Voters in the state of California spoke loudly and angrily last Tuesday. After years of convoluted budget fixes, exotic borrowing schemes and skirting tough issues, Californians just said “no” to another series of band-aid fiscal ballot measures that just seemed like more of the same. Voter frustration has risen to such new levels that now there is even a movement to completely rewrite the State’s constitution to prevent the politicians from operating like credit drunk consumers.
Archive for the 'Financial Tools' Category
Page 2 of 2
I’ve heard it said that you can tell a lot about a person by what they do with their wallet. In our life, I would say that’s pretty accurate. A few years ago if someone went through our checkbook and debit card receipts, there is would be a pretty consistent pattern tracking what we value most highly. Repetitive expenditures after essentials are traveling to hang out with our adult “kids”, charitable stuff and keeping my wife’s horticultural degree in bloom by regular visits to the local nursery.
Turns out April is “Financial Literacy Month” and the National Foundation for Credit Counseling is weighing in by releasing the initial results of their third annual Financial Literacy survey. As this is currently a hot topic nationally, Congress will be briefed with the full report later this month. They will hear, among other alarming statistics, that fully 41% of respondents gave themselves a grade of either “C, D or F” when it comes to understanding money and/or making good money decisions. We are definitely not making the Dean’s List here.
Last week, I mentioned that two of the clear differences between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression are the interactive ways we now communicate and the staggering amount of data that is literally at our fingertips via the Web. Collectively these phenomena contribute to what I termed the, “data invasion”, meaning that, unless we have a way to filter, simplify, and personalize financial information we will probably not be much better off than they were in the 30′s… sort of dazed and confused.
These days as I slog through my daily Wall Street Journal, by the time I get to the lone cartoon buried somewhere in the back of the paper, I feel like I have been mauled by dozens of bears. What’s scary is that I am now almost numb to the pain because the daily mauling has been going on for well over a year. The Wall Street whispers of, “stay the course” and “invest for the long term” are ingrained in my thinking but it’s hard not to feel that what is going on now is different than the downturns of the past.
