Any Printed Number is Believable

Many years ago (19 to be exact) an otherwise unknown research firm put out a report on the average amount of time spent during an American’s life doing various mundane tasks.  It was presented in terms of years, so many years spent watching TV, so many washing dishes, and so on.  The media loved it and widely reported the numbers along with the obvious commentary that we Americans were wasting our lives with trivia and drudgery.

Except that to anybody who thought to do some simple math in their head, the numbers were hilariously implausible. I wish I could find a copy of the report now, but this was in the pre-internet dark ages. My possibly faulty recollection is that they said we spend an average of 6 years in the bathroom.

If you don’t think about it, and want to write about how we spend too much time alone in a tiny room, 6 years sounds just believable enough to use.  But if you do some quick calculations, you realize something is very wrong.  Assume the average life expectancy is 72.  (About right and it makes the math easy.) Then each year of your life is 20 minutes per day.  Two hours a day in the bathroom?  Every day? Average?

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Guest Post on Consumerism Commentary

I’ve got a guest post on Consumerism Commentary today, so if you want your daily dose of my brilliant thoughts, you need to go there.  I did not pick the calming and pastoral photo.

Credit Cards and Our Nation of Children

Congress is about to pass “sweeping credit card legislation.”  I don’t think it’s all that sweeping, and although overall I don’t particularly object to it, there are aspects of it that bother me.

Reassuringly for us curmudgeons, the bill is hardly revolutionary, largely a collection of modestly worthwhile reforms and regulations. There are rules about how interest rates can be raised and late fees charged. Most people will not notice any effects, and even those that do will probably forget about it in a year or two.  

However, there is one aspect of the would-be law that is significant both in its impact on a small slice of the public and as a sign of the times.  The just-passed Senate version of the bill outlaws credit cards issued to those under 21.  The House version set the minimum age at 18.  That’s a big difference in my book.

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The End of the Latte Era?

Every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Great Recession marks the beginning of a a New World Economic Order.  And with the new comes an end of many parts of the old.  Some will not be missed.  (E.g. no-doc mortgages, investment banks, Circuit City.) Others will be missed by the nostalgically inclined.  (Newspapers that actually print on paper, the Big Three Automakers, movie theatres.)

And last week Free Money Finance brought sad news of another part of our culture that is disappearing.  Maybe The Latte Factor is Now Less of a  Factor?  Apparently, caffeine vendors from Starbuck to McDonald’s are now cutting prices, meaning that doing without your morning fix just isn’t the compelling savings it once was.

Not that it was really ever that compelling.  Indeed, I am saddened by the news because The Latte Factor^® is such an excellent example of symbolic frugality that I will miss it.  Realizing that this may be my last chance to take it out for a spin, here goes.

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Our Personal Finance Problem

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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