You know, here’s the thing:
I’m not a financial genius, and never will be.
Our fearless leaders have used “emergency” situations like this to assume more and more power through the years, to the point where the cures are way more painful than the ills they were used to prevent.
Let us catch the cold. Fewer people will die from it, in the end, than if we give Big Gummint leave to “fix” it for us.
Most financial “geniuses” are, at this very moment, sweating harder than I do in the garden, and developing additional ulcers.
I’ve come to realize over the past few years that winning financially does NOT take “genius”, it simply requires listening to Granny, Granddaddy, and Dad.
Spend less than you make. Pay off debt. Don’t borrow money. Rainy days are coming, have a rainy day fund. Save slowly BUT consistently.
Those simple principles are NOT sophisticated, and financial MBAs would laugh. Financial MBAs are the people having their asses handed to them this week.
Lisa and I just keep driving our paid-for vehicles, paying cash (or debit, not credit card) for what we need, saving for Alex’s college and our retirement, and paying down our mortgage early… all a little at a time.
And we’ve been looking at the events of this week as “That’s interesting.”
All because we started paying attention to the non-genius common sense of the folks who walked these roads before us.
Related note – Texans in the House of Representatives seem to be a big part of the stumbling block to the “emergency throw money now” attitude – mainly because they’ve been getting record-breaking numbers of comments, including mine, running 95-98% against the $700bn kingmaker bill.
Scare a Texan bad enough, he just might shoot ya. Try to scare him, but not enough, and you’ll just piss him off. That’s the message I sent to Kay Granger and both my Senators, and at least Granger has gotten the clue.