Everyone Is Full Of It

Let’s start with Gail Vaz-Oxlade of CNBC, who will separate you from $30 if you buy her “Til Debt Do Us Part Life Planner”.

Get it? It’s a pun. Here, we’ll walk you through it: she exchanged “debt” for “death”. It’s not quite as clever as “dollars and sense”, but it’ll have to do.

Why should you buy this?

52 brand new financial tips, variable expense tracking worksheets…and show challenges you can do at home!

Go in your car’s glove box, and look at the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule. It should be right next to the owner’s manual. The maintenance schedule includes a handy checklist of services you should get done to the car at certain intervals, complete with little boxes to fill in. Change oil and filter at 5,000 miles, replace Zerk fittings at 60,000 miles, etc.

How long have you owned your car? Okay, how many of those boxes have you filled in? And yet Gail Vaz-Oxlade thinks you’re going to get excited about “variable expense tracking worksheets.” Lady, if I spent $26,000 on a car and can’t be bothered to show my homework, you’re going to have to charge a lot more than $30 for your life planner.

Just read this nonsense:

lying cow

 

Is there some rule that every letter S in a financial site’s name has to be mutated into a dollar sign?

  • CONTROL YOUR CA$H

There! Are you happy now? No, wait. We can do better:

  • ¢ONTROL YOUR ¢A$H

Come on, that’s money! Get it? Money! Unfortunately, the letter E doesn’t appear anywhere in the name of our site, or we could turn that into a euro sign. Alright, one more:

  • ¢ONTROL ¥OUR ¢A$H

Back to Ms. Vaz-Oxlade. Is she out of her mind? Out of every 10 marriages, 9 of them break up because of money problems? Most personal finance “experts” wait until you’ve read a few pages before subjecting you to falsehoods, but Gail knows the importance of a killer opening sentence.

Oh, come on. What she meant was that 90% of all divorces are related to finances.

Then that’s what she should have said. This is someone who communicates for a living. Poorly. And even that statistic is pure fiction.

Here are a select few of her “10 Tips To Get Out of Debt”, and you can tell what a priority these tips are given that no one at CNBC bothered to remove the HTML tags:

 

tip 1

 

Did you know that? You had no idea, did you? If you’re carrying credit card balances, you should remove the catalyst that enabled such balances, i.e. the cards themselves. Look for the next tip in Gail’s Anthology Of Obvious Advice: “You ran over your kid? Next time, consider making sure that there’s no one behind your Sienna before backing up.”

She didn’t say that, but she did say something equally pointless:

 

tip 2

 

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the animals in the manger, and all the saints and angels. CNBC has millions of viewers, and the threshold for being paid to talk to them on air is a pulse, a triple chin and an unwieldy last name.

“Hey Lurleen, Gail Vaz-Oxlade has a great idea for us to get out of debt.”
“Really, what is it?”
“She says we should bring in extra money.”

More specifically, she wants you to “consider overtime.”

This reminds us of a taxpayer-funded boondoggle in at least one state, and possibly in yours. Utah sponsors something called the Baby Your Baby program, which tells mothers how to raise their kids.

Using drugs (both legal and illegal) while you are pregnant puts your baby at BIOLOGICAL risk for future behavioral and developmental problems.

If you are pregnant or considering becoming pregnant, help prevent birth defects by NOT using alcohol, drugs or tobacco.

We can use triage here. There are exactly 3 classes of pregnant woman:

  1. Those who wouldn’t dream of smoking, drinking, or shooting up while pregnant.
  2. The kind who’d respond to the suggestion that they shouldn’t partake in unhealthy substances with “I’m a good mother, and f**k you you can’t tell me how to raise my baby!”
  3. Those who would smoke, drink, or do drugs while pregnant, but who will change their minds after being told that such activity might not be in the best interests of their babies.

We’d guess that 90% of mothers would fit in the first category, 10% in the second. Maybe the one’s a little higher and the other a little lower. But one thing is certain: there are zero mothers in Category 3. (And if any do exist, God help their kids.) No one will benefit from the suggestion not to poison oneself while pregnant, because women will either do so or they won’t.

Same thing with Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s minions. Here’s a Venn diagram of her audience, represented by the intersection of the two sets:

Venn

The purpose of Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s useless life planner, and the purpose of her tips, and the purpose of the husky lady herself, is purely to take up space. The people who are in debt, yet who didn’t give working overtime a thought until Ms. Vaz-Oxlade brought it up, don’t exist. No one is stupid enough not to think of overtime, yet smart enough to realize he needs to get out of debt. The two categories don’t overlap on the continuum that has Chris Langan at one end and Mindy McCready Tyra Banks on the other. Here’s more garbage posing as wisdom:

 tip 3

Just like that, Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s advice moved from neutral to negative.

When working your way out of debt you can still spend on things that are important to you, you just need to plan and save for them.

NO. Should we use a bigger font to emphasize our point?

99% of personal finance advice is interchangeable, and 99% of it is false. Again, we at Control Your Cash are the 1-percenters.

Gail Vaz-Oxlade qualifies by writing “things that are important to you”, which should mean food and clothing, but we all know what she’s referring to. (The accompanying photo is a clue.) If you have a negative net worth, you don’t get a wedding. Well, maybe a $75 one at the Justice of the Peace, but with no reception and no honeymoon. Why not? Because you’re in debt. If you believe the axiom “You need money to make money”, which is a practical truth, it follows that debt – the inverse of money – is standing in the way of you making money. Saving for a wedding doesn’t make sense, because if you’re saving, you should be applying it to the debt – which carries interest and thus, left unchecked, leaves you in a bigger hole a month from now than you’re in today. Anyone who can’t see this is too retarded to own a computer. Wait, she’s not done:

tip 4

“Discuss the day’s events and catch up.” Chance that a man wrote that: -60,000%. Maybe, just maybe, sitting down and having to face each other at the end of another negative-worth day is enough to put a couple among that 90% who get divorced. But no, an innocent $9 trip to El Pollo Loco will condemn you to an eternity in debt. Instead, you should have a $20,000 wedding! “You just need to plan and save for (it)”!

Stop believing the nonsense. We don’t have the platform of a fancy TV show with a wardrobe and makeup and everything – in fact, this post is being written pantslessly – but Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s advice borders on felonious. If you’re in debt, live like a Capuchin friar until you’re out of debt. If you eliminate tiny little purchases, e.g. lunch, while justifying gargantuan ones like weddings, you deserve to have what few assets you do possess taken away from you. And stop watching TV. Order our book instead.

In Case You Missed It

 

We couldn’t decide between 2 captions this week:
a) She never took a toothbrush on tour, and things worked out just fine.
b) Who says British women are unattractive?

 

An unscheduled feature in which we fill you in on what’s happening with other personal finance blogs. Because after all, Control Your Cash doesn’t have a monopoly on good advice:

Bible Money Matters

The author is going to a blog conference this week. Because he writes his blog for other bloggers, rather than a general audience, it’s filled with minutiae of interest only to that tiny little subgroup. Imagine how much more popular Bill Simmons would be if he wrote about paragraph spacing and interview techniques in every column. Guess we’ll never find out.

That’s actually not fair. And we strive to be fair. Bible Money Matters has handy tips for anyone traveling to any kind of conference. Or traveling, period. Or leaving the house:

Photo ID: Planning on getting drinks at the conference after party, or flying? You’ll need a photo ID of some sort.

Bet you thought tooth decay was an inevitable part of traveling, didn’t you? Well, it turns out that it isn’t:

Assorted toiletries: Don’t forget all your assorted toiletries from deodorant and shampoo, to a toothbrush and toothpaste.

When other bloggers are reminding you to remember your toothpaste and toothbrush, there’s not much we can add. “Wipe”, e.g.

The author also suggests that you take your phone, just in case you were dead set on leaving it at home. Like most people do when they travel.

 

The Simple Dollar

Well, here’s the opening sentence, formulated for the Alpha Centaurians whom the site’s author usually writes for. It’s a good refresher for any extraterrestrials, really, who aren’t familiar with human living customs:

In most American family homes, you’ll find one or two adults, sometimes paired with some number of children.

Some of these homes also feature pets, such as a dog or cat, or multiple dogs or cats, or a single dog and multiple cats, or a single cat and multiple dogs, but now we’re getting into advanced-level course work.

This post features the most toothless word in English, “consider”. As in, “consider quitting smoking to reduce your risk of lung cancer.” No, just freaking do it. Or don’t do it, whatever. But to tell people to “consider” doing something is the equivalent of telling them nothing at all.

To summarize, the Hamm-fisted (hey-oh!) author suggests that you “consider an alternative living situation” to save money on housing expenses. Whereas a normal person would say “find a roommate”, “consider an alternative living situation” adds that spunk of impenetrability.

But wait, he’s not done. The concluding tip in this post?

construct a second home on your land. 

Yes! A months-long full-time project that will require you to hire a contractor and laborers! Why doesn’t every person who’s short on funds try this? Heck, we should all be rich.

The point is that none of this garbage – pack a toothbrush, build a house on the house-sized lot that you already own but never thought about improving – is actionable, worthwhile, or anything other than a waste of both the author’s and the readers’ time.

Here’s some advice:

  • If you live in Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California, or Oregon, buy your groceries at WinCo. Good God. Their prices make Walmart look like Whole Foods.
  • You have an emergency fund? What the hell for? Take that money and put it in a 401(k). Buy gold with it. Buy BHP Billiton stock with it (3½% dividend yield, trading at near a 52-week low, ridiculously profitable.) That emergency will never come. Then again, there’s every possibility that it’s happening right now and you’re too blindly optimistic to even notice.
  • Change your freaking oil. Buy a permanent air filter, too. You can install it in 30 seconds, without tools. A $7 AutoZone battery tester will help out too, unless you want to run the risk of your battery dying in traffic and you have your heart set on paying a premium to get it fixed then and there.
  • Buy a house. The big quinella of low interest rates and low home prices won’t last forever. It’s lasted for years, but we’ve reached the nadir. The housing market is having a sale. Everything must go. Make someone an offer. Unless you have a compelling professional reason for renting, stop giving 100% of your dwelling expenses to a big fat rich landlord. (Note: The CYC principals are neither big nor fat.)
  • Which brings up another point. The proverbial ounce of prevention is physical activity. You know how some old people can fill out a pair of shorts without completely nauseating everyone around them, while others have those thick purple ankles and feet that terminate in toenails you could use to harvest crops with? What do you think those folks were doing 40 years ago? The former were taking the stairs and lifting weights. The latter were watching All My Children with one hand in a bowl of dry Froot Loops. (Note: Example cited may or may not be drawn from author’s real family life.)
  • Spend an hour or two running the numbers before spending 4 years in college. Chances are, your university education will not pay off. For it to be a worthwhile investment, you need to major in something not meaningless. If the very idea of running said numbers intimidates you to the point where you don’t want to do it, that’s a pretty good indication that anything you’d feel comfortable majoring in is not going to be worth studying.

Personal finance is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. As a general rule, the more complex it is (and the more you rationalize), the worse off you’ll be.