Welcome to Financial Spiderplant!

Welcome to Generation Debt

Anya Kamenetz is Yahoo Finance’s latest columnist. She isn’t from the older generation talking about the ‘need’ to build an emergency fund, avoid credit card debt, or contribute to your 401K. (These are all things you should do!) She’s 26 and has been down in the trenches with the rest of us, she knows what its like and these experiences are certainly reflected in her writing style.

She defines generation debt as, loosely, the following:
-Four figures of credit card debt
-’Miniscule savings’
-A cost of living that keeps your cash flow stressed
-Student loan debt (two-thirds of us have an average loan balance of $19,300)
-We spend SIXTEEN percent more of our income than we are earning
-Our income minus our expenditures puts us SIXTEEN percent in the hole
-For every one hundred dollars we make, we spend one hundred and sixteen dollars.

WE ARE GENERATION DEBT!

Anya’s advise: To realize our situation, step up and make the changes to that which we have identified needs changing; stay informed, open a savings account, and start funding your IRA. Basically, she is telling us things similar to what you would hear from the 30+ financial gurus. Her edge is that we, as knowledge thirsty college grads (hopefully), will be more likely to listen to her rather than the elderly…and she’s right. (To all the other players in the financial industry, I admire you greatly but I’m trying to make a point here.)

She’s funding her IRA, putting money in a savings account, paying off her credit card bills in full each month, and saving a home down payment. Talk about on track!

Her advise? “[B]ookmark me or put me in your RSS feed — you won’t regret it.” My advise? What she said. She’s a new writer for a new age in which hopefully we’ll become educated enough to use the debt industry to our advantage instead of to our downfall.

On that note, Visa’s IPO (Initial Public Offering is expected in early January 2008, I’ll be planning on buying up a little of their company and investing some of the proceeds from the investment to donate towards fighting the financial monster as I’m already doing with MasterCard. The credit card industry isn’t going away anytime soon, the least I can do is take some of its profit to fight it.

Be sure to check out Anya’sblog for more information on staying informed and becoming an educated member of generation debt.

Additional Information:
Ramit Sethi’s article from his interview with Anya

Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Jim writes about personal finance on a level that I greatly admire. His blog contains information about why to open a ROTH IRA (I hear you on that one Jim), why to rent forever (or at least until you are actually ready to take the plunge), the right credit card offers to accept, and the down to earth : what to invest with if you only have $100?

His thesis: “Blueprint for Financial Prosperity is a personal finance blog where I plan to discuss matters of shopping, insurance, investing, retirement, loans, credit cards, mortgages, bargain hunting and other issues related to personal finance. What you will find at Blueprint is a personal finance novice struggling to understand some pretty complex and confusing topics. I’m by no means an expert on anything and I don’t claim to be - you will learn as I learn, struggle as I struggle, and hopefully, together, we can avoid some of the common mistakes we would otherwise fall prey to.”

He is in a position very similar to mine and many of the readers out there; Blueprint is a great source for information.

Jim, good luck with the site and the exploration of the financial world.

I Will Teach You to be Rich

Ramit Sethi, Stanford grad with a finacial website featured in The Wall Street Journal, puts it like it is.

“(First of all, if you do nothing else today, just do a back-of-the-napkin calculation like I did to get a ballpark of what you spend. Then, if you’re working, compare your annual spending with your annual income (after taxes) and see if you’re spending more than you make. For example, if the potluck person had a $40,000 income and $32,400 expenses, after taxes she’d actually be spending more than she made. PLEASE DO THIS TO SEE IF YOU ARE SPENDING MORE THAN YOU EARN!!! If you’re too lazy to do this, I hate you.)”

If you are too lazy to do a little grunt work and actually take responsibility for your situation in life and take a litte action…he hates you. 

I don’t hate you, I just don’t care what happens to you and will laugh at your situation when you whine about how the world has somehow dealt you a bad hand in ten years when your 401K balance is still $0.00, you have a negative net worth, and are 100% clueless about your plight.  Strong statement?  Perhaps.  My main point is simply that if you are reading this, you’re doing the right thing.  Maybe you did a quick google search for some financial information, keep reading as much as you can from wherever you can, you won’t regret it.

As for Ramit, I dig the site, I fully agree with his I hate bloggers who waste their time on stats posting back in April which reavealed the secret to a successful website : “The “secret” is simple: Write good articles on things people care about, and then tell the right people about it. But that’s not sexy enough, is it? Instead, people spin their wheels installing the latest plugin and wonder why their exquisitely measured site doesn’t get more readers. “  His sometimes brutally honest and straightforward approach towards the subjects he writes about is uniquely able to bump your brain on a new path, give you a laugh, and create new/modified ideas. 

Check out his website, it currently contains a lot more information than I’ve written up but for the record, I’m aiming to be his competition.  Ramit rocks!