Sunday Reader: Garth Vader is Awesome and iPhones Suck

You’re probably wondering why there’s a new post on TF today. Don’t worry; you didn’t accidentally sleep through an entire day. It’s still Sunday morning. And yes, Joe Wood is still asleep. This post – the inaugural TimelessFinance Sunday Reader – is brought to you by Joe’s blogging better half, Adina J.

Some of you may have read my weekly column on TF, but I’ve been a personal finance junkie for a long time. If my experience lurking around the PF blogosphere weren’t enough to convince me, few blogs are more militant than TimelessFinance about the importance of disseminating intelligent discussion on personal finances. In a world increasingly afflicted with “money stupidity”, reading intelligent material is refreshing. Taking Joe’s exhortations to heart – and no one exhorts quite like Joe –  I have decided to do my bit for financial literacy by starting a Sunday Reader.

In this feature, I (Adina J), a self-confessed personal finance snob, select a handful of excellent PF articles from the week gone by.  The TimelessFinance Sunday Reader serves these pieces to you, Readers of refined tastes. And because we all need a bit of comedic relief at the end of a long week, I’ll label one Personal Finance Fail — a self-explanatory category.

Article submissions will be accepted at your author’s TimelessFinance Gmail, adinajtf@gmail.com. Fellow bloggers: don’t all rush to send in your links. Recommendations are welcome, but the TF Sunday Reader is not a quid pro quo link circle. Don’t be disappointed when your article is omitted. I am writing this column for Readers like me — the ones who want dependably good content to peruse on a lazy Sunday afternoon. On with it.

Wise Beard Man, a.k.a. Garth Turner, only knows one tune. But he sings it very, very well. It’s a little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane, and their suburban builder special that’s about to capsize their finances because, like every house-horny property virgin who dreams in HGTV, they’ve put all their financial eggs into one over-priced, about-to-deflate basket. If you like to get a straight-talking perspective on the housing market souffle and its impending collapse, you can’t go wrong with Garth. Bonus point for using one of my favourite words ever in the title. So much better than “doomed”. Which we are, considering that even mainstream media is starting to sing Garth’s tune. Pooched, I tell you.

Nelson at Financial Uproar wrote about how you can start your own hedge fund, which is totally on my to-do list. No, it isn’t. When Nelson’s not talking about his imaginary dating life, his posts are usually way over my head, but he writes them in a way I can actually follow, and not like he’s talking to a moron about quantum physics. This is all a long-winded compliment, by the way, in case I lost you somewhere around “imaginary dating life”.

Derek from Free at 33 is a relative newcomer to the PF world, but he defies every stereotype for bloggers in that category; he went from being a 20-year old cocaine addict to a 30-year old father of three with net worth of over half a million. And, no, he didn’t get there by winning the lottery. If his story doesn’t make you feel like an under-achieving slacker, then you must be Bill Gates, and I owe you $500 for the ten seconds it took you to read the preceding two sentences. Your check’s in the mail. In all seriousness, I am looking forward to reading more posts from this guy.

Dave at 6400 Personal Finance is one of my must-read PF bloggers, and not just because he called one of my posts a “gem” a while back. (Although, I won’t lie, that was certainly endearing.) His article on long-term planning for so-called unexpected expenses that even the phoniest psychic on late night TV could predict (like Christmas) is a great example that financially aware people really do think differently about money.

Cameron at Don’t Quit Your Day Job wrote one the calmest-sounding rants you’ll ever read about why he doesn’t own an iPhone. His remarks are ever so much more eloquent than my eye rolls on the subject, but here are the Coles notes: you don’t need an iPhone. The implications of that, if you also happen to have debt, should be self-evident. And the reason why Cameron’s post is worth reading is because that fundamental principle applies to pretty much anything, not just iPhones. (And, like Cameron, let me add that I’m no Apple hater; I baby my Mac desktop almost as much as my actual human baby.)

Robb from Boomer & Echo asks if you can trust advice from your bank. The answer is no. But Robb is a classy guy, so he puts it much more nicely than I would (and have).

And last, but not least if you need a good chuckle, the Personal Finance Fail of the Week (PFFOTW?):

I really want to like Honey Smith. Honestly, I do. But posts like this one make it so hard. She gets points for thinking about the need to increase her income (making $40K/year isn’t really cutting it when your debt load is more than twice that number), and then immediately loses every one of them, and then some, for spending the rest of the article justifying why she has not done that in the past 4 years. If I hear one more heavily indebted (kid-free) person, working less than 60 hours a week (at a job that essentially involves pushing paper and babysitting adults), talk about the importance of work-life balance, I am first going to drink myself into a righteous stupor and then quit my job and start herding monkeys for a living, because things just don’t make sense in this world anymore.

That’s it for this Sunday Reader. Feel free to share any good reading in the comments. Have a great day!