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: , , , ,

April’s (Financial) Retard of the Month

April 26, 2013
No self-respecting straight man would go on camera looking like this. And fix your collar, Champ.

No self-respecting straight man would go on camera like this. Fix your collar, Champ.

We’ll lay it out for you unambiguously.

You come here to learn about finance, right? If we’re doing our jobs right, you want to get some lasting knowledge about how to get rich, or at least avoid being poor, while cutting through the contradictory and facile advice available elsewhere.

But we’re just a humble little website, run by a couple of people with nary a CPA designation nor a professional degree between us. Why not read the big players instead – Barron’s, Yahoo!, Dow Jones & Company? They have greater resources and research budgets than we do. They have far bigger reach. They’re headquartered in New York, Silicon Valley and New York respectively. We’re on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Why waste your time here?

Because the “financial journalists” at the online arms of the above are incompetent. They make stuff up as they go along, to get glazed eyeballs to read shocking and counterintuitive headlines.

MarketWatch is part of the Dow Jones family, which publishes The Wall Street Journal. Thus through the parent company of all these entities, News Corporation, MarketWatch is a sibling or at least a cousin to Fox Business Network.

The sallow chap at the top of the page is Quentin Fottrell; homosexual* Irishman, MarketWatch columnist and incompetent hack. Last week he wrote, was tasked to write, had an editor beseech him to write or in any case thought it was a good idea to put together a piece with this headline:

Buy stocks when men buy socks. Socks and underwear sales may be an economic bellwether

We’ll give him a pass on the headline, because someone else probably wrote it, but the article itself is just as bad. It’s hard to pick representative quotes from the piece because it’s pretty uniform and fungible, but we’ll try:

American men’s apparel sales remained relatively flat in 2012, rising just 1%… The exceptions were the two garments some men continue to wear even after they’re falling apart: underwear, up 13%, and socks, up 12%. “Men are updating the basics of their wardrobe,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD.

If you want to get quoted by a rotten journalist, develop a flair for wordiness and grandiosity. All this time you thought you were buying socks, when in point of fact you were updating the basics of your wardrobe. One more thing. It wouldn’t be journalism without some perverse and unwarranted speculation:

And that may be a positive sign for consumer spending overall.

Because as socks and underwear spending goes, so goes the economy? That’s the kind of chaotic allegation that’s almost too easy to disprove. The idiot author himself, 4 lines earlier, stated that the (alleged very alleged) sock-and-underwear uptick isn’t even enough to stimulate spending in the clothing sector, let alone make a perceptible difference in the economy at large.

Okay, we’ve got

  • baseless allegation
  • overblown quote

What’s next? Of course. Obligatory academic, one with enough time to answer a media request because her field of study isn’t what you’d call intellectually demanding:

“Some men’s underwear may be so worn out that they have no choice but to replace it — or to go commando,” says Vicki Morwitz, a professor of marketing at New York University. “For men who don’t care so much about underwear, during lean times, they probably made do with what they had.”

Now another quote, this one from a sad little attorney who created a vanity website during the Clinton Administration and hasn’t updated its look since:

“With the economy improving, it must be the right time for men to get rid of all that holey underwear,” says Edgar Dworsky, founder of ConsumerWorld.org.

That looks like fun! Mind if we try?

“With Hanes selling briefs for a dollar-freaking-42 apiece, men will replace their underwear regardless of national economic conditions. Also, everyone who contributed to this embarrassment of an article deserved to have Kermit Gosnell stick a scalpel in their spinal cords and twist,” says Greg McFarlane, founder of ControlYourCash.com.

If you think the connection between underwear sales and gross domestic product is tenuous, wait till you see what Quentin Fottrell’s next argument is. He thinks, or writes as if he thinks, that increased underwear sales lead to…more men buying memberships at dating sites. Because they feel confident in their new boxer briefs. We’re not joking:

“When men start to gain confidence, they do go out more and date more,” says Z. John Zhang, professor of marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Romantic entanglements — as measured by online dating sites — have indeed seen an increase. The industry is now worth about $1.2 billion, up 4% from a year ago, according to research firm IbisWorld.

It’s a double-fecal column! Two marketing professor quotes, and dubious data points from two research firms! Unfortunately Fottrell stops before trying to determine how much of that 4% is attributable to the original phenomenon, men putting something between their skin and their pants.

Will Fottrell take this to a third level of absurdity? How about…another sign of economic recovery is that spending on divorce lawyers is up by (arbitrary percentage) because of wives catching their newly confident and securely boxered husbands on AshleyMadison.com? Does that work?

Now yet another brainless quote (the last one, we swear) from another quasi-intellectual:

Many men made undergarment purchases at off-price retailers and online, while fewer shopped at national chains…[This is] still a good sign, says consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier. “Post-recession, we are told the economy is improving and that people are spending again,” he says. “The first to go — items like men’s underwear — is often the first back on the shopping list.”

The first to go? Men stopped buying underwear, and now they’re collectively finding the $10 for a 7-pack that they couldn’t afford before? Fottrell can’t be dumb enough to believe his own lies. He just can’t. The entire purpose of this article was an excuse to show pictures of shirtless models and stock photos of men’s nether regions covered by novelty briefs with lipstick impressions on them. (We told you Fottrell’s homosexuality was relevant.)

“It doesn’t hurt for men to see ads with David Beckham, Mario Lopez and Tim Tebow,” Morwtiz (sic) says.

She’s got a point. If a 90%-naked pro athlete doesn’t motivate people to buy, nothing will:

EPSON scanner image

There’s more. There’s always more:

[R]ecent studies suggest men are more likely to buy eye gel, moisturizer, and other “metrosexual” products online.

Oh, for God’s sake. You’re already out of the closet, Quentin. What else is there? Spare us the residual anger directed at your father for forcing you to take boxing lessons while your more liberally parented friends were learning how to stepdance in the adjacent studio. Write Dad a letter instead.

As always, there’s a lesson to be learned here. Folks, do yourselves a favor and stay the hell away from the financial media. You will learn nothing, and that’s on a good day. On a bad day you’ll have your precious time wasted by trash like this. Underwear as economic stimulus. Good God. Just learn a few fundamentals. Buy assets, sell liabilities, look at each transaction from the other party’s perspective, don’t incur student loan debt, eliminate rather than tone down your money-sucking bad habits, and buy our book. Was that so hard?

 

*Relevant because he talks about it a lot and uses it as his stock-in-trade. We wouldn’t mention Matthew Berry without referring to him as a fantasy sports dork. This is the same thing. People who define themselves by their unconventional sexual predispositions are no more sufferable than people who can’t shut up about their imaginary baseball teams.

Filed Under: Financial Retard of the Month Tagged With: , ,

Financial Retard of the Month

August 26, 2011

Time for a new feature on Control Your Cash, where we’ve taking to scouring the internets to find personal finance bloggers we can hold up as examples of what not to do with your money. We’re thinking of doing this weekly, although we could probably feature a different retard every hour.

Our heroine (artist's conception)

Today’s honoree is Sallie’s Niece, who lives in New York state and is busy creating an anti-nest egg. (NOTE: We’re not providing links. She doesn’t need the traffic from a popular blog like ours. But you really should witness this foolishness firsthand.)

Her disclaimer (everyone has a disclaimer, except us) starts off with the funny:

I am in NO way qualified to answer any financial questions

You’ll find out why shortly. The “Sallie” in question is Sallie Mae, the money-losing boondoggle that enables people ostensibly on the cusp of adulthood to defer productivity for years if not decades. To hear the niece in question describe it, 



I’m a 30 (gasp!) year old professional woman struggling to pay off my student loans, live on a budget, and plan for the future.

Here at Control Your Cash, we’re old enough to remember when “professional” meant something. It meant that you were a doctor or an engineer, not that you simply had a job.

Guess how many student loans this financial drain took out? Remember, she’s an individual, not sextuplets.
SIX. Six freaking student loans. Including a law school loan that she managed to pay off. We’ll let you know the parade route once it’s scheduled. Rounded to the nearest thousand, her remaining loans total $40,000, $33,000, $21,000, $19,000 and $6,000. For a total of $118,000, a debt which no 30 (gasp!) year-old should incur unless she’s buying a house.

Still got some food remaining in your gullet? Here’s an emetic we can all enjoy. This woman works in some level of government and is, well, we’ll quote the original source:

Assuming I make the same salary for the next 6 years I will have contributed about $14,000 to my pension. Then I stop contributing but keep working for at least 10 more years. How much do I get?
Using a final average salary of $49,312, when I am 57 years old I will have 30 years of service credit. I will thus be eligible for a Single Life Allowance of $29,587 a year. That’s 60% of my final average salary. All for contributing just $14,000! This is totally morbid but even if I only collect for one year I am getting 2x my money back!

Why are state and municipal governments (to say nothing of the big one in Washington) drowning in debt? No idea whatsoever. Can’t quite place our finger on it.

Where would your priorities be if you were carrying $118,000 in student loans, while financing a laptop; carrying a credit card (you’re not going to believe this, but there’s credit card debt, too); borrowing money from a friend, a fiance-cum-husband and your mom; and aren’t even organized enough to pay your water bill on time? Don’t know about you, but we’d spend $7000 on a wedding!

You know, that change in your legal status that any justice of the peace can handle if you spend $40 on a license. But what’s the fun in that, when you can spend $6,960 more? You’d have to be crazy to apply that money to your student loan balances instead.

It’s the brazenness that gets us more than anything else. One of this woman’s stated goals is to increase her net worth to -$100,000 this year. She hopes to one day achieve the rarefied financial air of her husband (she calls him “DH”, for “dear husband”, and isn’t that precious?), who last clocked in at a robust -$15,000.

She uses terminology such as “fun money”, which we can only assume goes for pedicures and other non-assets. Listen: if you’re $100,000 in the hole, you don’t get “fun money”. You get debt reduction money, and maybe a buck or two to feed and clothe yourself with.

People often ask the CYC principals how we’ve managed to lead lives of relative affluence. Two answers. One, read the book. Two, by not doing the same idiotic, self-destructive crap that other people do. This doesn’t require anything beyond a 1st-grade comprehension of math. At its absolute most basic, income > expenses. Replace the > with a = or a <, and you can’t build wealth. Even if you’re sucking at the public teat like our friend Sallie’s Niece.

Here’s our favorite line from her archives, from April:

(The husband and I) recently combined finances.

Oh, this is going to end spectacularly. If you’ve never heard Mark Steyn’s line about dog feces and ice cream (or in this case, dog feces and slightly less pungent dog feces), Google it.

It gets even better. She donates to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, completely unaware that she’s the charity case. What’s the best way to help poor people? Not adding to their ranks. This isn’t a case of there always being someone less fortunate than you. This is a case of needing to get your own house in order before vacuuming the neighbors’ carpets.

(NOTE: We’d originally used American Cancer Society as our example in the preceding paragraph, but a couple of clicks later we found she’s also donating to the starving unfortunates who run taxpayer-sponsored television that nobody watches. In her words, “I can’t imagine a world without PBS.”)

$200 concert tickets. Trips to Mexico. A “fabulously unfrugal (sic) Hawaiian honeymoon.” She used boldface 24-point type with exclamation points to announce when her consumer debt got down to $122,000. And there’s also:

The base price of my (wedding) dress is $1100, plus planned alterations of $150 and taxes of $104, the total comes out to be $1354.

It never stops. You know what? Forget about the two-pronged advice we just gave about how to build wealth. Instead, simply do the exact opposite of everything Sallie’s Niece does and you’ll be swimming in it.

Make sure you read the congratulatory comments, too. If there’s one thing we Americans do better than anyone else, it’s celebrate non-achievement. Like the morbidly obese woman who shrinks from 800 pounds down to 780, and whose case worker commemorates the meaninglessness by passing out hugs and Pixy Stix. Instead of celebrating the woman who’s always weighed 120 pounds and who goes to the gym every day and eats healthily to maintain that weight.

Oh, and sure enough, Sallie’s Niece is fat. It stands to reason: if you’re grossly undisciplined in one aspect of your life, you’ll be grossly undisciplined in most of them. We couldn’t locate any pictures of her, but people who aren’t fat don’t join Weight Watchers. (Nor do they join a gym as a New Year’s resolution, the surest sign that those pounds are not only staying on but inviting some friends to join them.)

Also, it’s a cleft palate, not a “cleft palette”. (Worst art supply ever.) Look, it’s one thing to make worse financial decisions than a Holstein cow would make. What we don’t understand is why she considers her stunning lack of acumen to be something worth sharing with the world.

And she smokes. Of course. And she “could use a Halloween costume.” (Again, 30 [gasp!] years old.)

Damn. The Chinese can’t invade our shores us fast enough.

**This article is featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #324: The Universe Edition**

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