I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Thanks for checking out my site.

You fully admitted to being completely unfamiliar with the product, to doing no research before writing your post and you posted incorrect information with figures pulled out of thin air.

(Additionally you changed the dollar figures in your original post without making a correction note that you were editing your post to correct a mistake- which is poor form.)

Sorry you found it rude, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Do any of these “bloggers shall not do this, this & that” commenters write complaint letters to the tv networks when they dare put a commercial in their favorite show?

Somebody has to pay the bills – if you want to read free content, be prepared to see ads in various shapes and forms.

Love the videos!

To disagree with someone is one thing, but to make assumptions about them and what they have or haven’t read and researched is quite another.

No doubt Kevin has something to contribute to the personal finance world and is clearly talented. However I think your general rule of thumb about not usually promoting other blogs like this is not necessarily something you should abondon in this case.

His analysis of including birth control in the guidelines for preventative health care (so it would be availble with no co-pays, like colonoscopies are for example) is flawed and inaccurate.

I’ll quote thebaselinescenario.com for my larger point to be cautious:

I think that basic economics, the way it is taught today, tends to give people reflexive pro-free market, anti-government positions — positions that are not held by people with a deeper exposure to economic thinking. When your understanding of government finances is based on reading the newspaper, it’s somewhat eye-opening to come to college and learn that free markets lead to maximum societal welfare and taxes impose a deadweight loss on society — the pictures are so simple and compelling. That’s why a little bit of economics makes you more likely to be a Republican.

But when you learn more about principal-agent problems, information asymmetries, and so on, you learn that those simple pictures are simplistic to the point of being misleading. That’s why Joseph Stiglitz argues in Freefall that understanding economics is crucial to understanding why free markets often lead to suboptimal outcomes. The problem isn’t knowledge per se; it’s a little bit of knowledge.

Full post (worth reading) here:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/08/the-perils-of-studying-economics/

I know some younger consumers who don’t know the difference between information from blogs that are purely opinion based and blogs/articles that contain actual information. And people in general tend to not investigate enough before they believe the information they read. Question, question, question, and get informatiom from more than one source before you decide what course of action to take. Knowledge is power.

I definitely won’t be visiting your blog after the initial visit. To be truthful, the politics turn me off, but the real clincher is that I don’t see that much in the way of personal finance advice.

I think you’ll find that while we may not always agree, I do my best to keep an open mind and admit when I’m wrong. I actually love to be proven wrong because it helps me grow as a person and allows me to learn something I didn’t know before.

But another reason I write about things like economics is to help people understand money in the world around them. A basic understanding of economics and government fiscal policy can go a long way in helping people invest in the right stocks or industries, have an idea of how a downgrade of US debt by the S&P will affect them personally, or come up with an estimate of how much their health insurance costs might increase next year.

While economic posts are not as directly applicable to helping with personal finance, there is definitely (in my opinion) relevancy to budgeting and investing. I don’t want to get so caught up in the details (how to type articles) that I ignore the grand scheme (the US economy).

Again, it sounds like that’s not your cup of tea, which I can definitely respect. I just hope you stop by every now and then, at least to check out the music videos.

He thinks that premiums will increase from $200 to $300 per month because of free birth control? Insanity. And really, *really* bad information.

Anyway, I actually really disagree that you can’t divorce the two. For one because, as I think you may have seen here, you can really alienate some of your potential readers by intermingling them so heavily. I did see a few posts on your site that I really enjoyed, but for the reasons I mentioned above, I won’t visit regularly. Second, when you write about how much you should be taxed, and where those tax dollars are going, you’re talking hypotheticals, what might be if only enough voters agree with you. I think a more successful personal finance blog is going to deal in concrete changes that can be made by the individual. I’ll hardly say I think you shouldn’t write about politics and macroeconomics, but I will say that I think your blog will be more focused and successful if you branch off and keep them separate them from your personal finance writing.

And I didn’t neglect to add his site to my favorites this time!

I hope to keep making personal finance videos and entertaining people with my writing in the future. Thanks again JD, and thank you to everyone who has checked out my site.

One of the things that impresses me so much about JDs site is that he puts out so much content without being political. There are only so many strictly personal finance topics, and sometimes I feel like I’ve covered them all, yet JD has been doing this for years and is still going strong!