A Guest Poster Who Has Worn Out His Welcome?

The blog Free Money Finance has a recurring guest blogger usually identified as Marotta Asset Management.  In fact, Marotta posts often enough and has been doing so for long enough that the designation of "guest" seems a little strained.  I assume that this is one of those mutually beneficial barter arrangements that make the blogosphere go.  FMF gets free content and Marotta gets free advertising for their business.  (They are a financial planning firm in Charlottesville, VA.)

The only flaw in this swap scheme is that the posts aren’t very good.  I mean that both in the sense that the content falls short of what you would hope to see from an actual working financial advisor (not "just a blogger") and in the sense that the posts are not written as well as I would like.  Indeed, on more than one occasion I have aborted plans to write about them here because in parts I am not sure what they are saying.  And that makes it hard to argue that a post is wrong, even when I am pretty sure that it is.

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Guest Post on Consumerism Commentary

I’ve got a guest post on Consumerism Commentary today, so if you want your daily dose of my brilliant thoughts, you need to go there.  I did not pick the calming and pastoral photo.

Carnival of Personal Finance

This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Funny about Money.  My post on the Efficient Market Theory Hoax is there along with a lot of other interesting stuff and some pictures of lovely places I will probably never visit.

The Death of LifeLock

You have seen the ads for a company called LifeLock.  They’re the ones with the CEO’s Social Security number.  It must be a very effective campaign. The company currently has 1.5 million subscribers at $10 a month each.

And what do you get for your $120 a year?  Well, a few things, but the major one is that LifeLock will place a "fraud alert" on your credit reports. These warn potential grantors of credit that something is fishy and tell them to contact you directly to confirm that it was really you that asked for the loan.  Fraud alerts expire after 90 days, so LifeLock dutifully renews them for you four times a year.

That’s a nice little business they’ve got. $180 Million in recurring annual revenue for not a lot of work.  But before you slap your forehead and ask why you didn’t think of it first, you should know that it looks like the party’s over.

LifeLock’s use of fraud alerts is pretty clearly abusive.  They were created by federal law as a way for consumers to place a red flag on their credit reports if they were currently involved in fraud, not as a precautionary step to be taken by millions.  (The LifeLock website says that to use the service you must "confirm that you have a good faith suspicion that you have been or are about to become a victim of identity theft."  Wink wink.)

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