Wheaties for Your Wallet

So often, major media publications view personal finance as a niche topic for people who “have problems” with money. I’d much rather see each publication cover personal finance in whatever way is best for their readers. From my experience, we all “have problems” with money, whether we have lots of it or none or anywhere in between.

Today’s New York Times Magazine featured an interview with Suze Orman, about her new book on women and money, and about herself and her own relationship to money. The interviewer was, I thought, very condescending, taking the “niche topic” approach to extremes. It was an interesting read nonetheless — Orman is great at taking control of a conversation, and she certainly did this time. Some excerpts:

Q: As one of the most widely read financial gurus of our time, why would you write a book like “Women and Money,” which is based on the regressive premise that women are birdbrains when it comes to managing money? I would think women are better at saving than men.

A. No, they save and then they give it to their best friends, who need it. They give it to their children, who need it. They give it all away once they’ve saved it.

Q. Isn’t that admirable?

A. That depends on what it leaves them with. It’s not admirable when it leaves them with nothing. I want to change women from savers to investors. […]

Q. Are you married?

A. I’m in a relationship with life. My life is just out there. I’m on the road every day. I love my life.

Q. Meaning what? Do you live with anyone?

A. K.T. is my life partner. K.T. stands for Kathy Travis. We’re going on seven years. I have never been with a man in my whole life. I’m still a 55-year-old virgin.

Q. Would you like to get married to K.T.?

A. Yes. Absolutely. Both of us have millions of dollars in our name. It’s killing me that upon my death, K.T. is going to lose 50 percent of everything I have to estate taxes. Or vice versa. […]

Q. Do you enjoy spending money?

A. Oh, yes. My greatest pleasure is still flying private. I spend between $300,000 to $500,000, depending on my year, on flying private.

The full interview is worth a read. It’s hard to read even such a short piece and come away thinking of personal finance as a niche topic.

I’ll be speaking twice at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this coming March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego, California. ETech is my favorite conference of the year — a great gathering of people who want to talk about fun, new ideas. If you’re in the area or are attending, please drop by and say hi.

My conference session is entitled, “Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers.” At Wesabe, we’ve tried to come up with a bunch of new ways to protect our users’ privacy, and we have a set of newer ideas coming down the line. The session will lay out some of our techniques and how they might apply to other web applications, and talk about the best ways to think about users’ privacy and data rights when you are developing Web 2.0 applications.

During the conference tutorials, I’ll be presenting my talk for technical entrepreneurs, “Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks.” If you’re interested in competing with Wesabe, come on by and I’ll tell you all about how we built it! I’ll also cover coming up with an idea, finding co-founders, getting things started, product development, hiring, and fundraising.

Hope to see you there.

Ramit Sethi, author of the fantastic blog, “I Will Teach You to be Rich,” has just released a PDF book ($4.95) called “Ramit’s 2007 Guide to Kicking Ass.” He’s collected some articles from other personal finance bloggers (including J.D. at Get Rich Slowly), and put them together as a collection of advice.

The Table of Contents

• Who Has the Most Frugal Family? An Investigation…Page 3
• The Key to Running a Great Project (hint: it starts with an “M”) by Ramit…Page 5
• Producers, Consumers, and the Information Diet by Ramit…Page 7
• Why Do People Get So Nutty Around Christmas? by Ramit…Page 8
• 101 Words on Running More Than One Project at Once by Ramit…Page 11
• How to Send an Introductory Email by Ramit…Page 12
• Money Day by J.D. Roth…Page 14
• Take Advantage of Your Youth by JLP…Page 18
• Handling Failure: Dealing with a $2.2 Million Mistake at Age 24 by Casey Serin…Page 22
• Building the Team You Already Have by K…Page 26

Looks like it’s well worth checking out. I’m thrilled that there are so many great resources shaping up together online, and seeing this collaborative effort is great. Congrats, Ramit!

My favorite personal finance journalist is Linda Stern. Her articles (distributed via Reuters, I believe) are practical and clear, and they avoid so many of the traps of personal finance writing: parental/disciplinarian voice, overpromising, false precision, mind-numbing boredom, and so on. She just tells it like it is and lets you know when there’s no good answer for a particular fear. How refreshing!

Her latest column, on planning for retirement, is a great example of this. You should read the whole piece — it’s a great, simple introduction to thinking about how much you’ll spend during retirement, and building a retirement savings plan from that. Here, though, is a snippet that is characteristic of her style:

Don’t waste too much time mulling over those retirement rules of thumb that seem to pop up everywhere. They’ve never been very useful, but changes in the way people live and work make them even less so.

Here are a couple of rules debunked.

– That 80 percent spending maxim. Once you start planning for retirement, you usually run across this “rule”: “You’ll need roughly 80 percent of your pre-retirement income once you retire.”

That’s a ridiculous figure, pulled out of thin air. Investment companies say they often use that number to “help” people who don’t have any idea of how to plan their retirement savings. But it mainly helps to scare people into thinking they have no hope of saving enough for retirement.

In truth, they may spend more than that in the first couple of years after they stop working, but they’re likely to spend far less, on average, over their entire retirement period. By the time they are 75, they’re likely to be spending about half of what they did when they were 50, according to the Labor Department’s survey of consumer spending….

I love that she debunks the very general saws financial articles typically throw around, and then backs up her assertions with better numbers from reputable sources. When you think about how easy it is to fall into the “personal finance traps,” it makes what she does that much more impressive. Definitely worth reading every week.

I’ve very much been enjoying Mutual Improvment, the new blog from the makers of the fabulous site 43Things. It talks about, as they say, “personal development, happiness, statistics, emotions, neurobiology, cognitive science and all the things that make life worth living.” A great mélange, and wholly relevant to Wesabe and what we’re hoping to do.

They recently posted an interview with my friend Jason Fried, and I loved one of the things he says about money problems:

I don’t think you have money problems until your problems are someone else’s benefits. When someone is making money off your money problems you’re in trouble.

That’s a great way to think about it. He qualifies that he isn’t talking about mortgages, but instead debt or loans with “no payoff in sight.” The rest of the interview is also worth a read.