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Let’s Fix Money Magazine!

May 3, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

I love Money… the magazine and the concept. Today, I want to focus on the magazine. I’ve been reading Money (along with Kiplingers) since I was in high school. That’s around 25 years now.

When each issue hits my mailbox, I’m so excited to see what’s inside. It’s little bit of Christmas that comes every month. Except this last month’s issue was… different.

The cover almost made me throw-up in my mouth. Money has already sold me so the cover isn’t important to me.

Then I started to read it. It didn’t get better. If possible, it got worse.

I gave it to my wife and asked, “Do you see anything wrong with this?” I feel like this is a good litmus test. She’s not a personal finance junkie like myself. So if she says, no, that’s great. I might be crazy, but maybe it would be differently crazy.

My wife pointed to an article that I hadn’t noticed.

This issue of Money magazine was such a dumpster fire that we couldn’t even agree on which trash is getting burned the most.

I am going to point out why the magazine was so bad. This might make me Grumpy McGrumpface I deliver this criticism with love. Tough love, but love nonetheless. Perhaps my stinging criticism will get their attention.

I’m going to offer some solutions to their issue (pun completely intended). I sympathize with Money. The issue before this one announced an editorial change. I imagine it is difficult to sell magazines in a world where newspapers are a dying breed.

(Note to Money: If any of the “fixes” below make sense, then reach out to me. I’m happy to write for you. This article isn’t a soliticiation. Some companies would pay tens of thousands of dollars for this kind of feedback. I offer it freely.)

What Wrong with Money Magazine?

It starts with the cover. The sub-heading on the magazine is “Tony Robbins Wants to Make You Rich.” It reminded me of when Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki published a book in 2006 titled “Why We Want You to Be Rich.”

I covered Kiyosaki’s scam here. I cover that other guy here. The book was terrible according to The Wall Street Journal and Kiplinger’s. Here’s a quote from that Kiplinger’s article:

“The Donald needs no introduction. Kiyosaki’s success with Rich Dad Poor Dad has spawned a franchise of books, games and speaking engagements… Impressive resumes. Alas, unimpressive book. Why We Want You to Be Rich is a thinly veiled infomercial for more financial-advice products from Kiyosaki, Trump and their minions. They sell positive thinking and can-do haziness — specific details cost extra.”

I’m not being political, I’m quoting a review from 2006. If Pee-Wee Herman runs for office, it’s fair for me to quote Pee-Wee Herman reviews (and Chair), right? This isn’t partisan.

Sorry, I got sidetracked.

My point was: If you want to make me rich, then simply give me your money. I’m here and I have a a contact form. If there’s a way I can make it easier for you, let’s talk. Don’t try to sell me a book.

It’s strange to hear that Tony Robbins wants to me rich. For decades he’s been known as an inspirational speaker. He didn’t seem to be interested in helping people with money until a couple of years ago.

In fact, Tony Robbins talked about his connections with “financial people” in this video in 2010. This “economic warning” gives a recommendation of taking money out of the stock market.

With the benefit of 7 years of hindsight, it doesn’t seem that it was good advice.

So it is very strange to have Money trumpeting Tony Robbins on the cover. He seems to admit that he doesn’t know jack-poop about finance in the video. I can find 2000 people at FinCon, who care about personal finance deeply. They live and breathe it. Why aren’t they on the cover of the magazine? (To avoid an aesthetics argument, there are attractive people at FinCon… myself not being one of them).

But even if you throw away Robbins’ failure at personal finance, there’s the time he was directly responsible for dozens of injuries according to the Washington Post. That article is from June of last year… it’s not old news.

Money magazine couldn’t wait 5 or 6 years to promote someone with almost no personal finance knowledge (that he seems to admit to)… and what he seemed to say was proven wrong.

I don’t have the space to express the number of people who might be more appropriate for the cover. Instead, I’ll jump to animals. Yep my dog is a personal finance guru. And yes my dog is much, much more handsome than Tony Robbins. He has the paper to prove it.

Phew… that is a lot of writing that seems to attack Tony Robbins. I love second chances. Let’s give him one. That’s fair, right?

Do you think this Money Magazine feature of Tony Robbins is about saving money, investing appropriately, or something that is actionable by readers. As my 4 year old would say: Nahhhh!

Instead the Tony Robbins feature seems to openly disclose that he’s promoting for a 401k company. The point he’s trying to make was essentially “401k fees are bad.”

It’s a valid point, but I covered the problem of excessive 401k fees a decade ago. And I wasn’t paid to promote a company. I was simply explaining something I read.

Oh and I didn’t include a picture of myself on my private jet like Robbins did.

I’m ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille Mr. Money Magazine.

Not everything wrong with this issue of Money is about Mr. Robbins… though I wonder if he’d like it to be. I threw him under the bus (and drove over him a few times), but this isn’t about one feature. I didn’t jump to that article.

Let’s take Tony out of the picture and pretend that “scandal” didn’t happen.

One person does not a dumpster fire make.

The Rest of Money Magazine

On page 12 there was a 2-page spread (“First”) on a $250 million dollar home. It appears to be a rewrite of this January article. CNN used to be CNN Money, I think.

I hope there isn’t a picture of a candy wall… Nope, there is. It looks like your standard candy store, but it’s important journalism to note that this is in my “typical” $250 million house. Why is a personal finance magazine wasting precious publishing space with this?

Can the average person relate to a $250 million home?

The next page has an article of “She Became a Billionaire at Age 82.” It is about an entrepreneur in Japan who started her company in 1973. It appears there were unique gender challenges in Japan at the time. Kudos for her overcoming huge odds.

Can you relate to an 82 year-old Japanese billionaire? Can you use that to improve your financial situation.

The next article is about “Streaming on a Shoestring Budget.” Good idea, but it isn’t about streaming services… where the real cost is. Instead it is about streaming devices. Fine… but if you have a “shoestring budget”, why pitch the Amazon Fire TV at $90 instead of the Fire Stick at around $40?

Page 18 has the article that caught my wife’s attention, “Which Would You Rather: a Million Dollars or True Love?” It starts out with “Love or Money? It looks like money has the edge.” It turns out that the poll is about a million dollars annually. The title is clearly misleading, right? Using the 4% rule a million dollars is worth around $40,000 annually, right? If you stack the deck with dozens of millions of dollars, is it really surprising that money wins?

I’m not even at page 20 and there are 3 articles that have a focus around people having tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Oh and there’s that Tony Robbins stuff.

Let’s Fix this!

This article is getting long, so I want to make this quick. Fortunately this isn’t complicated. Here are a few recommendations:

  1. Don’t get carried away in thinking that the title of the magazine (“Money”) means you should write about everything that fits. This isn’t the Robb Report.
  2. Think about your readership and ask, “Can my readers relate to this article?”
  3. Then ask, “Does this article give actionable information?” How can a reasonable of percentage of people use the article (How does a house with a candy wall help my personal finance situation?)
  4. Please say no to informercial stuff. You have Tony Robbins promoting a 401k company. He’s talking with Bogle, who happens to be featured in his new book. If you want me to listen to your message get the special interests out of the room. Why not have Elizabeth Warren talk with Bogle about 401k fees? I am confident she’d jump on the opportunity. Maybe you could disclose the financial relationship you had in promoting it?
  5. In for a penny, in for a pound… I’m going to go all Brick Heck on you. I’m the last person to talk about fonts, but they were all over the place. It’s like San Serif and Serif are fighting it out. I’m not sure who the winner was, but it certainly wasn’t the reader. And I didn’t mention the capitalization in the “Which Would You Rather: a Million Dollars or True Love?”, but I think a 9 year old knows that you need to capitalize that “a”. Oops, I did mention it. I’m obviously not the grammar or proofreading police, but I think there’s a difference between paying subscribers and my blog.

I suppose I’m now Grumpy McGrumpface. In nearly 300 issues, I haven’t seen something so bad in so many ways.

Filed Under: Rants Tagged With: money magazine

Problems With American Airlines Credit Card

February 11, 2009 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

This post is going to be bit of rant, due to very poor customer service. Many people probably don’t like reading rants, but in extreme cases (like this one), I find it necessary to document the case for those interested. Maybe it just makes me feel better that someone from the company may see it and offer to fix their service.

On Saturday, my wife was looking at her American Airlines Credit Card bill. We are going to a convention in March and she purchased the American Airlines tickets with the card. As you might imagine, this is one of the ways of earning more miles. The statement had an obvious problem – no miles earned from travel purchases. “How can this be?” she asked me. I told her it clearly looks like an error.

Having a little extra time on Saturday, she decided to call the credit card and get to the bottom of it. I thought this was destined to go poorly. Credit cards seem to be getting squeezed nowadays and I didn’t have high hopes that they were putting money into having the best customer service representatives available on a Saturday. I thought she was lucky to get anyone on the line to be honest.

That’s where the problems started. I may be wrong on some of the details, because I simply may have lost track after awhile. The first credit card person couldn’t answer my wife’s question, so she transferred her to another credit card person. After my wife explained the story again, the person said that she needs to talk to American Airlines about it. (I thought this was a bovine excrement excuse because the statement clearly says the purchase was from American Airlines.) So my wife got transferred to American Airlines and explained the problem once again. This customer service person, probably more used to hearing people looking to book flights than field calls about credit cards, sent my wife to the only place that made sense to her – the American Airlines card membership application program. Of course they are not set up to help someone who already has an AA credit card. So this is a dead-end.

She starts over with the credit card company and the chain of calls repeats itself. This time they transfer her faster before she can explain that she’s been through this. Starting off the conversation with “this is the 6th time I’ve been transferred, so please don’t transfer me to [fill in the last place she was at] doesn’t seem to help.” At this point, I decided to give her advice. Standard stuff like, “Make sure the call is recorded in the call log and get a reference number. This way so if you get disconnected or transferred you can come back to where you were in the chain.”

It really was a perfect blame game situation. The credit card company can blame the airline for not coding the purchase right. The airline can claim that they don’t know what’s going on at the credit card company. I suggest that she try to conference them all, but of course neither party will accept that solution – even if we are using our own phone to conference. It becomes clear to me that this is one of those fun customer service situations where you caught in the middle of two sides that won’t talk to each other. By this time, my wife is nearly in tears. Though the situation is annoying enough to warrant tears, I’m starting to wonder if it’s compounded by thoughts of how my wife is occasionally caught in the middle of a communication battle with her two divorced parents.

I’m getting ready to intervene and offer to try to get it resolved myself, when she tries one last call to the credit card company. This last call says that the statement appears to be in error and she deserves those miles. The statement is supposed to be fixed as I’m writing this. If it’s not, I’m going to have to suggest the “We’ve had this credit card for years and are a frequent customer of yours. What are you going to do to make me happy?” response. We’ll see how that goes if it comes to it.

Filed Under: Rants Tagged With: american airlines, Credit Cards, poor customer service

Major League Baseball and The Onion of Evil

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man 8 Comments

I made fairly sizable purchase last Friday. I called up Comcast, my cable operator and said, “Yes, I’d like to sign up for the MLB Extra Innings package.” My wife and I will pay $160 to watch the next six month of our favorite team, the Boston Red Sox from our San Francisco area home. It hurts me to spend money like this. It seems like living in a different location shouldn’t prevent you from seeing your favorite team. Alas, that’s the way things work today and I have to live with it. I imagine that in 5 or 10 years this business model will go the way of music stores like Tower Records.

There are a few options for Major League Baseball fans living away from their favorite teams:

  • Slingbox – We have a Slingbox back home, but there have been lots of technical problems getting it work with Verizon’s FIOS service. It’s partially Verizon having a complicated procedure for adding new televisions and partially the wiring of my friend’s house. It’s at the point where I’ve become too much of a burden to him and have dropped the subject.
  • MLB Extra Innings – This is the way we went. You give the cable operator or DirecTV $160 (or $200 if you don’t get their early bird special) and you get a set of channels with a bunch of baseball games. If you have the Dish Network, you don’t have this option, they weren’t able to reach a deal with Major League Baseball this year.
  • MLB.TV – This is an option for those who want to stream the games over the Internet. One of the pluses is that you can get a monthly subscription rather than buying a whole season. The price is a more reasonable $120 a year. You are reduced to watching it on a computer or hooking up your computer to your TV. However, the biggest negative is that MLB likes to steal your money or at least they liked to steal mine.
  • Streaming P2P services – I’m not sure these are legal and I bet the quality isn’t the best. Still I’ve heard of people using Sopcast and/or TVAnts to watch games. I don’t really consider this an option, but I’m adding it here for completeness.

On Saturday morning my wife and I woke up excited to watch the game while we do a little Spring cleaning (because of the time zone difference, it’s only 10 o’clock). We turn on the TV and go to our new channels and see that they are showing only four of the days 12 games – all starting at 7PM. I think that’s very odd since there were currently 6 or 7 games in progress.

I called up Comcast. It takes me about 20 minutes to explain to two people that I have no service problems, but an issue with the programming (or lack thereof) being offered. I get put on hold for a quite awhile and as the call approaches it’s one-hour mark, they direct me to InDemand’s MLB Extra Innings website. It seems that the program is their issue and not Comcast’s. I buy that, and the Comcast person is nice enough to give me a phone number for their offices. Of course InDemand’s offices aren’t open on the weekend.

I eventually got routed back to Comcast where I found someone who actually watches baseball. This is helpful because I’m fairly sure the other Comcast reps believed no baseball was being played at the time. He found some fine print about the MLB Extra Innings not being able to carry games during Fox’s or ESPN’s Game of the Week. Well, Fox didn’t have game on, so that couldn’t be it. Wait, looking through my TV guide, they are showing a game at 12:30. So that explains it…

Major League Baseball is paid a lot of money by Fox and ESPN to not show the other games at the same time on that service. It’s a fairly stupid thing, but I’ve never once thought, “The Red Sox game isn’t on, I’ll watch the Dodgers/Padres.” I’d guess that few people don’t have that thought either. If people are willing to pay $160-$200 to “follow your favorite teams” and “get access to ALL the hard-hitting, base-stealing action.”, they don’t care about the game of the week.

It’s at this point where I decided to look at the MLB.TV service again. They claim “April – September: WATCH and LISTEN to every regular season out-of-market game” as well as “WATCH every 2008 regular season out-of-market game LIVE or on-demand.” Eureka! So this how I can watch the Red Sox on Saturday and Sunday when they are not the Game of The Week – “every game” means every game right? There are no asterisks or footnote markets next to those claims. Scroll down the screen and in the smallest, lightest gray text they can manage, they mention that the service is subject to the same Fox/ESPN blackout.

At this point, the Red Sox game was nearly over. They were losing 10-2 and my frustration came to a head. I explained the situation to my wife, who can’t get over the fact that we paid $160 for most, but not all of the games that we got for free in Boston. The best I could do is say that Major League Baseball is an onion of bovine excrement – you pull off one layer and there’s another layer beneath it.

Of course as long as they draw such strong feelings from me (and fans like me), they will be able to continue these practices.

Filed Under: Rants Tagged With: baseball fans, boston red sox, business model, cable operator, comcast, extra innings package, major league baseball, mlb extra innings, mlb extra innings package

Does Anything Come With Electronics Nowadays?

August 1, 2011 by Lazy Man 10 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I got a HP OfficeJet from Costco (similar to this model). I was a little surprised that an item that costs hundreds of dollars made a big point (a full one-foot sq sticker) that it included it’s own USB cable. I was pretty shocked by this, especially since the cost of such a cable is under three dollars on some Internet sites. The cost to the manufacturer is probably under a dollar. I realize that margins are tight on electronics, but are they so tight that they have to highlight a feature that cost them 0.03% of the amount that I’m giving them?

Just this past week, I cashed in years worth of SonyCard reward points for a Sony HandyCam. Most of the points were acquired before cash back programs were very good. I figured there’d usually be something that I could use from Sony, making it nearly as good as cash in my mind at the time.

I was excited to get a camcorder, the first I’ve ever had. The first thing that struck me was that it was small for camcorder that could record straight to DVD. As it was charging, I flipped through the instruction booklet. It seems that this camcorder uses a smaller version of DVDs – once that are 8cm instead of the standard 12cms. (I obviously didn’t do my research, but it wasn’t like I had a ton of choice – it was the best I could get with the expiring points.) The smaller discs were a disappointment as it records far less video than a regular DVD. At the top quality, I would get only 20 minutes of recording time instead of the standard DVD that gives you two hours worth.

I looked though all the included paperwork and cords and noticed that they didn’t include one DVD that is required to use the video camera. A standard recordable DVD costs pennies in bulk and since Sony makes these mini-DVDs, there’s no reason to think that it would cost Sony more than a fraction of a penny. They wouldn’t be giving up their sales of these blank DVDs as anyone buying a camcorder is going to want to record more than a few minutes. Instead Sony decided to make a product that doesn’t work out of the box. Perhaps this is the reason I’m finding that fewer and fewer of my electronics purchases come from the electronics giant.

Filed Under: Rants

Major League Baseball Stole My Money…

August 13, 2007 by Lazy Man 12 Comments

As some of my regular readers know, I’m a huge Red Sox fan (which hasn’t been easy this past week), living in Northern California. If I want to see Red Sox games, I have three choices… a $160 (or so) cable subscription, a Slingbox, or MLB.TV’s service to watch the games over the Internet. I’ve tried to get the Slingbox to work, but the cable wiring at my brother’s place currently allows me to nearly every channel except for the high numbered ones that the Red Sox are on. I didn’t want to invest heavily in the cable subscription – I would miss most of the games with most games starting at 4:30PM local time.

The MLB.TV service is different. At $20 a month, it’s a price that I could easily justify. I particularly liked that I could try it out and not be locked into a contract. Everything sounds good so I signed up for a month. In the signing process they defaulted the “automatically renew my subscription” option. I was particularly careful to uncheck that option as I wanted to test the service for a month. Sometimes you just don’t know how a streaming video is going to work.

It turns out that the service worked fairly well. It wasn’t quite like watching on TV, but it was pretty good. I was a little sad when in the middle of a game on the last day of the month, the video cut out. The Red Sox had a comfortable lead, so it wasn’t a big deal. With my wedding coming up the following month it made little sense to renew the subscription. I wouldn’t be around to take advantage of it.

Flash forward ahead to when we get back from the wedding and I’m looking over my credit card bill. There’s another charge from MLB.com for another month of service. Well this is a call for customer service. After getting a representative they confirm that I did indeed uncheck the “automatically renew my subscription” button. I started to get the satisfaction of justice being served, when the person explained that the button is to automatically renew the subscription each season, not each month. They said, I had to call up and cancel the because even if you don’t check the “automatically renew”, they assume that you want to each month. You have to call up and cancel specifically. They refused to refund my money.

I have a dispute in with my credit card to get them to intervene, but the representative said from the sounds of it, they’d have to take MLB’s side. I’m not very optimistic in the outcome. I think the Better Business Bureau might be a better option for my complaint.

Filed Under: Rants

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