I had a long week at work this past week. It affected my blogging, if you didn’t notice – Wednesday’s post went out late Saturday, and Friday’s post…well let’s try for next week, shall we?
Because of the busy week, I had very little opportunity to read any blogs this week. But there are three posts that have been…we’ll call them controversial. And they’ve been all over the personal finance sphere this week. I wanted to highlight them because they underscore a problem we are trying to work through in the personal finance community.
What exactly do you, the readers, expect out of personal finance bloggers?
And what should we, the bloggers, give you in return?
Are you reading bloggers whose lives closely mirror your own, and find those who don’t to be a waste of time? Do you want to hear from people who are well ahead of you in their financial path, so you can mimic them? Do you need them to be 100% upfront about every aspect of their lives in order to find value in what they say? If a blogger focuses on personal stories instead of lessons, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do you expect radical transparency from bloggers, and if so have you thought through the ramifications of them doing so (both in their lives/minds and your own)?
I have some plans to address this from my own perspective in future posts, but I’m interested in hearing what you have to say first.
I’m only going to talk about the first one, because I don’t want to taint your reaction to any of them but I admit it rubbed me the wrong way.
I’m serious about wanting to hear what you have to say about these pieces. Bloggers are writing for an audience – you. It’s important to know what you think. Drop a line. If you don’t want to leave a comment on the blog, send me an email at militarydollar@militarydollar.com or leave a comment in one of the Facebook pages where I post this.
Article #1: Why Households Need To Earn $300,000 A Year To Live A Middle Class Lifestyle Today
Financial Samurai – March 19, 2018
Emphasis on the word “Need” in that title…
Now, my problem is not with people who earn $300,000. More power to them. If I were married to someone of equal rank, our household income wouldn’t be too far below that…at least not where I’m currently living.
And I have no problem understanding that you do need more money to live in San Francisco than you need to have the same lifestyle in Des Moines. I live in a very High Cost Of Living area right now. I’ve lived on the coast in California. I know what it’s like to live in expensive cities. But…
This post is out of touch.
What really bothers me here is the acceptance of both the blogger and many of his readers to willy-nilly change the definition of middle class to meet their argument. I’m not of the opinion that you have to follow the definition of middle class (which in the US is two-thirds (2/3) to two times (2x) the median household income for the area) to the dollar. I don’t think that if you earn $100 more than the upper limit of middle class, you are suddenly rich.
But these people are defending the idea that earning $100,000 more (!!!) than the upper limit of middle class for that city only makes them middle class. No. It’s that word “Need.” Like $300,000 is the starting point for middle class. As in, anything less isn’t even middle class. As in, if you are living in San Francisco and you aren’t making something close to $300,000, you must be struggling. By this logic, an O-6 Colonel/Captain living in San Francisco would be…barely able to make ends meet? What does that mean for the E-5s? Are we to believe every janitor in San Francisco makes nearly $300,000?
That thought is at best silly, and at worst harmful to the people reading. Why? Because *generally speaking* people aren’t logical with their money. We are ruled by emotions – envy being a big one. People don’t view their money as something independent of others – they decide what is normal based on what others are doing. That’s why we have The Joneses, and why FIRE is considered a counter-culture financial path.
The best way for me to describe how I feel about this post was written by one of the commenters, so I’ll let him/her have the last word:
…pretending that these aren’t lower echelons of the upper class is just diluting the definition of middle class to the point where it means nothing”
Article #2: Being Frugal Is For The Rich
The Outline – March 23, 2018
Article #3: What FIRE Bloggers Owe Readers // A Blogging Manifesto
Our Next Life – March 21, 2018
Attempting to not get caught in inductive fallacies is very difficult , even when definitions, terms and broad understanding is thought to have been achieved. Misleading vividness, in this case the eye catching title with the $300K, appeals to the readers as “omg that is a lot of money”…until context places comparisons out the window. Bloggers have a difficult assumption to make in each post, answering who is my audience and what message will these words construe.
An O-1 and an O-9 are both Officers, yet there are 8 levels of income deltas between them. An E-5 through an E-9, all NCOs, and we still codify further as junior, mid and senior. Nothing simple when it comes to income and expenses either…usually an additional codification is placed.
Statistics can show cause for an effect, more often than not it does not. Showing a correlation is often the easy way out, but to infer causation is an error.
#1. at one point we may have made 150k or so for 2 incomes working for the man in a cheap city. i can say i felt filthy rich at that level about 5 years ago. i bought whatever i wanted, which wasn’t much outside of good booze. that’s my perspective.
#2. i read that frugalwood site a little bit and found it too nerdy and preachy for my taste. as somebody who grew up about a 4 iron from vermont i also recognize the “flatlanders” whom we made fun of. like, you got that big new piece of equipment/toy to clear a driveway? we had a 1971 toyota land cruiser with no license plates that plowed our driveway and our neighbor’s for about 15 years. and you don’t squash all your apples into cider, you dig a root cellar, fraud! i didn’t just write that, i was only thinking it.
#3. i read that one and mostly stayed out of it. it seemed like the club could argue this one ’til blue in the face but i only read these things for the entertainment.
Great roundup! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those 2 posts, and how pursuing FIRE may look from the outside world. I think they’re right that an American family making median income is simply not going to be able to save 71% of their income without living in poverty. The math just doesn’t add up. I would personally love to see more posts on personal finance and debt management. I think that’s what most of America struggles with, especially the young Airmen/Soldier/Sailor looking for advice. So yes, there’s a bit of privilege built into one’s assumptions when talking about FIRE. My favorite line is “If you just save an extra $500/m at X% compound interest for 30 years, you”ll be a millionaire!” As if someone making $40K a year with $80K in student debt and a parent whose health is failing has that option. Everyone’s situation is different. Not everyone is a young, single former Google engineer or Finance whiz with no kids, perfect health, and a blog with 100K monthly unique visitors. If you have the luxury of writing about “arbitraging the lower property valuations and higher net rental yields in the heartland of America,” you’ve already achieved a much higher level of financial fitness than most ever will. I gotta say, I usually love Financial Samurai, but some of his posts like that really do make him seem a bit out of touch. I don’t care where you are, $300K is not middle class. I’ve lived in southern Cali, outside of Denver, and in Washington DC on a salary of less than half that amount, and yes there were times when we had to make some adjustment to make ends meet. But that was our choice. We could have chosen to live in a cheaper area of town. We could have chosen to shop in bulk at Costco instead of eating out all the time. Even with his budget, you can find ways to cut costs and live further beneath your means. If you have the income to be able to afford to buy a house and live comfortably in a city like San Francisco, sorry to burst your bubble, but YOU ARE NOT MIDDLE CLASS. Sure, maybe that’s the median income in cities like that, but those cities are off the charts compared to most locations in the US. I call BS.
Okay, I really need to read articles #1 and #2 now. It’s interesting how much flack Mrs. Frugalwoods has gotten with her book release, but I do understand the feelings of people who haven’t had the luxury to be frugal for the same reasons – though I would argue that our country would be better off as a whole if people lived more like they did (versus the rampant consumerism that’s much more popular).
Thanks for the highlight. When the $300,000 post got featured on Yahoo Finance, I was expecting a massive backlash since there was so much backlash from you and others on Twitter. Alas, the responses were pretty tame and not too many if you look at them, which makes me think that the article’s argument was so strong that it was hard for the masses to disagree. I don’t know any other reason why the response from Yahoo readers was so tame.
See the comments for yourself: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/households-need-earn-300000-year-live-middle-class-lifestyle-174504164.html
BTW, what are your thoughts on Twitter? I’m not often too often, but when I get on, I notice that it’s like high school in the PF sphere and others, where users just talk about other users without @ing them. Why not just say something directly to the person?
Sam
We must be reading different comments. The comments I’m seeing on the Yahoo article are far less friendly than you seem to perceive. Although the nicer ones look largely like what I saw on Twitter: “no one NEEDS to spend such ridiculous amounts” is one of the tamer comments. Kingdom Come does seem to be a fan of yours though. I personally didn’t see a lot of backlash on Twitter. What I saw was a lot of people telling you that $300,000 isn’t middle class by any accepted definition of the word, and you ignoring that. Perhaps if you’d been willing to engage with people on what middle class actually is, you wouldn’t have felt attacked. Why not have conversations instead of telling people they are wrong? Finance Stoic did a great job of having the conversation many of us were trying to have with you, btw.
I find PF Twitter to be an incredibly friendly and supportive place, but when people put out tweets meant to provoke and then act appalled that people are provoked, I suppose it can come off differently. As to why people subtweet (I think that’s the word for what you are describing) perhaps they don’t want to get into a Twitter debate. Perhaps the last time they tried to engage someone with facts on a topic, they were blown off and/or ridiculed – something I’ve seen a lot of lately. I definitely don’t like to waste my time that way. Perhaps they don’t want the other person to jump into the conversation. Perhaps they just don’t want to bother. I really can’t answer for why everybody does what they do. I suspect there are many reasons. Why do you think people use clickbait titles? I personally hate them, but some people like them.