A reader named Trent pointed me to a story that 60 Minutes did last week, Retirement Dreams Disappear With 401(k)s. It’s not their best work, and I’m not one who thinks much of their best work.
Helpfully, the CBS website gives a near transcript of it, so I can easily quote
the way over-the-top copy read by the reporter, Steve Kroft.
It was a gray, chilly morning in midtown Manhattan and a line of unemployed, mostly white-collar workers, stretched for blocks around the Radisson Hotel. More than 1,000 middle managers, stockbrokers, consultants, secretaries and receptionists had come hoping to find a job.
It was called a career fair, but there was no merriment – only a whiff of desperation.
Many of the people at the career fair have been out of work for months and burned through their liquid assets; their future, even bleaker than the present.
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A few things too small for posts of their own have been cluttering up my (virtual) desk.
CreditMattersBlog today has a post on a column a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal by our friend Brett Arends on using your credit cards to raise money for an emergency fund. It’s a stupid as it sounds. The column, I 
mean, not the blog post. I have a rule not to pick on the same guy twice in a week, so I will keep from saying anything bad about Arends. I’ll just give you a link to where somebody else does it. (Note to any WSJ editors reading this: I would be happy to do Arends’ job for whatever you are paying him.)
CreditMattersBlog apparently noticed the Arends piece from a post by Liz Pullman Weston at MSN Money with the (for me) irresistible title “Why Suze Orman is Wrong – Again”. In case you missed it, good ol’ Suze put out some advice on March 1 that caused quite a buzz.
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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Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a column by Brett Arends in which he wrote positively on a relatively esoteric strategy, namely investing in the S&P 500 index while writing (i.e. selling) call options on that index. It’s just the 
sort of thing that, in a different time and place, big media journalists would condemn as the foolish scheme of too-clever-by-half financial engineers.
I never know how much or how little to explain about the mechanics of financial instruments, but since I generally advise folks to steer clear of options, I will assume that a relatively long explanation of what Arends is talking about is in order. So excuse me if the next few paragraphs are painfully obvious for you.
A call option is an option to buy something at a specified price for a specified time in the future. So you might have an option to buy a share of GM stock at $5 on June 30. If on June 30 GM is trading above $5, then your option is “in the money” meaning that the ability to buy at that price is worth something. (It’s worth the difference between the current price and $5.) If it is trading for less than $5, then the option isn’t worth anything, since buying at $5 would be pointless.
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There was an article in the Saturday New York Times that provided further evidence of something I’ve been blathering on about here. It is what I call the Frugal Lifestyle.
Just to be clear, I have nothing at all against saving money. In fact, I have only respect for those who tightly manage their limited resources to get what they and their families need and want. The same goes for those who now find themselves in difficult circumstances and need to make very hard decisions about what to do.
What I have outright contempt for are people who pretend to save money. People who, for peculiar psychological reasons that need not be explored here, enjoy depriving themselves of small things, or spending small amounts of their time in tiresome ways, because it makes them feel good to be “frugal.” My hostility is doubled for those who have taken the current economic tragedy as inspiration to adopt the Frugal Lifestyle in the same faddish way that they might otherwise take up a new hobby or start twittering.
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Two weeks ago Trent at The Simple Dollar had a post in which he quoted at length from a pretty hostile email attacking him for not having any particular qualification to give personal finance advice. Of course, to a blogger like Trent that’s a slow hanging curve, and he proceeded to yank it into the bleachers in post that got 225 mostly supportive comments.
His defense of his right to give advice was not “Hey, maybe I don’t have a lot 
of credentials, but I know what I’m talking about” nor “Look, I’ve been doing this for three years and more than 100,000 people read this blog every day, so my advice must be pretty good.” Instead, Trent essentially said what most bloggers say, that he is not a guru but an ordinary guy doing his best. “All I can do is share my experiences and what I’ve learned along the way.”
Similarly, in the Get Rich Slowly post that discussed this blog (and led many of you to discover it) my current hero j.d. wrote that he had been thinking of updating his disclaimer and had settled on borrowing the text from The Digerati Life:
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the way over-the-top copy read by the reporter, Steve Kroft.
Investing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
April 27, 2009 9:52 am | 
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