- She doesn’t look quite like this
Last month we started an impromptu feature in which we devote a post to displaying the horrible habits and lifestyle of a particular self-styled personal finance blogger. It’s part warning, part comedy. The inaugural post in the series was titled “Retard of the Week”, but lots of people left comments saying that they found that offensive. We respect that, so we’ve decided to change it.
We’re now calling it Retard of the Month. This month’s honoree is Mom’s Plans, which sounds like and is a mommy blog. But instead of offering pumpkin spice latte recipes and craft projects for her readers’ daughters and effeminate sons, the woman behind it recently chose to host a popular personal finance blog carnival. This reclassifies her as fair game.
The brains behind Mom’s Plans lists (oh God, does she love to list) her debts on her website. Rounding to the nearest thousand, they include $7000 on one credit card, $13,000 on another, $7000 on one student loan, and an incomprehensible $30,000 on her husband’s student loans (plural). However, she is making payments on these loans. At a rate that will take her decades to pay them off, but whatever. More to the point, she’s chosen a time at which she’s drowning in consumer debt to
a) dispense financial advice to whoever wants to hear it, oblivious to any irony;
b) have kids, which aren’t exactly free, and;
c) see how much she can reduce those balances while simultaneously refusing to get a freaking job.
By the way, she took a 16-month leave of absence after her most recent kid was born. You know, because when you add another economic liability to a house full of them, the last thing you want to do is go out and earn money.
This woman’s stated goal is to become a stay-at-home mom. Not an astronaut, not a research scientist, not even a hot dog cart vendor (which would require at least the discipline to get out of the house.) Her professional ambition is to watch Live with Regis & Kelly while wearing her jammies and visiting Amazon to order Halloween costumes for her kids. And it’s not as if she started off doing this. To hear her tell it, being a stay-at-home mom was something she was working towards.
Becoming a stay-at-home mom is not a “goal” for several reasons, the least of which is that a goal implies expending some effort. If you want to be a mom who stays at home, you have to a) spread your legs and b) stay at home. She already accomplished the first half of that, and to do the second half, all you have to do is not do anything.
Think about what society has chosen to value and chosen to dismiss. Incurring consumer debts of $57,000 is considered something worth sharing with one’s readership. Imagine if someone else – say a recent high school graduate with a burgeoning career and a knack for deferred gratification – proudly announced that he’d done the exact opposite of the Mom’s Plans lady and had accumulated $57,000 in assets. Here’s my car, here’s my townhome, here’s my motorcycle, here’s my furniture etc. People would deride him as materialistic. They’d leave comments reminding him of the importance of a balanced life, friends and family, no one likes a serial acquirer, etc.
Building assets is commendable. It’s something to be proud of. It proves that you contributed something of value to the marketplace, and received just rewards for doing so. Building liabilities, as Mom’s Plans is doing, is the exact opposite of this.
The husband has rung up 10 years of student loans while working on a couple of advanced degrees. A), why does it take so long to earn a master’s and a doctorate, and B) why is education the one commodity that doesn’t have to submit to cost-benefit scrutiny?
If you’re going to college for 10 years, even if you somehow get a free ride for the entire decade, your education should still have to justify itself somewhere along the line. You can talk all day long about the intangible, non-monetary benefits of an education, even an advanced one. Doubtless they exist. But they still require real outlays of that pedestrian concern called money. Penn Foster – a school that we’re guessing Mr. Mom’s Plans has never heard of, let alone considered enrolling in – will turn you into a carpenter for $700.
The median salary for an entry-level carpenter in the United States is around $40,000, which means that any Penn Foster grad who financed his tuition can pay the whole thing back within weeks. While learning a legitimate, honorable trade that will be in demand as long as the overeducated need someone to hammer their nails and drive their screws for them.
Let’s not forget the utter narcissism of it. It takes a particularly inconsequential kind of person to post her freaking grocery list online and consider it compelling content.
But it’s inspiring. And it’s sharing. Who are you to judge?
Who are we? Just people who make an effort (there’s that word again) to write worthwhile, purposeful, intelligent and helpful personal finance content, 3000 or so words of it a week.
If knowing that someone else bought a bag of quinoa and some soy milk inspires you, you need new heroes. Here are some people you can find legitimate inspiration from:
Jesus
Kurt Warner
Winston Churchill
John McCain
Stevie Wonder
Tammy Duckworth
John Milton
This guy.
One more thing. The URL is MomsPlans.com, but the introductory image on the main page reads “Mom’s Plan”. Which is it? Do you have one plan, or several? If you have several, do they include putting in a bid for the URL MomsPlan.com, which appears to be a placeholder for a porn site?
Alright, yet another thing. This passage was too good to pass up. From her September 9 entry:
When September 11, 2001 happened, my husband and I were glued to the television for days. We were horrified by what we saw unfolding, and I remember those days as particularly dark ones.
You mean because of the terror and the destruction and the wholesale murder of innocents? Yeah, it does seem as if those days were indeed “particularly dark”, once you stop and think about it.
This should be obvious, but if you were horrified by 9/11, that’s not exactly a sentiment that warrants mentioning. We get it. Then again, there are some things we don’t get. Later in the paragraph, she polishes this gold:
In light of the 9/11 anniversary, I almost feel silly posting these links, but they are my light reading that take me away from the heaviness of the events 10 years ago.
Homemade Peanut Butter – Heavenly Homemakers. Who knew making peanut butter was so easy? This is on my agenda to try in the next few weeks.
That’s an unedited excerpt. She went straight from 9/11 reflection into sandwich spreads. No cowardly, wanton act of mass human butchery is so vile that a peanut butter recipe can’t make it all better.
**This article was featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #330:Canadian Thanksgiving Edition**
“Penn Foster – a school that we’re guessing Mr. Mom’s Plans has never heard of, let alone considered enrolling in – will turn you into a carpenter for $700.”
The problem is that none of these things are really taught in schools. Rare is the high school student with ambition/knowledge of where he wants to go, and how he wants to get there. Which, of course, leads to 18 year-olds being funneled into their local universities, taking programs of which they both have zero interest in and are almost not at all tied to a future income stream (any of the Arts “disciplines”, for example).
I like the attention that you’re giving to trades. People are often surprised at how much money they make. The dirty clothes and greasy hair are associated with low prestige, but the reality is that these guys often make a steady income through their day jobs, and then a lot have side businesses that they operate on weekends.
Thanks for the comment Jack. My Dad was an electrician so I witnessed first hand the job security that comes with knowing how to make, or fix, stuff.
The education racket is out of control. In Las Vegas the community college’s largest classes are remedial reading, math and science. Even at UNLV they’ve had to add these types of classes for the incoming freshmen. If you read this article and got the message that not every student should be going to college then we accomplished our mission today.
I’m not going to lie, that was pretty harsh…
Wow, that was harsh. Thanks for the laughs.
Gotta go — it’s time for Regis and Kelly!
I really couldn’t agree more. Obviously there is no way to justify staying home with kids and trying to tell people this has value or somehow requires any more effort than what it takes to sit on a couch all day. Anyone with kids will tell you once they get used to being ignored they are no effort at all. Also they turn out great when raised that way.
If I were in this lady’s situation (which I never would be because family is way down the priority list after easily quantified investments), I’d be tearing my hair out over wasting time supporting my spouse in getting educated… and laughing myself to sleep over my effortless life as home maker. No, not really – I’d be getting a damned job because that’s the point of all the saving and budgeting and lifestyle adjusting: putting family last!
I also think if people make mistakes like getting into debt, that basically makes them ineligible to ever opine on matters of personal finance. Also we should not be tempted to sympathize with any tendencies to set their own priorities or otherwise act like autonomous adults – they should be roundly shamed instead. In fact, I am surprised you even linked to this lady. I don’t think we want to be giving a public forum to people who try to turn their lives around and value caring for the next generation.
We didn’t link to her. Try to keep up.
Raising responsible, productive kids is hard work. Plus, it’s pretty darned expensive. Which is why it’s amazing to see so many people take on the responsibility of childrearing with no advance planning.
Our example blogger demonstrates why most families live paycheck-to-paycheck. They’re unable to separate wants from needs and unwilling to wait for anything. I need (want?) an advanced degree, I want children, I want to be a stay at home home. Can you realistically accomplish all 3 simultaneously? Using family values as an excuse not to get out of debt is a cop out. She could be at home with the children during the day and get a job working evenings or nights when her husband is home with the kids. The kids get full-time parental care and the parents, who created the financial mess, make a short-term sacrifice of some sleep and couple time to get out of debt.
Hey Guys (I can’t tell who wrote this, Greg?), what’s the point of your post? It’s her own blog and I don’t think she’s claiming to be the authority on finance. She’s just writing her personal thoughts.
I guess you are doing the same, but why make fun of someone? What is the bad thing that has happened to cause this anger? Did she do anything to offend you?
If you want to make fun of someone, make fun of me and my site and leave my friends alone. And for you commenters who revel in the misery of others, you’ll never be truly happy until you can find happiness in others.
Sam
Sam, why would we make fun of you or your site?
These aren’t just her personal thoughts: we didn’t break into her bedroom and steal her diary. She’s writing for an audience. She’s attempting to engage readers, and presumably get them to modify their behavior, ideally by patronizing her sponsors.
The point is that when someone is going to speak authoritatively about personal finance (“here’s how you can save on Halloween costumes”, etc.), she has zero credibility when she’s not only choking on debt but taking only the smallest of steps to reduce it. We’re not “angry” at her; rather we’re stupefied that someone who admits to carrying obscene amounts of consumer debt is giving advice on this topic. She might be a delightful cook or a kick-ass seamstress, but as a dispenser of financial advice, she’s (fill in the non-positive adjective of your choice.) That is not an opinion. It’s the equivalent of that guy in Mexico who weighs 1230 pounds dishing out diet and exercise tips.
Wow. You just come right out and say it. Being a stay-at-home-mom is not a real job.
This guy I work with was carrying on and on about how his wife needed an assistant to help her out with their two kids. I said, “TWO KIDS!!!” What the h***?
I try not to be offensive, but if a woman assumes the role of full-time mother, then she’s tasked with the responsibility of making sure the house is clean, dinner is cooked, and the kids are quiet when her husband gets home. She doesn’t need any help. She is the help.
This would also be the case if a man assumed the role of stay-at-home-mom. Hehehe.
Wow. That was an unnecessarily harsh attack on Mom’s Plans. I am wondering if you are really not that familiar with the site, as by no means does the author claim to be an expert on finances. Rather, she shares how she is able to live a lifestyle that suits her family’s needs while paying down her debt. It may not be the life you want, but that doesn’t make it less valid. Perhaps by visiting the site with an open mind you might actually enjoy it.
If she wants to be a stay-at-home Mom, then she should.
So what if they have a lot of debt and spend too much on education.
LIfe isn’t just about the money; sometimes it’s about living.
She seems pretty happy with her decision to me.
As a stay-at-home mother of 5 children…with almost $40,000 in credit card debt…who recently started a personal finance blog…I should probably be pretty offended at this article.
Instead, I laughed my ass off.
It’s so true! We make one financial decision (to “get out of debt”) and all of a sudden we’re experts and everyone should listen to us! (I mean, come on – we learned our lesson, so all that’s in the past, right?)
I personally think there’s a difference between openly sharing a struggle and trying to come across as experts on a certain topic. I don’t know which one she’s doing, but it’s difficult to take her seriously.
Thanks for the kind words. You’ll probably dig our post on refund anticipation loans.