2009 July | Bad Money Advice

Personal Finance Carnival #212

Time for my weekly roundup/review/rant of/about the Carnival of Personal Finance. This week’s edition is up at Darwin’s Finance. Seems like it’s a little shorter than usual. Friday holidays will do that.

Right at the top of the editor’s picks was an item from Funny About Money on the value of a master’s degree. That’s a good topic of relevance to us all. But, although the post does hint strongly at the idea that grad school is likely to be a poor investment in economic terms, it does not quite get down to brass tacks and tell the reader how to evaluate a given degree.

A post from The Digerati Life on the merits of identity theft protection has the same problem. The issue is sort of nibbled at on the edges without the payoff of a cost-benefit analysis. What gives? Yes, in both cases there are non-money factors to consider, but lining up for the reader what you pay and what you get in dollar terms seems obvious and central to the discussion. Are these bloggers afraid of going against the grain and too strongly making the case contrary to grad school and ID theft protection? Be brave! Dare to be hostile!

Carnivals | Frank Curmudgeon | July 7, 2009 10:30 am | Comments (61)

Goldman Sachs Discussed in Rolling Stone (?)

There is an article, and I use that term loosely, in the current issue of Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. It’s certainly not a publication I normally read, in fact I think this may be the first copy I have ever owned, but the the Goldman piece has gotten a little buzz going and one of my commenters told me to read it. (The full thing is not available on-line in authorized form. Google and you can find bootlegs. Legal excerpts here.)

Admittedly, I expected little from an issue whose cover story was "Boys to Men: Inside the World of the Jonas Brothers." But Matt Taibbi’s Goldman diatribe, "The Bailout: How Goldman Sachs Runs Washington" is truly nauseatingly horrible.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | July 6, 2009 9:00 am | Comments (24)

A Frugal Friday Fourth of July

I realize that today is a holiday for many of you, but I just couldn’t put off the monthly round-up of tips from the frugalosphere for another week. I know than this means that most of you will not get this until Monday, when you return to the office (internet at home is not frugal) but that’s better than waiting until the end of the week, isn’t it?

June was an exciting month as old themes faded into memory and new ones emerged. There was nothing in June worth reporting on toilet paper and toilet paper tubes, nor on laundry detergent.

What was big this month was food. Frugal Upstate shared a recipe for Iced Coffee. (Can you imagine the CEO of Starbucks when he heard the formula got out!) Other tips included freezing the unused whites of eggs in ice cube trays if your recipe calls for only yolks and cutting the sugar called for in cookie recipes in half. They will taste just as good Thrifty Jinxy tells us.

Frugal Friday | Frank Curmudgeon | July 3, 2009 3:42 pm | Comments (66)

Home Prices Turn Up

Yesterday, being the last Tuesday of June, was, obviously, the day they released the April Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller Home Price Index numbers. If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I think this is just about the only useful data we get on the housing market. And house prices aren’t just important to us consumer-homeowners, they are central to the whole Great Recession thing.