This is a Devil's Advocate post.

Here’s a topic you don’t see being covered every day – renting furniture. Renting furniture is often regarded as a bad idea, and for most situations I have to agree, it’s not a good idea. There are, however, some instances where renting isn’t as bad as you think.

The biggest strike against renting furniture is that it’s expensive. After doing some quick research online at Cort (it gave me the DC rates), you can rent a nice queen bedroom set for under $200 a month. A comparable bedroom set from a department store would be around $2,000. So you’re paying a significant premium when it comes to renting furniture. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the biggest strike against renting furniture is cost.

So why would I advocate renting furniture? Sometimes the situation requires it.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

Because of the Occupy Movement, people are focused on the rich, or the 1% as they are now known. CNN reported that in order to get in to the exclusive 1% you have to make a minimum of $343,927 each year.

I figured it would be much higher and I thought of the article that appeared in my hometown newspaper that told the story of a city bus driver who was making $98,000. There are truck drivers and rig operators in North Dakota who are transporting oil for salaries starting at $100,000 with an almost endless amount of overtime and apparently those jobs are still plentiful. They can’t find enough workers to fill these jobs! Some of these sometimes called “roughnecks” are almost half way to the 1% club after bonuses.

Did you know that the 1% earned 17% of the nation’s income and paid 37% of all income tax in the United States, according to CNN? CNBC, in a recent on air report, said that in reality only 3% of the 1% club is actually in the financial industry, by the way.
(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

We all know that the best way to take advantage of the tendency of the stock market to gain over time is to invest in index funds, right? It makes sense: You get a share of everything on the index, so as the index rises over time, you see increases in your own holdings. Plus, investing in index funds reduces the need to do tons of research — no worries about stock picking and seeing your choices fail miserably. Unfortunately, investing in index funds may not be your best option. When you really think about it, index funds might not be the way to go at all.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

It’s been a while but the Devil’s Advocate posts have returned and they’re going to return in a very big way – I’m going to argue why you shouldn’t save for retirement. If there are a few tenets in personal finances, saving for retirement is up there with having an emergency fund and spending within your means. Between compounding interest and the tax benefits of retirement saving, putting something away for the future is almost a no brainer.

Almost.

In this post, I’ll argue why you shouldn’t save for retirement. That’s right. You should not put money into your 401(k), your Roth IRA, or any of the other alphabet soup account names.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

One of the longest held tenets of buying a car is that you shouldn’t buy a brand new car. As I once gracefully put it, “Buy used and let some other sucker pay the new car premium.”

The tenet is true, buying a good used car will save you money over buying a brand new car. There are, however, plenty of reasons why buying new might make more sense.

In this latest installment of the Devil’s Advocate series, where I argue the other side of classic personal finance advice, I’ll look at the reasons why buying a brand new car might not be so bad after all.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

One of the oft-discussed cardinal sins in personal finance is to borrow from your 401(k), 403(b), or other eligible retirement accounts. The reasons against borrowing are obvious – those assets are for you to consume in retirement, not right now. By borrowing those funds, they can’t grow with the market tax free and you lose one of the great vehicles for retirement planning.

Not everyone can borrow from their 401(k) or 403(b), the plan administrator has to permit it, but this Devil’s Advocate post will discuss reasons why this may make sense for the limited number of employees who can borrow from their 401(k) plan.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

One of the big lessons from the post-credit crisis era, and you could argue we’re still fighting through the crisis itself, is the idea that cheap credit and cheap debt are bad for you. In general, I’d agree that racking up double digit interest rate debt is a very bad thing, but having access to that credit can be a very good thing.

It’s been a while since I wrote a Devil’s Advocate post but I felt that it was time. There’s been a huge backlash against credit and debt lately, in part because they were a cornerstone of the credit crisis, and I think that anger and fear is a bit unfounded. For every irresponsible borrower, there’s a responsible one taking full advantage of credit and using it in a way that enriches their life. Today, we’ll look at just a few of the reasons why you shouldn’t abandon credit.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

When I was younger, the plan for my future was pretty straightforward. You go to high school to learn, get good grades, and get into a good college. You go to college to get good grades and then get a good job. After that, just circle the mouse wheel until retirement. OK, that last part about the wheel was my own addition but that basically was my “job” as a kid. That plan worked for me and it’s the path many people have walked with great success, but it’s not the only path.

With the government looking at additional regulation on the for-profit colleges, I started to wonder again whether college is “worth it.” In general, it is. However, recently with all these for-profit schools, a lot of people are going to college unnecessarily. They’re being promised things that the schools can’t deliver. They’re being sold something they don’t need, depending on what they want to do, and they’re only buying it because we’ve put “college” on a pedestal. In this Devil’s Advocate post, I explain why you might want to skip college.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

I bet this Devil’s Advocate is going to ruffle a lot of feathers! Frugality is a pretty big topic in the personal finance blog community because there are so many things you can do to trim a few cents or dollars off here or there. You can buy gadgets like a Kill-A-Watt to find out how much energy your appliances are using and disconnect them when they’re not in use. You can make your own detergent for your washing machine or buy a rack to line dry your clothes. There have been books filled to the brim with thousands upon thousands of ways to save a few dollars and cents here or there… however they never get to the heart of the issue – being frugal should be the very last thing you try to be when all other options have been exhausted.

If you think of yourself as a business, you have two ways of generating a profit. You can increase your income or you can decrease your expenses. When you focus entirely on being frugal, you only look at half of the equation. That’s foolish.

(click here to continue reading…)

This is a Devil's Advocate post.

We are led to believe that the best place to invest our money is in the stock market. Low barriers to entry, low barriers to exist, plenty of information, high probability of success in the long run and a lot of success stories. We also hear some of the horror stories of people who day traded tech stocks in the early 2000s, gamblers who lost it all on penny stocks, and all the chop shop, pump and dumpers like in the movie Boiler Room. However, through it all, we’ve been taught, over and over again, that if you buy for the long term, you will always win.

For today’s Devil’s Advocate post, we’re going to break down the stock market and show why we really are just little guppies hoping not to get eaten by the sharks.

(click here to continue reading…)