This is the 100th post to Bad Money Advice. In honor of that milestone I thought I would get a little more philosophical and reflective than usual.
I am generally very suspicious of arguments founded on the assertion that never in history has some aspect of our lives been more difficult or challenging than it is today. Some parts of life in the good old days may have been less 
complicated then they are now, but it was a brutal simplicity. I remember years ago when somebody remarked to my grandfather how dirty the streets in New York had become. He rolled his eyes and pointed out that when he was a child those streets where covered in horse manure. And you may think it is stressful to raise kids today, but consider what it was like a few hundred years ago when half of them died before reaching adulthood.
But there is at least one part of our lives that really is much more difficult and harder than it was hundreds of years ago. That is the somewhat amorphous subject that we call personal finance. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way pining for the old days. In the past there was no such thing as an activity called personal finance for most people because, by our standards, in the past most people spent their lives broke. A person might save food for the coming winter, but not money for retirement. Until recently, there was no such thing as retirement for ordinary folks, and, if you go back far enough, hardly such a thing as money.
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When I started this blog I planned to occasionally point out good articles and posts as well as criticize the bad ones. So far, I’ve done it so infrequently it can’t even be called occasional. There’s just so much bad stuff out there.
But last week SmartMoney had a pretty good item on the fuzzy math of retirement. The math in question is basic stuff: how much you need to save, 
how much you can expect to draw from your savings each year in retirement, and so on. But here I mean basic in the sense of being fundamental, not in the sense of being simple or easy.
Nevertheless, as the SmartMoney piece points out, until recently a person visiting their friendly neighborhood financial planner or broker might have gotten the impression that these were simple questions with simple answers. Your investments will appreciate X%. You can safely withdraw Y% from your savings each year. When all was going well and the market was (mostly) going up, from where those numbers came and how useful they were didn’t seem like important questions.
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It’s graduation season again. Time to write about how totally screwed today’s college graduates are. They didn’t learn enough in school, certainly not enough about personal finance, they owe amazingly large amounts of money, 
and they have bleak employment prospects. (Note to college seniors: anybody over 30 who says they wouldn’t trade places with you is lying.)
This year, there is hand-wringing particularly over the debt part. Bargaineering asked last week if students should have credit cards at all. The credit card reform act passed by the House last week would ban the issuing of credit cards to those under 18. If that survives the Senate, it will mean that credit cards will join such things as alcohol that we expect young people to learn about on their own after they leave home. (Will there be big burly guys at the door of the bank checking ID?)
There can be no doubt that young people can do dumb things with credit cards. Nor do I doubt that they are more likely to do so than older Americans. In the immortal words of that guy who had the job before Obama “When I was young and foolish I was young and foolish.”
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Normally, I have the criticizing personal financial gurus business all to myself. I like to think this is because I am the only one who sees the faults in their advice, or alternatively, that I am the only one bold enough to say the emperor has no clothes on. But it is also possible I am the only one who takes them seriously enough to bother writing about what they say.
This is not the case with Suze Orman’s recent advice on credit cards and emergency funds. It took a while, but quite a few people thought it was important enough to comment on critically. Welcome to my world.
It started with Orman’s March 1 Suze Scoop. There’s been some disagreement as to what exactly she told her readers to do, so if you are as obsessed about this stuff as I am, click on that link and come back when you are done. In the event that you have more balance in your life, I’ll quote the first two paragraphs.
If you have an unpaid credit card balance and not much saved up in emergency savings I need you to listen up. My advice has changed.
I want you to only pay the minimum due on your credit card balance and instead make it your top priority to build as much of an emergency cash fund as you can.
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It was a rather light month in the frugalosphere. I am certain this does not mean that the trendsetters of the frugal lifestyle have run out of ideas. Could it be an early indication of strengthening economy? Did Tax and/or Earth Day distract bloggers from the frugal cause? I hope not.
I got my hopes up when I saw that there was a post entitled Suggesting Frugal Alternatives to Friends at Art of the Coupon. I was expecting something on how things like Second Life, and, uh, blogging, are cheaper than having actual friends. Sadly, it’s about how to suggest doing less expensive things with your friends, not getting rid of them entirely.
Bargaineering had a detailed post on how to make your own breadcrumbs. More than just a recipe, the post has great tips, for example, that breadcrumbs make good gifts.
Speaking of useful tips, How I Save Money introduced me to the concept of reusable cloth wipes to replace toilet paper. Now I concede that this is the obvious next step from using cloth diapers, but I see an obvious objection. If a frugalist does this they will have no toilet paper tubes to reuse in frugal ways.
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complicated then they are now, but it was a brutal simplicity. I remember years ago when somebody remarked to my grandfather how dirty the streets in New York had become. He rolled his eyes and pointed out that when he was a child those streets where covered in horse manure. And you may think it is stressful to raise kids today, but consider what it was like a few hundred years ago when half of them died before reaching adulthood.
Gurus, Media, The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | 
May 7, 2009 11:30 am | 
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