bad Money Advice. In honor of that milestone I thought I would get a little more philosophical and reflective than usual.
I am generally very suspicious of arguments founded on the assertion that never in history has some aspect of our lives been more difficult or challenging than it is today. Some parts of life in the good old days may have been less 
complicated then they are now, but it was a brutal simplicity. I remember years ago when somebody remarked to my grandfather how dirty the streets in New York had become. He rolled his eyes and pointed out that when he was a child those streets where covered in horse manure. And you may think it is stressful to raise kids today, but consider what it was like a few hundred years ago when half of them died before reaching adulthood.
But there is at least one part of our lives that really is much more difficult and harder than it was hundreds of years ago. That is the somewhat amorphous subject that we call personal finance. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way pining for the old days. In the past there was no such thing as an activity called personal finance for most people because, by our standards, in the past most people spent their lives broke. A person might save food for the coming winter, but not money for retirement. Until recently, there was no such thing as retirement for ordinary folks, and, if you go back far enough, hardly such a thing as money.
Gurus, Media, The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | May 7, 2009 11:30 am | Comments (1,221)
When I started this blog I planned to occasionally point out good articles and posts as well as criticize the bad ones. So far, I’ve done it so infrequently it can’t even be called occasional. There’s just so much bad stuff out there.
But last week SmartMoney had a pretty good item on the fuzzy math of retirement. The math in question is basic stuff: how much you need to save, 
how much you can expect to draw from your savings each year in retirement, and so on. But here I mean basic in the sense of being fundamental, not in the sense of being simple or easy.
Nevertheless, as the SmartMoney piece points out, until recently a person visiting their friendly neighborhood financial planner or broker might have gotten the impression that these were simple questions with simple answers. Your investments will appreciate X%. You can safely withdraw Y% from your savings each year. When all was going well and the market was (mostly) going up, from where those numbers came and how useful they were didn’t seem like important questions.
Investing | Frank Curmudgeon | May 6, 2009 12:10 pm | Comments (79)
Subscribe