We wouldn’t have a “student debt crisis” if people believed post-secondary education is about improving your earning potential. The fact that that’s even a thing is proof that many people believe the exact opposite of what you’ve described.

I use an online service to file my taxes but I always do them by hand myself prior to doing so. I’ve yet to have a delta between my number and theirs of more than a dollar.

Um it’s primarily people. Specifically the innumerate lemming variety of people. The number of entities that are properly handling real estate as a money making tool (these are the corporations and true investors) are dwarfed by the number of entities pissing away what little money they have on an “investment” that…

Investments are purchases from which you reasonably expect to get out more money than you put in. Why is this concept so freaking hard for people?

Budgeting is how you end up with that sort of money... Is that really not blatantly obvious?

“There are plenty of no-talent hacks who have become wildly successful DESPITE their complete inability to perform.”

“Talent and hard work neither enable nor assure.”

Yeah the real lie is probably the idea that hard work should lead to success. Talent combined with hard work does. 5'4 Bob Marshall isn’t going to hard work his way into dunking on LeBron James.

On the list of reasons why the American meritocracy is a myth a handful of rich families bribing their way into elite schools is like reason 19,962. It’s so far down the list that this headline matched with this event can only be interpreted as white nonsense.

“I’m thinking of all of the really hard working students, students who put in the time, got great grades, and whose parents don’t have hundreds of thousands to bribe their way in.”

The system actually allows for plenty of downward mobility. The child of parents at the “top” has a much better chance of ending up anywhere but the top than retaining that position. Class isn’t that sticky.

I go into employment discussions from the position that either my current boss is going to give me what I want or my replacement boss is going to give me what I want. It’s not uncomfortable for you when your current boss is the only one that stands to lose anything.

“A car buyer in 2016 got a zero percent APR loan on a new car that retailed $30,000 and the payments were $500 per month. That person is now back in the market but their trade value is equal to their loan payoff so it’s a wash.”

The idea is that you need to weigh the cost savings associated with aggressively addressing debt against the opportunity cost of not investing that money. The number itself isn’t really important because it’s personal.

The trustworthy vpn is the one where you sign up with a cloud service of your choosing and administer your combo tunneling/forward proxy solution on your own. I’d wager that that’s some degree of what these VPN providers that have been coming out of the woodwork are doing so cut out the middle man and do it yourself.…

That paragraph, minus the part about apps, could probably be a personal finance article all by itself because a lot of people struggle with its content.

The guidelines exist to give people a fighting chance at avoiding a trip into debt, the street, or being plain old house poor when faced with shit happening. The only caveat is that if you want a greater risk of encountering one (or all) of those outcomes when shit happens do whatever you want.

Those people have broadcasted, loudly, that you could raise taxes on them but as long as they get a refund in the end they’ll be happy because the refund is obviously what really matters.

Gurus only exist because seemingly everyone is waiting on someone to spill the beans on the magical money secret. Spend less than you make and invest. Personal finance isn’t rocket science. Whoops. Spilled the beans.

It’s a which costs more comparison. Do the cheaper one and use the difference to get ahead financially. More clear?