On Saturday The New York Times discovered yet another example of evil business fleecing wholesome Americans. Resale Fees That Only Developers Could Love opens with the usual tropes.
Rebecca and Trent Dupaix of Eagle Mountain, Utah, spent a year searching for their dream home. The couple, who have five children, considered 15 to 20 houses before finding “the one.”
But four months after buying the “rock-and-stucco home” the dream turns to a nightmare when
the Dupaixs discovered that their sales contract included a “resale fee” that allows the developer to collect 1 percent of the sales price from the seller every time the property changes hands — for the next 99 years.
Incredibly, the resale fee arrangement was apparently not disclosed to the Dupaixs, something that is either outright fraud or spectacular incompetence on the part of the title company and whoever ran the closing. It can be inferred from the article that the Dupaixs did not have a lawyer.
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Late August had more angst and gloom about the housing market than usual. Had I been blogging last week, I would have written about it on the last
Wednesday of the month, my usual housing market slot. (The Case-Shiller Index numbers come out on the last Tuesday.)
The proximate cause of the wave of pessimism were two reports on the low levels of house sales in July. The National Association of Realtors revealed that existing home sales were down 27% in July from June. And sales of newly constructed houses fell 12.4% to a new all-time low.
The New York Times reported this with the headline Housing Market Plunged in July, Fueling Anxiety. Anxiety may indeed be being fueled, but the housing market, at least the one most of us care about, did not, as far as we know, plunge in July.
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Labor Day Weekend is prime time for big-picture discussions in the financial press. With the cultural end of summer, and the heightened feeling of 
seriousness of the back-to-school and back-to-work season, Labor Day is a good time to review where we are and where we are going. Also, articles on broad topics can be written far in advance so that journalists can take the weekend, or entire week, off.
Thus, The Wall Street Journal recently treated us to a spate of pieces on basically the same topic, the wisdom of investing in the stock market.
Brett Arends kicked off this festival of tea leaf reading mid-week with Why Stocks Still Aren’t Cheap. Then over the weekend we got Is It Time to Scrap the Fusty Old P/E Ratio?, covering some of the same ground as Arends but with a less bearish spin, and Thinking Outside the Stocks, discussing off-beat non-stock investments.
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The theme of this blog, which admittedly I often stretch and occasionally just ignore, is that the money advice we Americans get is lousy.
That advice comes from several sources. There are publications and 
broadcasts of various kinds. Aside from often lacking much wisdom or insight, these sources of information suffer from the fact that they are aimed at a broad and anonymous audience. By their nature, they are one-size-fits-all, leaving individuals to work out for themselves any customizations that might be required. On the other hand, this advice is free or nearly so.
More near-free advice can be had from friends and relatives. Some of this is probably good, but given the general state of PF knowledge out there the chances of hitting on a gifted amateur with sound ideas is low.
At the top of the advice food chain are professionals who give advice to particular individuals, presumably based those individuals’ situations, in exchange for money in the form of fees and/or commissions. In principle, that ought to work best and I have no doubt that there are many paid advisors out there who do a great job. But I am also pretty sure that many others, maybe even most others, are not up to snuff.
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The Consumerist is, according to a popular ranking, the #1 personal finance blog. I am not sure that it fits cleanly into the personal finance category but there is no denying that it is a monster in the blog world, linked to by 8,865 other sites. (For context, this blog has 89 inbound links.) I read it every day.
A post last Friday, written by the Consumerist’s managing editor, ~600,000 Chinese Die Making Our Shiny Toys caught my eye. To save you a click, here is pretty much all of it, links included.
Let’s expand our foreign language vocabulary! Can you say, "guolaosi"? It’s a Mandarin word meaning "death from overwork!" The word describes the phenomenon of Chinese workers falling dead on the spot as they toil in sub-Dickensian conditions so you can save a dollar on your next laptop!
China Daily, an English-language state-run publication, says an estimated 600,000 Chinese workers die each year in this fashion, sometimes falling "off their stools bleeding from the ears, nose and anus," as left-leaning mag The Nation reported in 2007.
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On Saturday The New York Times discovered yet another example of evil business fleecing wholesome Americans. Resale Fees That Only Developers Could Love opens with the usual tropes.
Housing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
September 14, 2010 11:59 am | 
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