August’s (Financial) Retard of the Month Is A Good One

August 30, 2013
Time for good old common pennies, amirite?

Time for good old common pennies, amirite?

 

No, no, no, no, no. 58,000 times, no. Because we haven’t made fun of enough of these undifferentiated debt bloggers yet. So here’s another one! Lindsey Thurston at Cents & Sensibility. These vermin are so indistinguishable, so repetitive, so devoid of originality that they think they’ve uncovered new strata of cleverness every time they fashion a pun on “cents” and its homonym “sense”. The sad(der) part is that the logo on Ms. Thurston’s site doesn’t even spell its own name correctly. It uses the wrong homonym: “Sense and Sensibility”, just like the original (unreadable) Jane Austen novel. She also used the same image from the Lauren Graham movie Bad Santa that we did a few months back. Sister, if someone’s going to violate copyright law around here, it’ll be us, OK? Besides, you clearly stole this line in your bio from every other Financial Retard of the Month we’ve already objurgated over the years:

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (in Psychology) and a monstrous $45,000 student loan.

Do you people realize how tiresome this gets, this general first-person declaration that you borrowed far more money than you could afford (to achieve an empty goal, no less) and now think that your broke posterior is qualified to write a single word about money? (Other than “Keep me away from it, before I burn my fingers with it again”?) It’s the same 1-chord song, but only the singer changes. We’d now link to every Lindsey Thurston clone who’s already brought similar steaming plates of rotten lutefisk to our attention, but there are literally dozens of them and it’d take forever.

Blue-collar champion and master of the practical Mike Rowe recently summarized the state of self-destructive higher theoretic education and the accompanying student loan industry, stating “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist.” Or in the case of what one can do with a B.A. in psychology, jobs that never existed. As always with these people, it gets better.

Lindsey got knocked up at 19. (Fat girls really are more fun!) She and the father went their separate ways, and if there’s a worse preparation for adulthood than being a single teenage mom and then proceeding to incur $45,000 in debt while attending college for a useless degree, we don’t know what it might be.

That’s only the start. Lindsey graduated in 7 years, which we’re guessing wasn’t due to a Mormon mission and a medical redshirt. She then met a guy who thought that hitching his wagon to a single mom with a 7-year old kid and a Lake Baikal of red ink would be a prudent decision. You’re not going to believe this, but their fairytale romance didn’t work out. 2 years later they split, and she returned home with…well, when it comes to these pathos research projects it’s best to quote the original sources:

I ended up getting the job (but with low pay) back in my hometown  and went about trying to start over. I never seemed to have enough to make ends meet though. I was working three jobs at one point trying to “catch up”.

But how can that be possible, given that she had an invaluable university (not “college”, she’s Canadian) degree? Nothing’s more important than an education, so how did that impressive psychology B.A. not attract hundreds of employers with lucrative job offers? Especially since she spent so much time crafting it?

This gets weirder. Ms. Thurston continually refers to her blog as “Sense & Sensibility.” The only reference to “Cents & Sensibility” seems to be in the URL. She can’t even do rehashed puns right. Nor has she figured out the one homonym that mastery of should be a prerequisite for attending the 2nd grade:

I made too much too (sic) qualify for “interest relief” on my student loans and other social programs and too little to make ends meet.

So by all means, create a personal finance website then. We learn that Ms. Thurston is currently $35,000 in debt, but that’s totally cool because she used to be $67,000 in debt. You see, this stuff is all relative. And if we were to point out that the Control Your Cash principals are several multiples beyond that, but in the other direction, then that would just mean that we’re ostentatious and insecure blowhards who love rubbing our good fortune in poor people’s faces.

(Actually, it would mean that we refrained from making calamitous decisions such as reproducing far too early and handing stacks of third-party cash over to a university, but most people don’t like to hear the truth.)

We’re skeptical of the $35,000 figure, too. If the graphics on her site are any indication, and are calibrated arithmetically and not logarithmically, it’d seem that she’s more like $53,000 in debt. She has two bars on the right column of her main page, one showing that she’s paid off half a $50,000 debt and the other showing that she’s paid off maybe 1/20 of a $29,000 debt. She gave these bars the precious names “Makin’ A Dent-O-Meter” and “Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter”, and would it kill these net drains on society to act like adults and take this stuff seriously? Then again, why should they when there’s endless reinforcement in the comments? One commenter wrote “Hey 32k is a lot!!! Great job!” Taking that on its own merits, 35k is an even bigger lot. (!!!)

Imagine if there existed a personal finance blogger who created a “Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter” to quantify her augmenting positive net worth. Her monthly cash flow rose $2000 last month, her net worth $16,000, and the Kickin’ Ass-O-Meter documented the increases. Most people would regard that as unseemly, a crass display of one’s materialistic bent and the kind of thing better kept private.

Then how the hell is it any different when you’re trying to reach zero instead of some other number? Ms. Thurston ought to keep this to herself, but this is 2013. Accruing consumer debt is no longer something embarrassing, but rather something to be proud of as it cements one’s position as a victim yearning to break free – a Strong Woman Who Shall Overcome Whatever Life Can Throw At Her, even if what life’s throwing at her is a 16-lb. shot put and she’s the one who hoisted it in the first place.

Ms. Thurston even admits that she was inspired to create her blog after discovering one called, ahem, “Making Cents of Sense.” You see what the author did there? Here, we’ll walk you through it one more time. She noticed that “cents” and “sense” sound identical (though they’re spelled differently), and considered it dexterous wordplay to bring that coincidence to her readers’ attention.

Our favorite part was when Ms. Thurston offered financial advice to her kid, now 16. The easy joke to make here would be that the advice was “Do everything I didn’t do,” but that’s exactly what it is.

[S]he doesn’t understand the value of money in any real sense. She connects the two facts that there are things she wants and that they cost money but that’s about it for insight. The idea that she has to earn money before she can spend it seems to be the missing link in her brain.

That’s a blockquote. Which means it’s Ms. Thurston referring to her kid, not us referring to Ms. Thurston.

Jesus H. Of course she splurged on a wedding.* Of course she’s going back to college for another bachelor’s degree, because 7 years in university just weren’t enough. And of course she’s made a list of goals (people who never accomplish anything love to list goals), one of which is…that she promises to spend 45 minutes a day entering contests. Because you never know what you might win. What she’d win from spending 45 minutes a day on a StairClimber is more certain, more beneficial, and more tangible. But it’s also less fanciful, and considerably more difficult, so we can discard it immediately.

If you take one thing away from our site, let it be this: By and large, people want to be poor. They make the decisions and willingly execute the activities that will invariably result in being poor, therefore it stands to reason that they must want to be poor. Nothing will convince them otherwise, as they happily continue with the same destructive habits (spending too much, overeducating, writing interminable self-referential blog posts) that got them poor in the first place.

The good news is that thanks to them, the field is a lot less crowded for the rest of us. Don’t crank out kids when you’re a teenager, don’t spend money you can’t afford, don’t borrow money to exacerbate the problem of spending money you can’t afford, and stop selling assets and buying liabilities. Read this and you’ll never be anyone’s retard.

*If you’re $35,000 in debt, and you do anything beyond paying $50 to have a justice of the peace marry you, you’re splurging. 

 

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Consumer Debt, Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With: , , , ,

The Most Expensive Meal In The World

August 21, 2013
Our Italian forefathers would be embarrassed

Our Italian forefathers would be embarrassed

 

It’s one of the most overwrought axioms of personal finance advice, right up there with “Create an emergency fund” and “Buy generic.” Do this one and you’ll save Gaia while keeping your belly full, the ultimate dual objectives of parsimony.

Plant a garden! What could be easier or more rewarding? A little (free) photosynthesis, a little (practically free) water, and soon you’ll be consuming nutrients as Mother Nature intended, eliminating the middlemen – Monsanto, Walmart, and all the other baleful corporations that serve only to keep the downtrodden trodden down while tightening the screws on the customers.

That wasn’t our motivation, but we succumbed, anyway. If anything, we were trying to defy Mother Nature, see if we couldn’t make something grow in a region whose annual rainfall rarely breaks 4 inches. We started ambitiously, with tomatoes and peppers, eventually adding more modest crops such as mint and basil into the mix.

That was in late May. Furthermore, we cheated. We bought the Home Depot starter kit; potted shrubs instead of seeds. Several cubic feet of soil. Plus a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a dream.

This is hardly news to anyone who’s ever tried a garden, and we’re running the danger of being Mojave Desert-centric in our description of the events, but hear us out. For 12 weeks we watered the plants daily – 3 minutes first thing in the morning, 3 more at twilight – marveling at their steady and measurable growth. We eventually shifted to automated sprinklers, but never forgot the painstaking work involved in turning on a hose and waiting patiently, twice a day. Doing so kept us grounded, and hopeful. Then around week 10, the plants bore fruit:

 IMG_5979

 

There are 6 tomatoes on that bush. You might well have mistaken them for grapes. As for the peppers, or “capsicum” for some of our Commonwealth friends, may they rest in peace. Nevada, or our little slice of it, apparently being too arid or otherwise inhospitable for such feeble vegetables.

Hothouse round tomatoes cost around $2 a pound at the local supermarket. By our estimates, the tomatoes on our winsome little bush weigh less than a pound. And cost $48.11 in cash and maybe 10 hours in time. Including building the materials for and erecting our makeshift sunscreen (that slumping canopy, suspended on polyvinyl chloride pipe.) Mercifully, we have no weevils nor potato bugs in the desert. We do, however, have rabbits. And now the rabbits have the larval peppers. God know what they’re doing with them, other than laughing at our attempts to arm the perimeter with (irritating but non-toxic) mammal repellent.

To our fellow Americans (well, fellow North Americans) reaping, threshing and winnowing their way through the vast tomato fields of the San Joaquin Valley, this post’s for you. Thanks, and thanks for helping illustrate this lucid example of Adam Smith’s invisible hand in action.

Tomatoes, born on a farm. Protected from blight by wonderful, beautiful, life-enhancing pesticides. (For everyone but the pests, anyway.) Harvested by the myriad and transported to our shores at an attractive if not incomprehensibly low price. Economies of scale in full force. Joining with our millions of neighbors to indirectly farm out (hey-oh!) our tomato cultivation to the people who are really, really good at it benefits everyone. The producers make a living growing tomatoes, several orders of magnitude more efficiently than we could do it. The consumers don’t have to curse the elements and pray for rain while their tomatoes contemplate growing.

The garden was, and is, a vanity project. Alright, that’s not fair: it’s a hobby. And like most if not all hobbies, it makes zero economic sense. It’s not supposed to, and it never was. Your stamp collection isn’t a professional endeavor, nor is your fondness for working on cars. (If it was, it wouldn’t be a hobby and you’d be a technician.) If we were to have paid ourselves minimum wage while tilling the fields on our way to and from our air-conditioned home offices, and then sold our produce at an appropriate markup at the local farmer’s market, those tomatoes would go for about $98 a pound.

Wagyu beef, the authentic Honshu stuff, sells for $35 a pound.

IMG_8037

The point to be made here is that trading pennies for hours is a moron’s game. At the very least, it’s a moron’s game if you think you’re being fiscally prudent by playing it. The gains from our tomato-farming enterprise weren’t illusory, but they were largely psychological. We learned we can grow edible food, armed with only our implements, our guile and the head start of fully developed shrubs. We justified being out in the sun doing something other than cardiovascular exercise, yoga, or lounging by the pool. And during our lonely hours tending to our nano-orchard, we had time to contemplate our and our tomatoes’ place in the universe. Made the first draft easy to write, and half a revision later, here we are.

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Healthy Living Tagged With: , , ,

Hunter Mahan Has Too Much Money

July 31, 2013

 

mahan--hunter-031111-640x360

 

This is Hunter Mahan, who was leading the Canadian Open after 2 rounds this past weekend. The winner of the tournament gets $1,008,000.

He withdrew from the tournament to be with his expectant wife. (If he’d withdrawn 9 months earlier, he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. Hey-oh!) Mrs. Mahan, we gratuitously mention, used to cheer for the Dallas Cowboys before advancing to the next occupation in the hierarchy, full-time adornment. Also, her name is Kandi. Not “Candy”, or even “Candi”, but “Kandi”. To be with her, Mahan had to fly from Toronto to Dallas-Fort Worth and then, presumably, heroically run through the hospital lobby to the maternity ward while a stern woman behind the information desk yells at him to remove his cleats because he’s destroying the linoleum.

Mahan is not an obstetrician, a nurse, a midwife, nor even a doula. But unlike those licensed professionals (and dubiously accredited charlatans, as the list progresses), Mahan does have an incredible talent for earning gigantic chunks of money in very concentrated periods. He was halfway to doing that this weekend, when contractions won out over contracts.

Again, $1,008,000. Not that leading after 2 rounds means he was necessarily going to win, but unless he were to suffer a Jean van de Velde-level meltdown, Mahan would be walking away with at least a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead he just up and quit, which did win him the non-monetary approbation of moonstruck women everywhere.

There have been previous instances of athletes taking inopportune days off to be with their pregnant wives. 20 years ago an NFL player missed a regular-season game and had to forgo $111,111 in salary. The culture has since softened considerably, and prioritizing the family’s paycheck now seems less-than-chivalrous. And increasingly uncommon.

That aside, the difference between Mahan and team-sport athletes is that the former isn’t on salary. Mahan can sit out all the tournaments he wants, or withdraw halfway through, without affecting any teammates or compromising anybody’s won-lost record. As long as he didn’t plan on winning, that is.

Let’s assume Mahan would have fought off the field and indeed won the Canadian Open. His wife would then have had to give birth with only trained medical staff and maybe her mother (if she’s sufficiently meddlesome) by her side. We’ll concede that Mahan might have provided some psychological benefit to his wife by being in the delivery room. And no, you can’t put a price on love.

Except you can, or at least on this particular manifestation of it. Again, $1,008,000. Instead of calling Mahan a selfless hero and the greatest husband ever, let’s assess this objectively. Is he really?

Go to your local community hospital and find one of the mamacitas ready to drop an anchor baby tonight. Oh, what the hell, you can even talk to an upwardly mobile U.S. citizen who’s about to give birth. Find one whose husband is standing around acting nervously while trying not to look useless as he awaits his escort into the delivery room. Then, offer the couple $1,008,000 on the stipulation that the husband leave the hospital and not return for 2 days.

Anyone who wouldn’t take the money is a prevaricator at best. Not just anyone of normal means, but literally anyone. Even Rupert Murdoch, who for some reason fathered his 6th child at 72 a decade ago, would have gone home and taken the money.

Is Hunter Mahan that rich? He’s not Murdoch-level rich, but he’s doing more than pretty well for a 31-year-old. His career earnings are $24 million, and with this year’s tour half over has won $2.3 million. Could have been $3.3 million, but what’s done is done.

Granted, a $1 million windfall means slightly less to a man who’s earned $24 million in his short life than it does to most of us. But that’s beside the point. Denying yourself money because of a relatively unimportant* non-monetary urgency shows a gross misunderstanding of what that money can do. It’s not as if Mahan had to pay a $1,008,000 ransom to get Kandi back from Sri Lankan terrorists. That would at least make sense. But refusing a 7-digit payday to fulfill some loosely unwritten social contract is bad parenting and bad husbanding to boot.

How much is it worth to show up in the delivery room and hold your wife’s hand when someone else can do it? Is it worth $1,008,000? Think about what the Mahans could have done with the money.

Everyone loves to acknowledge that a) there’s nothing more important than a college education and b) it can be a challenge to pay for one, right? What if by missing the birth of his child, Mahan had thus eliminated 4 years of tuition and boarding concerns, 18 years down the road? With tons of money left over, no less? Mahan could have bought an ostentatious house for…well, somebody, if not his wife and new kid. Instead, tournament winner Brandt Snedeker will get to make that decision instead.

If money accosts you on the street and says “Put me in your pocket” – or, less figuratively, requires you to spend your weekend protecting a 2-stroke lead – you’ve forfeited the right to ever complain about your financial situation again. Again, this wasn’t 100. This was 100 cubed. Part of the blame here lies with Kandi, who has now become so acclimated to luxury without concern that she didn’t say, “Hey! What are you doing? Get your butt back to Ontario and make us some money!”

Mahan’s hat sponsor Ping had nothing but accolades for Mahan. But we’re willing to bet that CEO John Solheim is secretly seething at seeing the Bridgestone logo atop Snedeker’s head as he hoisted the trophy Sunday afternoon.

 

*Yeah, we said it. He didn’t need to be there. 

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Capitalism, Making Smart Choices Tagged With: , ,
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