A Guest Poster Who Has Worn Out His Welcome?

The blog Free Money Finance has a recurring guest blogger usually identified as Marotta Asset Management.  In fact, Marotta posts often enough and has been doing so for long enough that the designation of "guest" seems a little strained.  I assume that this is one of those mutually beneficial barter arrangements that make the blogosphere go.  FMF gets free content and Marotta gets free advertising for their business.  (They are a financial planning firm in Charlottesville, VA.)

The only flaw in this swap scheme is that the posts aren’t very good.  I mean that both in the sense that the content falls short of what you would hope to see from an actual working financial advisor (not "just a blogger") and in the sense that the posts are not written as well as I would like.  Indeed, on more than one occasion I have aborted plans to write about them here because in parts I am not sure what they are saying.  And that makes it hard to argue that a post is wrong, even when I am pretty sure that it is.

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Get Rich Slowly’s Tax Rate Embarassment

As readers of this blog probably know, Get Rich Slowly is one of the most important and widely read blogs in the personal finance space.  Wise Bread ranks it #8. It has more than 81,000 subscribers and a Google PageRank of 5.  (That’s good, trust me.)

Early yesterday morning it posted a guest post from CJ at WiseMoneyMatters entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Keep a Mortgage Just for the Tax Deduction.”  It is not, to say the least, a work of great insight.  Filled with breathless explanations of the painfully obvious, it contains such gems as an explanation that a tax deduction reduces your taxable income not the taxes you pay.  And it makes some remarkably unfounded generalizations, such as that the reader is unlikely to itemize deductions in the absence of mortgage interest.

But what made the post worth discussing here is something that it lacked, or at least lacked by the time I read it yesterday evening.  Apparently, as originally posted the piece contained an “offending section” that betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how income taxes work, specifically the difference between marginal and average tax rates.

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