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.

Why Aren't Personal Finance Bloggers Wealthy Yet?

Just to pass this along, I read a great blog post at my-wealth-builder.blogspot.com entitled "Why Aren't We Wealthy (Yet)?"

One of the basic criticisms of personal finance bloggers goes something like this "If you're so smart and know how to be rich, what are you doing sitting around writing a blog?

Super Saver's first answer to the question hits the nail on the head: "More Time Needed." Most personal finance bloggers (me included) aren't blogging about get rich quick schemes. But, a lot of the advice in the good personal finance blogs can help a person to get rich over a period of years.

When I say good personal finance blogs, I am talking about a very small percentage of the blogs out there, probably about 2% of them.

One of my pet peeves is all of the trash that people in the personal finance blog community spew forth every day of the week. To come up with a typical post, they link to a "Top 10 Ways To Save Money" link at Bankrate.com, they list the 10 ways, and they write very little of their own content to supplement it. I have to admit I have been guilty of this as well on occasion, but I am really getting fed up with what I'm seeing out there.

If one more person tells me to give up coffee, pop, or find my latte factor, I am probably going to hit them with a roll of pennies. Of course, they are probably going to collect those pennies and use them to buy a latte, but at least I will have had the satisfaction of blasting them in the face with a heavy, blunt object.

I think I'm going to start writing a weekly post where I find a boring/useless/blatantly stolen, or otherwise incorrect post on someone else's blog, and I'm going to call them out for it. It won't win me any friends in the PF Blogging community but I think it will go a long way towards calling out people who really need to be called out. Bloggers beware!

Boring Financial Advice

I've been getting sick of a few pieces of advice I keep hearing. This advice has been repeated so often that it is starting to make me physically sick. You don't need to know anything to repeat this advice, yet people act like geniuses when they throw these little nuggets out there. Suze Orman, I'm talking to you. Two bit hack bloggers, I'm talking to you.

The magazines, websites and TV shows are bad, but I think bloggers are the biggest offenders.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are some of the boring pieces of hackneyed financial advice everybody and his mother thinks they are qualified to give out:

1) Be sure to contribute enough to your company's 401(k) plan so your company matches your contribution. If you don't, you're giving away free money.

OH MY GOD! I AM GOING TO DROP DEAD! WHAT GENIUS ADVICE! TAKE ADVANTAGE OF A MATCHING CONTRIBUTION? I THOUGHT I WAS SUPPOSED TO REFUSE THAT MONEY!

Please, financial people! For the love of all that is good, stop repeating this sentence!

2) Buy things that are on sale.

You mean... pay less for something than it normally costs?? You, my friend, are a personal finance maven. I will surely become A MILLIONAIRE now.

3) Don't buy X. X being some incredibly cheap thing that makes no difference in your budget, but the blogger multiplies X by some huge number and shows how it ends up costing you $2,000 OVER YOUR LIFETIME if it was invested at some high rate.

I found the perfect illustration of number 4 while looking at some different personal finance blogs last week. I pulled up this one blog at Getting-Green.blogspot.com. This site’s tagline is “Information for people who want to be millionaires.”

What a great premise for a site. Information for people who want to be millionaires. I figured there would be some great stuff there, but instead, I was met with this post (I kid you not), entitled Say No to Soda. In your quest to become a millionaire, the author suggests that you stop drinking soda because of how much its costs. The following is a direct quote from this post, with no emphasis added. For some reason his apostrophes show up as a bunch of gobbledygook symbols:

“How much is that pop costing you? Let’s say you get one twelve pack a week, plus buy another 4 soda’s from gas stations or vending machines. That’s about $8 a week on pop, or $416 a year, or $4160 every decade. It adds up to be a lot over time. Instead drink nice cold healthy and delicious water.”

I am sure if you could have asked Andrew Carnegie what contributed most to his great wealth, he would probably say it was the fact that he drank water instead of pop.

This is completely useless information! First of all, who buys 16 sodas a week?
Second of all, we already know how much soda costs. The price is often advertised on the shelf, printed on the box, it shows up at the cash register, and you can even see it on your credit card statement if you use your card to pay for it. Where is the information here?

People already know that they buy stuff that costs money. It is no big secret that not buying something lets you avoid paying for it. I can’t count the number of similar blog posts I’ve seen. “Don’t subscribe to magazines you don’t read, because you could save the subscription fees. Don’t buy that expensive new TV because you could save thousands of dollars.”

Are we really that stupid? Do we need to be told that not buying something will save us money?

I looked around the site to find some description of the author… maybe something that would qualify him to give advice to millionaires. A college degree, a million dollars, a successful business, rich parents… anything that would give him some credibility. However, there was nothing. Not even a brief biography. For all I know this could be a 12 year old kid who got pumped up after reading a copy of “The Automatic Millionaire” or something.

4) The budgeting post. Write down what you spend for a month, then make a budget.

You can see a good example of this budgeting advice in this post, entitled staying afloat financially in college. Sorry to pick on that one blogger but man, the stuff he is putting out is just sad.

If anyone out there is tempted to write an article or a blog post about anything in the list above, please do me a favor... don't.