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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > someone who is good at the economy help me budget this, my family is dying
 
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Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Sphairon posted:

The idea of "building up credit" is completely foreign to my Euro neck of the woods. As someone with precarious and irregular income, my credit card limit is €100 and 10 years ago I might not even have gotten a credit card. If I go into debt and pay it off, nothing improves for me. But if I fail to pay up, I'll have to deal with lifelong (not sure about that) negative entries in a debtor archive, which might end up costing me loan, housing or even employment opportunities.
FYI you don't actually have to go into debt to use credit cards and 'build up credit'. If you pay off your balance every month it basically functions like a debit card, except better.

Mr. Money Mustache is great. Yeah it's still bootstrappy but what do you expect from a personal finance blog? "Give up and wait for full communism" isn't terribly practical advice.

* # ¿ Jul 22, 2017 16:40
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 14:10
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Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Nevvy Z posted:

Lol who said anything about communism before this post?
Did you not notice the first couple replies on the first page?

Aside from that, the anti-bootstraps sentiment is strong in D&D and similar message boards, such that criticism of personal finance blogs along the lines of "how dare you try to help people better their financial lives, can't you see they're just at the mercy of kkkapitalism's murderous talons and there's nothing to be done except to push for communism??" is pretty common. For example, from this very thread:

quote:

If you're someone who's not making a living wage(a lot of people) or are like one health crisis away from bankruptcy(probably most of the US) then it's harmful because it starts from the false premise that you actually have control over your financial life.

Most people in the US are not actually in any position to control their financial future due to factors outside their control(falling wages for decades, no universal healthcare system, healthcare costs through the roof).
Which is dumb because whether capitalism is screwing people over is still orthogonal to giving them individual advice to improve their situation. Yes it sucks that the US doesn't have UHC and whatnot, but using that an excuse to shrug your shoulders and go, "well guess you're just screwed then, no point in trying to make the best of a bad situation" isn't helpful.

Now, whether Ramsey's particular advice is good or not is a totally separate issue (mostly it seems to range between "meh, could be worse" to "pretty bad, actually"). Really his greatest virtue is that he reaches a blue-collar/conservative demographic that a lot of other, more liberal/technocratic personal finance bloggers cannot.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2017

* # ¿ Jul 22, 2017 19:00
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Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Paradoxish posted:

Good financial advice is usually pretty specific to an individual's particular situation. If you're reasonably well off then you can probably afford to take general purpose advice and make it work, but even otherwise good advice can be actively harmful to someone that's living paycheck to paycheck or struggling to pay their bills. Like, insisting that someone with very little income save 10% of what they earn can really gently caress that person over if they take it to heart.
Yeah I'm not trying to defend Ramsey's specific advice, donating money when you're barely staying afloat is real dumb. But if you read personal finance help threads (or calls or letters) there's a ton of repetition. Obviously any one person can only use a subset of the general advice out there, but it's still useful.

* # ¿ Jul 22, 2017 20:02
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > someone who is good at the economy help me budget this, my family is dying