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The TimelessFinance Sunday Reader is not your typical PF carnival. In fact, it is not a carnival at all. It is a weekly round-up of interesting and informative articles that I, Joe Wood, serve to you garnished with a healthy dose of my own opinion. For comic relief, and because bad writing and poor decision-making is in no danger of extinction, the PF Fail of the Week tradition lives on. Send your suggestions (and PF Fail nominations) to adinajtf@gmail.com who will help me pick the cream of the crop. |
A new year, a new Sunday Reader. Gangnam style. Given the time of year, many PF bloggers’ thoughts turned to wishful thinking a.k.a. New Year’s resolution-making, including here at TF. Of course, the result was a ton of boring, hopeless articles by authors who came out looking like narcissists (myself included). But I won’t generalize; I know Adina and Sara are taking their resolutions very seriously, as do others in the PF world.
Take Derek, who plans to be Free at 33, for example. He isn’t just committed to making positive changes in his life — he’s committed to helping you do it. He’s showing us how to set goals and stay accountable like a personal trainer. Which I obviously don’t need to maintain my glorious six-pack.
If you’re looking for some goals to get started on, check out Robb’s monthly financial planning checklist over at Boomer & Echo. It’s not exactly spreadsheet ready but you’re likely to get a couple great ideas for quick wins in your financial life.
101 Centavos (sorry, Adina, but nobody else bothers to add the accent aigu), on the other hand, doesn’t do resolutions. Instead, he wrote about the heights of absurdity being achieved in the world of marketing – and it’s all about the marketing these days. “Bold aromas of wet grain sack, crushed whole nut, and crusty artisanal raisin bread with a vibrant, silky dry-yet-fruity medium-full body and a hot and spicy dusty gravel road finish.” This describes something called Arkansas Lightning, which I understand to be some sort of liquor marketed to hipsters. Dirty, dirty hipsters.
Get Rich Slowly staff writer Kristin Wong wrote a thoughtful post on whether we romanticize poverty as a keystone in learning financial independence. Sure, there are bragging rights inherent to the claim of being a truly “self-made man”. I can even see the appeal of early-life poverty as a character-building exercise. A bizarre phenomenon — evident in certain PF blogs — is the vilification of wealth. This should be paradoxical if the whole damn point of personal finance is building wealth. More and more, however, PF is devolving into whining about debt hell or — at best — the fiscal purgatory of avoiding debt. Anything more than modest wealth attracts suspicion. Somebody should explain to people who hate rich people that they’re not being very ‘tolerant’ themselves.
The folks at Control Your Cash decided to crush a few more of your deeply-cherished but incorrect beliefs this week, by tackling prevalent myths about gas mileage. The title says it all: everything they tell you about gas mileage is a lie. It’s a great read but I will say I think the claim that each car has an optimal speed for fuel efficiency is true. It makes sense that the function would be an inverse parabola with a peak, simply because of physical realities like momentum and aerodynamics. Lacking any contradictory evidence, I’ll continue to believe it, despite the fact that it’s been shoved down my gaping maw by a socialist government.
Finally, the Personal Finance Fail of the Week goes to recidivist Honey Smith of Get Rich Slowly. I don’t know at what glacial pace she is planning to get rich, but I assume it involves a payout to her estate from her own life insurance policy. If you didn’t believe me when I said that wishful thinking was a major theme this week, just take a look at Ms. Smith’s list of financial goals for 2013. First up, she hopes to pay off $5,000 in debt. An admirable goal for somebody with $5,000 in debt. Unfortunately she has ABOUT TWENTY ****ING TIMES THAT. It could be worse — at least she’s paying it down, right? Except that, in the very next breath, she talks about taking on more debt to buy a house. Let’s look at her scenario:
- Honey says that she plans to buy a house (presumably with her self-employed partner) at around $150,000.
- Her current debt load is around $99K.
- Her net monthly income is $2,000 (of which over $1,600 is devoted to living expenses and debt payments).
You know what? Nuts to calculations. It’s another stupid decision in what is clearly a long line of awful choices. Joe out.
Honey Smith is the only reason to visit GRS since JD fled the blog. Her posts always elicit such vitriol from the commenters. Rather reminiscent of back when you could post comments at The Simple Dollar (Trent posts this week about taking his 3 kids to the grocery store! Thrillsville!)
“Which I obviously don’t need to maintain my glorious six-pack.” – Joe does that mean I can count on you for a workout buddy next time you’re in Toronto? Awesome. We’ll grab Five Guys burgers after we’re done, of course.
lol yeah man, you work out and I will totally cheer you on from the sidelines.
I actually haven’t been to The Simple Dollar since last year. I am incredibly tempted, since the 365-ways-to-save should be over and I really want to see what kind of frivolous content he’s replaced it with. But stories about grocery shopping with kids surely can’t replace the glory of the Yellow Neon.
I liked the comment Pattie, RN (#112) made on Honey’s post – “You are saying that your feet are too cold to walk in the snow in sneakers, and instead of buying boots you want to move to Fiji!”
Thanks for the mention, Joe!
That is awesome. I stopped reading the comments when I got to the most asinine, redundant, stupid statement in personal finance: “Of course the decision is ultimately yours.” It’s stated as though it’s a self-evident argument that supports the writer’s dumb choices. Did you know it’s legal to commit suicide in Canada? If somebody wrote a post about killing himself, wouldn’t it be rude to say, “Of course the decision is ultimately yours.” We don’t live in a dictatorship and I believe in freedom. When I criticize somebody I am not proposing that the government give me the right to become their legal guardian and start making choices for them. “Of course the decision is ultimately yours… to chronicle your stupid decisions on the internet and then become indignant when people rightfully criticize said stupidity.”
And then the commenter in question goes on to drop the gem “it sounds like you’ve run the numbers”. I’ve heard that a lot from desperately self-promoting bloggers trying to drop their daily deuce of a comment on a blog post, e.g. the commenters on Bridget’s Platinum Card fiasco. What does this even mean? The woman has 6 figures in student loan debt and you’re dumb enough to blindly trust her biased analysis of largely unstated numbers? Everything in the world of these clowns is out-of-context, vague, and subjective; then whenever you point out truth, they hide behind lame postmodern non-arguments, e.g. “That’s just YOUR OPINION!!!1!”
I’m with you on the fuel efficiency – an overdrive gear at 1,800 RPM sips gas while 5k in 2nd probably pours it out of the tank or something. Sometimes when I’m near E I drive like an idiot and skip into the upper gears to get every little piece of gas out of the tank.
lol that sounds like the fun version of “hypermiling”.
Reminds me of the documentary “Senna”. In one of his F1 races, Aryton Senna’s gear box failed, so he had to finish the race in 6th gear. It completely wore him out as he wrestled with the steering. Watched it on Netflix.
Luckily for me (or is it?) I’ve only got 5 gears! I drive a Saab 9-3, and only the 5th gear is an overdrive. Yes, sometimes I shift into 5th at like 40 MPH (64.3738 KPH!)
Maybe Honey Smith is a made up person?
Some bankers and loan companies created her to support their industry and hook other people into thinking being hopelessly in debt is cool. The way out is to go further in debt. I mean if the USA runs their budget like that hey who to say its wrong on an individual basis. Maybe she is counting on a bailout or a favorable bankruptcy down the road.
lol if somebody wants to cut TF a weekly cheque to run a fake persona’s fail journal I’d be happy to do it, but I doubt they’d like my “Editor Joe’s Notes”.
Part of me always hesitates before clicking on these financial fail blogs, because I don’t want to give the author the satisfaction of another page view! “Wow, 1000 views on this post!! I am totes famous on the internets and an expert in my field!!!!1!”
lol I didn’t think of it that way. I’m really hoping if Honey sees the backlink, she reads it and realizes that she’s making really poor choices. Yeah, I know, 0 chance. But at least we can aim to give readers the straight dope on TF.
Perhaps Joe can make it one of his goals to summarize the PF Fail sufficiently so as to making that extra click unnecessary – you can observe the stupidity second-hand, as it were, without having to deal with the internal conflict of giving these people extra page views.
Most vehicles are designed to optimize their fuel efficiency around 80 km/hr. I don’t know all of the details or anything, but my automotive engineering friends tell me that. Also, what that fuel efficiency articles claims to be the “data” doesn’t account for all sorts of things, nor mention them, which affect fuel efficiency a lot. Examples: stop lights, queuing time and acceleration.
I read 93km / hour is the typical peak of efficiency (the vertex on the inverse parabola); it was used in my econ class to introduce the Laffer Curve. But I doubt there is a specific point at which all cars are most efficient. It’d be a function of the individual engine, drivetrain, aerodynamics, weight etc.
Also, there are some really weird possibilities if you’re interested in hypermiling, e.g. rapid acceleration interspersed with gliding can be more efficient than a constant speed.
I think — and I don’t want to say this is the thesis of CYC’s post but I suspect it is — that it’s important to focus on the low-hanging fruit for fuel efficiency and not get caught up in blowing hours and hours (not to mention the frustration and possibility it won’t work) to save a couple percent of your consumption.
I last tracked mileage about 7 years ago but at the time I did notice a significant increase that seemed to be from accelerating less aggressively. I’m thinking of tracking it again and see if the distance between fill-ups makes a difference but a lot of things could make it hard to tell what’s really making the difference including different weather, different loads, and different drivers.