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Is Anyone Listening?

There is plenty of bad advice, scams, and advice that makes the advice giver more money than you, out there, but there’s also good advice. It’s hard for the good advice to cut through the noise and the fact that the good advice also takes a bit more work, or at least doesn’t sound as easy as the bad advice, doesn’t help.

Without asking every single person I meet how they’re doing with their finances I’ll never know if people really are listening. Using statistics provided by the government, however, I think I have a pretty good idea that most people aren’t listening at all. How else do you explain the fact that the savings rate is –0.5 per cent?

I’m writing this as I’m heading into work and I’d really rather be going anywhere else but I know that if I want that pay check at the end of the week I better go in. When it comes to investing however, it seems that people don’t want to do the work. Buying stocks isn’t enough if you don’t do the research and try to minimize the costs. That’s work, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Sure it’s not as easy as picking blindly and hitting the jackpot but nothing ever is.

I often talk about hard work as a means to more money but there really is a very simple way to do better, spend less and save more. You can do a lot more than you think by cutting out things that aren’t really necessary. Paul B. Farrell (a favorite columnist of mine) from Marcketwatch.com talks about this quite often and books such as "You’re Money or Your Life" or "The Coffeehouse Investor" show that if you stop trying to get super rich with shcemes and scams, and instead focus on steady investment within your means you’ll do far better than most people. But we hang onto the dream and take the bait of easy riches whenever it's offered.

Other people such as Jean Sherman Chatzky whose book "You Don’t Have to be Rich" points out that "money can't make you happy, but it can make you miserable" is another source of good advice. "The Millionaire Next Door" is an excellent book that demonstrates that having lots of things, driving a Mercedes S500, and living in a huge house aren’t the signs of wealth, that people living modest lives have something more important than a fancy car, they have security.

For all this good advice out there I still see people with $15,000, $50,000, or $100,000 in just credit card debt. We see the reports on the news every night and yet are we listening? Are you listening?