This is the 200th post at Bad Money Advice. As it is also a cold and rainy Friday morning here in Boston, this seems like as good a time as any to reflect and take stock.
I started Bad Money Advice on a much colder morning this past January. My primary goal was, and still is, my own amusement and satisfaction. Unemployment saddled me with a lot of free time and extra energy and I wanted something to do more substantive than on-line poker.
So far so good. BMA amuses me. I’ve got something to say and, apparently, have found an audience of people willing to listen.
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The Digerati Life had a post last week linking to a tool at CNN Money. It asks you a few questions and then gives you a letter grade for your financial health. It’s 
just as subtle and sophisticated in its analysis as you would expect from a web applet on CNN.com.
But it does nicely encapsulate the conventional wisdom on personal finance. So nicely, in fact, that I will use it as the structure for a new occasional series here at BMA, The Conventional Wisdom.
Today the topic is the first question in CNN Money’s quiz: How much is your housing payment? If you enter in more than 28% of your gross income you flunk this one.
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I have a favorite, although rather obscure, Monty Python sketch. An older housewife type (a "pepperpot") sits on a park bench. Another approaches dragging a car engine on a cart, saying she’s been shopping.
"Did you buy anything?" asks the first.
"A piston engine!"
"What d’you buy that for?"
"Oooh! It was a bargain."
It’s not their most memorable bit. But it deftly sums up a way in which we can short circuit our own thinking when we shop.
As I’ve written here several times, when we shop we are not creatures of cold calculation. We can’t be. There are just too many choices at the mall and not enough time to find the one optimal allocation of our money over everything we could buy. Instead, we operate on a set of learned behaviors that approximate the optimal outcome. One of those is bargain hunting.
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I don’t see why West Coast playoff games can’t start at a reasonable East Coast time. Sure, a start at, say 4pm LA time would reduce productivity out 
there in the late afternoon, but all of New England are zombies today and there is another game tonight starting at 9:30.
So no post, just a few thoughts from my sleep deprived brain.
Obama Wins What?
It took a long time for me to process the news of the morning. I kept blinking and trying to focus on the screen better, because obviously I was still not fully awake.
I’ll be the first to admit I can’t think of anybody else who deserves a prize for peace this year. But seriously, Obama? For giving us hope? And bravely taking a stand in favor or nuclear disarmament? For real? To their credit, the folks in the White House are obviously just as head-scratchingly stunned as the rest of us.
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It seems to me I have already cleverly mocked the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report blog. I think I said something about how the author doesn’t actually talk to wealthy people so much as talk to people who talk to wealthy 
people, or at least talk to those who claim to talk to wealthy people. Then again, maybe that was the Times’ Wealth Matters blog. It’s all a blur to me now.
The latest installment of the Wealth Report doesn’t merely talk to people who claim to talk to rich people, it rehashes an article on Reuters whose author talked to people who claim to talk to rich people.
The post, a little confusingly entitled "Do Millionaire Investors Get Better Deals?", is about how financial firms are now more interested in the investment business of sub-millionaires. This is a change from a few years ago when, we are told, they concentrated their efforts on bigger game.
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The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | 
October 16, 2009 12:15 pm | 
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