Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Finance Bloggers - Stop Whining about Financial Education/Literacy

Ok, occasionally I go off on a rant about hackneyed posts I see popping up again and again on financial blogs. I even created a "PF Blog Rants" tag for the explicit purpose of letting me vent. See this post on boring financial advice to get an idea of the kinds of things I hate, yet see repeated over and over again.

I need to add something else to this list. I need to add it now.

Financial Education.

Financial Education.

Financial Education.

Financial Literacy.

Teaching financial literacy in school.

Think I've repeated that enough? It doesn't compare to the number of times I've seen this theme repeated by two bit hack financial bloggers. Honestly these people write about finance, but they know practically nothing about the subject. They just repeat what they've read in three or four popular books (Rich Dad/Poor Dad, The Millionaire Mind and all of that other trash), they link to ideas put forth by other people and they agree with them. They have never had an original thought in their lives.

Yes, I don't post very frequently. Mea culpa. But at the very least, I try to be original. I try to avoid linking to something and saying it is a good idea. I try to avoid repeating all of the BORING FINANCIAL ADVICE we have been seeing everywhere for years. I try to assume that you can read these books on your own.

So anyway, sorry to go off on a rant, but to give you a concrete example (and you know how I hate calling out other bloggers), take a look at this post and this post by a financial blogger who shall remain nameless :)

Teaching financial literacy in schools is not your idea. Robert Kyosaki has been writing about this for years. So has everybody else. Unless you want to bore me, stop writing about it. Frankly, I'm sick of it.

Please, stop.

I feel the need to add another disclaimer here. It's not like I dislike any of the bloggers I call out here. In fact, I would need to actually read their blog in order to go off on a rant about it, so you can be sure I've read their blog if I mention them here. And if I've read their blog, that means there are some things on their blog that I've liked. However, there are also some things that drive me crazy, and I have no qualms about writing about them. If that makes me the Simon Cowell of the blog world, so be it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very well said! I've ranted about the exact same thing over the past 12 months. The "Headliners" and "Simpletons" bother me the most.

Anonymous said...

I've never claimed to have come up with the idea. I'm just trying to draw attention to it.

MoneyMan said...

Yes I'm not trying to say anybody claims to have come up with it or anything like that. All I'm saying is that it's a tired concept that frankly bores me silly. It's like one of those news stories the press latches onto and saturates you with. The OJ Simpson trial or something like that. The girl who went missing in Aruba etc... After a certain point I start to say "OK, OK we get the idea already!" and I tune out anymore coverage.

And I didn't mean to call attention to one blog in particular. For me to have gotten this tired of hearing it repeated, it would have to have shown up on a number of blogs for a long, long time!

But anyway, I hope at the very least this post turned some of my readers on to Amanda's always informative and entertaining blog over at Young and Broke.