The other week I finished up a five part series of posts on Dave Ramsey’s Seven Baby Steps. It seems to have been well received and still gets a steady stream of clicks. But honestly, I was expecting a larger and more hostile reaction than I got, at least as measured by comments and emails. Ramsey has a very large and devoted following, particularly, it seems, in the blogosphere.
At least I thought so. Maybe I was wrong about that. Perhaps Ramsey is well liked but not, ultimately, taken all that seriously.
Or maybe I was just a little too subtle in what I wrote. Perhaps when I said that “His advice on higher level personal finance topics such as investing and taxes is weak and often misinformed because his knowledge in those areas is limited” my readers thought I was exaggerating for effect. And perhaps when I criticized him for giving advice “on topics such as investing, about which he should probably just keep quiet” those readers didn’t really think I meant that his listeners would be better off if he didn’t cover those topics at all.
Today brings another dollop of data on the housing market. The Wall Street Journal carries a story about a drop in real estate listings in April. An outfit called ZipRealty reports that listings were down 3.6% from March. In general, April is an up month, with the average monthly increase since 1982 being 4.8%, so the down tick is significant. Listings were off 21% from April 2008.
This could be an indication that the number of sales will be down in the coming months, which as I have written before, is bad news if you are a real estate broker.
But what if you are an ordinary reader of the WSJ concerned about house prices, both because it’s a central issue in the current crisis and possibly because you may yourself own a house? Then this isn’t news at all. Fewer listings could mean that the supply of cheap houses is being exhausted and soon buyers will start bidding up the prices of what’s left. Or it could mean that sellers have become discouraged and have pulled their houses off the market, waiting for conditions to improve. Or half a dozen other reasonable scenarios.
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.
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, he bravely sent me a 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.
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.
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?”
All advice in this blog is guaranteed to be worth at least what you paid for it, or double your money back. All persons dealing with matters of personal finance are advised to gather information from blogs, books, radio and TV, consult with professionals, discuss the matter with anybody who will listen, and then make their own decision. Because it’s their money.
hostile reaction than I got, at least as measured by comments and emails. Ramsey has a very large and devoted following, particularly, it seems, in the blogosphere.
Dave Ramsey, Gurus, Investing | Frank Curmudgeon | 
May 13, 2009 3:00 pm | 
Comments (2,877) 
, he bravely sent me a
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