The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness: Ramsey
(See online!)

I have heard of the philosophy of not needing a credit history or credit cards, but never really believed it could work for me until I read this book. Ramsey describes many carefully planted myths about money and money management that hurt normal people and benefit companies and how our ignorance of this is killing us financially. We are trained by meticulous marketing techniques to live a lifestyle that will keep us in debt forever (a lesson I've lived personally).

Read this book to get a practical and easy-to-implement plan that will get your personal finances under control. Stop wasting money, stop worrying about the future, stop being a slave to your debts. And, yes, I'm debt free and have been for more than four years now. Never again.

I'm fairly ambivalent about the whole Wikileaks issue. I've long been a supporter of whistleblowing in general as companies and the governement should be held accountable for abuses and wrong-doing and often it's only fully public scandals that allow that to happen (though sometimes not even then).

Anyway, as to whether Wikileaks has done anything wrong, one must first ask if there was anything posted that caused significantly more harm than good (which so far has been a "no" it seems).

But to the point, Wikileaks is expected to release a lot of data about Bank of America very soon. There's a lot of speculation, but more interestingly, there are reports that Bank of America is preparing focused teams to respond to whatever drops when it drops.

I look forward to seeing how slime covered that rock is when it's lifted.

I've never liked Mint.com. Not because they're bad at what they do (they're not), but because you have to give them too much access to take advantage of it. So you get a little money management help, so what? You have to give away your password to do it. Not only that, Mint is (surprise, surprise) using all that juicy data you provide for their own purposes.

For now, it seems that they're not actually telling you who purchased what, but there's no telling when and if they'll start selling your valuable personal data to 3rd parties. Until then, showing truly anonymous purchase information is kind of neat so long as they don't take it further than that.

I've never liked Mint.com. Not because they're bad at what they do (they're not), but because you have to drop your trousers to take advantage of it. So you get a little money management help, so what? You have to give away your password to do it. Not only that, Mint is (surprise, surprise) using all that juicy data you provide for their own purposes.

For now, it seems that they're not actually telling you who purchased what, but there's no telling when and if they'll start selling your valuable personal data to 3rd parties (maybe they are already). Until then, showing truly anonymous purchase information is kind of neat so long as they don't take it further than that.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

This is some great stuff:

If big business has its way, which it usually does since those with the gold make the rules, business will suck every penny you have out of you until you can't earn any more and are left dead or dying. This is the way a competitive economy works: there are winners and there are losers.

The great thing about America is that anyone who wants to can achieve anything, limited only by their imaginations, but the bad thing is that those who just want to slide along in life usually slide off a cliff to the benefit of those who are paying attention.

Here he explains how to buy whatever you want, but to do it intelligently and cheaply. He drives better cars than his friends, but paid far less. He saves tons of money so he can afford to buy the toys he wants. He avoids credit and worthless expenditures.

Sounds good to me 🙂

About the only thing I disagree with is his stance on TV and video games. I happen to learn quite a lot from those. A whole lot. Really! It's totally not a waste of my time…

Ok, maybe it is, but he spends all his time working on cars. Everyone has to have their hobbies.

Anyway, read it. It's fun and interesting like this section here:

I got lucky with my wife. She's even cheaper than I am, but she's rare. Want to know how cheap she is? She hates flowers because she can't bear knowing that they die in a week and then the money is gone. She'd rather just have the money. I sometimes leave a $20 on the counter. When she asks "what's this?" I respond "flowers." She then gets all smiley. Marriage is weird.

Oh, and extra points to the author for doing advertising right! Way to go!

Let's just get your SSN, a few fingernail cuttings, an elbow-print, a sample of saliva, and fill out this form of all your deepest fears and personal secrets!

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Defending your information doesn't stop when you walk out the front door. How many times when you're at the store, at the doctor's office, or otherwise out and about does someone ask for your private information? Do you provide it? Should you? How can you know?

The defense is simply this: ask. Why do they want to know? What will they do with it? How do they protect it? Ask and depending on the answer, decide what to do. For example:

• When I went to a new dentist, they asked for my social security number. When I asked, they claimed they needed it for insurance purposes, but a quick call to the insurance company confirmed that wasn't the case and I refused. They were able to put a random number instead and everything worked fine: I got service and they got paid.

I was once asked for my SSN at a video-rental store! Obviously they didn't need it for anything, but it made me wonder how many people provided it just because they were asked.


Most stores will take the Jenny number for discounts and such
(See online!)
• Lots of stores have "club cards" or some kind of membership where you theoretically get discounts or they can pull up your purchase history for returns or some such nonsense. Depending on the specifics, I might sign up (leaving everything I can blank — which is usually a lot if not most of it), but sometimes I'll just give them a common phone number that someone else has already set up. Specifically your area code plus one of the following almost always works: 555-1212 (the number to general information) or 867-5309 (the Jenny number).
• Electronic signatures are everywhere, but are you really comfortable giving companies yet another important piece of data to lose? The system isn't going to check what you put in (even if you draw funny or inappropriate pics instead) so it's up to you what to do in this case. If I were of a privacy mind, I might draw the first letter of my signature for myself (so I could tell later it was me who signed it) and then scribble the rest randomly.

Fun fact: I quite literally stopped the nurses at the birthing ward to ask them why they wanted a SSN on the admission paperwork while my wife was in active labor in the wheelchair behind me. Due to the impending baby, we agreed to handle the paperwork later (spoiler alert: they didn't need it either).

Summary

By being stingy with my data, I have avoided letting people put my information into yet another computer system and be at risk from abuse and hacking. It's not a 100% solution of course, but it costs me little other than some time and confused looks from employees who've never been challenged before. For my effort, my data is harder to find, harder to lose, and harder to exploit.

Exercise

Exercise by Nick Youngson - Alpha Stock Images

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

This section doesn't lend itself well to exercises. Just be careful out there ok?

What you can do is check out the resources page (next in the guide) and make sure to click any remaining orange-colored dots next to the lessons in the guide. This will mark them complete and once all are so-marked, you will receive a course-completion badge in your profile. Congrats for making it through 🙂