Avoid Fake Facts

SAHM, College, Raising Children, Debt, & Life Insurance

Personal finance guys love their little ‘shocking’ tidbits.

The space is full of claims that, if you don’t think too hard (or are incapable of thinking hard) about them, seem possible. But if you stop and ponder you quickly start to see some massive holes in the logic.

But so many people see these claims and then make major life decisions based on continuously hearing the same type of claim over and over.

This substack has spilt much ink on personal finance ‘rules’ that can be disproven with personal experience before. And even more posts have been written about these ‘rules’ that can be disproven with some analysis.

Today, we are going to go over some of the claims that are so egregious that it is unfathomable (at least to me) how anyone who tries to make them isn’t immediately ridiculed into such shame the only way out is seppuku.

I’ve used this story before, but it is a good, albeit mild, example of the kind of ‘facts’ being referred to.

When F’er was a young lad, schools had a program called D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) which dared kids to avoid drugs. Well F’er couldn’t have been much older than 2nd or 3rd grade when the cop who did the talks came in and told us how much a pack of cigarettes costs ($1 back in the day). And if your parents quit smoking they would save $7 a week or $365 a year (a seemingly massive amount of money to a young F’er).

The punchline was ‘invested, that would be enough to buy a corvette for you when you graduate’. (Apparently the cop subscribed to the Dave Ramsey-esque theory of small amounts of money + unreasonable returns on investments = huge money).

Man. Just think, F’er riding off to college in a sports car. Amazing.

Well, young F’er went home and couldn’t wait to tell Papa F’er about this amazing fact. Papa F’er was not known for mincing words. After letting his opinion of the police officer be known, and before showing how dumb it was with some simple math and comparing $1 a day to the cost of a meal, he said “neither me or your mom smoke so where the f is our corvettes”.

Sadly, despite the world being 30+ years later, these kinds of ‘facts’ still exist.

So lets point out why these are absurd so you can laugh next time you see them (I hope none of you actually believe these so I hope I am not opening your eyes…but if you tend to be gullible or not think about things you see in the news, you definitely don’t want to miss this post).

We are talking about ‘facts’ like…