Kris and I had dinner last night with Mandy from Personal Finance 101. Mandy is a personal finance coach and the most active member of the Get Rich Slowly discussion forums. (She posts there more than I do!) Mandy’s money classes sound awesome. I hope to sit in on one in the future.
Here’s the weekly look at highlights from around the Money Blog Network (and beyond):
- The Mighty Bargain Hunter had a response to our recent discussion here about the not-so-big house. “Our houses are bigger, but not that much bigger,” he writes. He’s really taking issue with misleading charts and graphs, however, and I agree with him 100%. I’ve stumbled across several awful visual lies lately. This one is by far the worst.
- No Credit Needed writes about how he lives without credit cards. He has a simple system for living on a budget. I lived without a personal credit card for nearly a decade. It’s not difficult!
- Flexo was drawn to the same Newsweek article that I was. (If I’d had more time, I would have written about this last week.) The magazine reports that former big-spenders are trading down, becoming less concerned with luxury for luxury’s sake.
- Free Money Finance explores the notion that your friends and neighbors help determine your financial health. I’ve noticed this in my own life. Especially when we were younger, Kris and I would buy things just because our friends had. This is “keeping up with the Joneses” made real. It’s not a conscious thing usually, but very real nonetheless. We seem to have escaped this over the past couple years.
- Jim has some advice on what to do if a bank error is not in your favor.
- Nickel does some further exploration into Roth IRA conversions in 2010.
- JLP at All Financial Matters has some advice on protecting your assets should you end up in court.
- At Pick the Brain, Peter explains how to sell yourself (and why your career depends on it). This is a topic I’ve been reading about a lot lately, and one I’ll write on in the future. Self-promotion is not a bad thing; in fact, it can be an important component of success.
It’s cold and rainy here in Portland. Perfect weather for writing about personal finance while watching football!
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Greetings from Poland !
Thanks for your work.
We share the weather, too. Unfortunately.
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Yeah man the weather in Oregon is bizarre. I’m in Ashland right now, I come from Calgary Canada which has a pretty random weather cycle, but Oregon is a whole new dimension of weirdness one minute its raining then its sunny then rainy then sunny back and forth non stop, its enough to make a man crazy.
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That graph you linked to really is horribly misleading. I agree.
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PF101 better not have said bad things bout me
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Did they just put random sized balloons up, or is it really supposed to mean something, d’ya reckon.
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I don’t know if the Mighty Bargain Hunter him- or herself will see this, and I’m too lazy to go comment directly, but his critique about the house size is totally off the mark.
The issue is about comparing square footage. The genesis of the argument stems from available space in houses, but his rug analogy (10 x 10 feet == 100 sf, 20 x 20 ft == 400 sf) works just as well. Yes, the length of the rug has only doubled from the former to the latter….but we don’t only use the linear dimension. The actual, usable, *relevant* issue is how much space the rug takes up on the floor–the square footage–which is four times as much.
Now, I know from small houses. Last house I lived in had less than 700 finished sf of living space. The house I’m in now has about 1400 sf of living space. That’s fully *two times* as much living space—NOT 1.4 (square root of two) times the living space.
The quibble with the NPR graph seems to be that it’s trying to depict the footprint of the house with a representation of the exterior (i.e., a view of the perimeter of the footprint). But I argue that the figure actually *does* accomplish what it set out to do, in a graphic way: convey that current houses embody twice as much of the relevant space (i.e., footprint) as the houses of 50 years ago. Trying to show several teeny weeny floorplans might have been more “formally correct”, but would have been a graphic design nightmare.
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The problem with the balloon graph is simple. They related the number of people to the radius of the balloon, but the human mind is actually seeing the volume of the balloon. Which is (4/3 * PI * Radius ^ 3), which makes the expansion seem much larger than it really is.
They likely did this on purpose, to make the expansion seem much larger than it actually is. A simple bar or line graph would have given a better representation of the growth rate.
And thanks for the link about selling oneself. I have always been on the shy side, self-esteem issues and all. It’s something I’m getting better with, but reading about and being reminded is always nice.
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