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She can't take it any more! I have bored my wife enough with talk of money (she thinks I'm obsessed) and politics (I think I'm obsessed). I can't do this to her anymore so now I turn to the internet and any eyes that might find these words. My fixations have even led me to suggest that I might want to run for some kind of office but my wife doesn't stick around when I start talking that kind of nonsense. I have even written a book about a subject I care about, money (maybe I am obsessed), but I doubt it will ever actually be published. I think I know why - the reason can either be that I can't write or that I don't have the proper resume to write a personal finance book. I think it's the latter hence the name Obscure. But I don't buy that kind of thinking.

I don't buy into the belief that you have to have experience with something, that you have to have first lived it to give advice about it, whatever it might be. When I originally began writing this the Olympics were under way in Athens and I saw the coach of the US women's gymnastics team and wondered how many vaults he'd done or what his floor exercise might look like. The point is that he is a great coach but can't do what the atheletes he trains can do, maybe he never has.

The advice in my book is based on common sense, something most people just don't seem to have any more. None of the secrets to wealth are really secret. You need to make more money than you spend and if you want to be fabulously wealthy, you need to make much more money. That's not the hard part; the hard part is knowing what will make you rich, what job to take, what business to start. If that were easy then everyone would do it. It's not easy. And no book in the world will ever be able to show you how to succeed. Luck, skill, determination and an ability to laugh in the face of risk is what is required and a million people given the same resources will have a million different outcomes because of these variables.

Common sense is also lacking in politics. Today there are two political camps in this country, one on the right and the other on the left. In the middle are the politicians, the actual elected officials, listening to any and every body that will give them money. The true believers on both sides will contradict themselves and deny it to your face. They will ignore a good idea from the other side simply because of the source. Compromise is not in their vocabulary.

We have a president that lost the popular vote the first time around and yet acted as if he was given a mandate to do as he pleased. Now that he's won the popular vote who knows what havoc he'll wreak. (I guess there is no kidding myself - I'm not sure how impartial I'll be able to be on this site).

Our president is conservative and conservatives use the word liberal as a vulgarity and the people on the left let them. But progressives (as they are wont to be called) think of conservative as the bad word when the truth is that they are both wrong. It's good to be conservative just as long as you don't stand in the way of progress.

That's it. That's all you get from me today. This is my introduction to me, Rich E.Obscure and I hope that some of what I've said and will say has made sense. I hope that you will read these words and say, "oh I didn't think of it that way" or "yeah that does make sense when you think about it." I hope that this will begin a dialog that leads somewhere, to a place where common sense rules the day.