The article is ominously entitled When Student Loans Live On After Death. And it begins, dramatically, thusly:
In July 2006, 25-year-old Christopher Bryski died.
His private student loans didn’t. Mr. Bryski’s family in Marlton, N.J., continues to make monthly payments on his loans—the result of a potentially costly loophole in the rules governing student lending.
And what, you may ask, is the nature of this hitherto obscure loophole that The Wall Street Journal heroically exposed this weekend? Turns out, if a loan has a cosigner, and the borrower dies, that cosigner is considered liable for the debt. This was a surprise to both Mr. Bryski’s father, who cosigned his student loans, and Mary Pilon, who wrote the article.
Are you freakin’ kidding me?
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The hopeful promise of spring has now been fulfilled by the sticky and oppressive heat of summer. But that just means more opportunities for frugality, summer-style.
Free Money Finance gave us a list of ways to save on golf. A few were obvious, including using cheaper clubs and fishing in ponds to find lost balls. But also it discussed the frugal strategy of befriending people with memberships in golf clubs so you can play as a guest without having to join yourself. The key is finding suitable marks. “When meeting people for the first time at different social events or just by random chance, be sure to throw in your golfing interest in conversation.” Good tip.
Meeting the right sort is often a problem for us frugalists. Penniless Parenting reminds us that if our current friends just don’t get it, we need to find new ones. But where? “Try finding new friends in places that are geared towards the thrifty; perhaps hanging out in bargain shops or striking up conversations with people at garage sales….” You meet the best people at thrift stores. Just be sure and bring up golf.
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[This Thursday re-run first appeared August 14, 2009]
If there is one topic that professional journalists just love to report on and analyze, it is the troubles of traditional newspapers. They’re in very bad shape, we are told, and if something is not done these vital institutions might just go away, obviously taking our civilization along with them. There are even pundits who quietly suggest that government subsidies are in order.
What is most weird about this (spectacularly self-serving) sort of commentary is that it often actually understates the economic problems that newspapers face. Some papers may stagger on for a few more years or even a decade or two, but make no mistake, this patient is terminal.
Imagine, if you will, that newspapers didn’t exist. Now imagine somebody came to you with an exciting new business idea. His plan is to print the news of the day on paper overnight in massive printing plants and distribute copies to driveways in the wee hours throughout the region using a network of motorized vehicles. This operation would be paid for mostly by selling advertizing, but he would also have to charge about a dollar a day to readers.
You would tell this person he was crazy.
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I had not noticed this before, but apparently August is college textbook season. I guess that makes sense. School will start up in a month and college students are widely known for not leaving things to the last minute. Both SmartMoney and The New York Times’ Bucks blog came out with items on how to save on textbooks in the last 48 hours.
My first reaction to the focus on textbook costs is that it is misplaced. College is an expensive endeavor, and the price of textbooks does not help any, but let’s get real. It’s like worrying about the low gas mileage on a Ferrari. Double what you spend on books or eliminate it entirely and you’ll still graduate with essentially the same heap of debt.
Alas, this is yet another triumph of psychology over math. Textbooks, unlike tuition, are usually not financed, so the expenditure is more noticeable. Money not spent of books can be spent on Pizza. Further, my unscientific guess is that texts are more likely to be paid for out of the pocket of students, rather than by mom and dad.
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I seem to be on a niceness streak lately. Yesterday brought another item written by somebody other than me which I nevertheless liked. Try as Investors Might, So Much Depends on 
Chance, from The Wall Street Journal, tells us that a person’s lifetime of investment returns is dependent primarily on accidents of birth rather than skill.
We spend a lot of time wrestling with investment selection angst. This mutual fund or that one, active or passive, 20% in bonds or 50% in bonds, and so on. Those are important and hard questions, but there is a forest-for-the-trees danger here.
The biggest driver of long-term investment returns is not an investor’s skill but the overall market returns over the period. In other words, whether you wind up living large or living modestly at 70 is largely luck.
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College, Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
August 9, 2010 11:59 am | 
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