pound foolish_ exposing the dar - helaine olen

[...]... Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and once again romanticized the pull-yourself-up-by -the bootstraps ideology of Horatio Alger The wealthy were idealized, the poor derided If it wasn’t working out for you, you must be doing something wrong As the national savings rate plunged over the 1980s and 1990s to near zero by the mid-2000s, instead of examining the rising costs of housing, education, and medical care,... the genre of personal finance out of this fulcrum, and can be fairly labeled the mother of the personal finance industrial complex, embracing the can-do practical spirit of the self-help movement, while eschewing its magical-thinking aspects “I write for a faceless image of myself,” she told Time magazine “I figure if I’m interested in a subject, other people will be too.” In these days of around -the- clock... says the American dream is dead? The path to wealth is as open as it’s ever been, thanks to easy access to the capital every would-be millionaire needs,” read the sub-head for the piece, which went on to argue that the “leverage” of borrowed money could lift you out of the ranks of lower-income earners: The middle and even the working class have a much easier time gaining access to capital today,” the. .. all, of these books focus on the idea of a journey—a place where the author or author’s student begins, a place where they end, and the lessons learned therein There were, however, numerous variants on the basic self-help trope Some gave tips on how to get ahead, sort of like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People but, given the tenor of the age, with a more self-involved twist There... large in the culture: self-help The self-actualizing spirit of the 1960s, when combined with the hard economic times of the 1970s, sent millions of people—like Orman— searching for answers, answers they would never stop looking for as the years went on The rise of the “New Age” movement saw people heading off to communes, traveling to Indian ashrams, and flocking to gurus Most people, however, kept their... and hold, my friends! Time the markets! Seize the financial day! But the ability of the vast majority of people to seize the financial day was increasingly constrained by a third trend: our salaries were not, for the most part, keeping up with the rest of the economy Buffeted at first by inflation, and then by the slowly widening chasm between the top tier of earners and the rest of us, we were stagnating... high-end restaurant proliferate So-called wealth seminars, like the ones promoting the works of self-described C-student Robert Kiyosaki, abound The financialization of our lives illustrates a huge change in a relatively short period of time Less than 5 percent of Americans were invested in the stock market at the beginning of the 1950s, a number that gradually quadrupled to one in five of us by the. .. record levels, with the top 1 percent of the population controlling 24 percent of the nation’s wealth Our social safety net is slowly becoming a thing of the past as the ranks of the long-term unemployed grow by the day So girlfriend, you better know how to manage your finances because no one else out there is helping you out But there are plenty of others out there doling out similar, and often better,... cold-calling the neglected: the waitresses, truck drivers, and other blue-collar folks who knew little about the stock market the people who were just like her, before she left the Buttercup She was successful enough to leave Merrill after a few years, working first for Prudential and later for her own practice, the Suze Orman Financial Group But deep down Orman was still the daughter of Morry the. .. her name to anyone under the age of fifty-five will elicit not an opinion about the columnist deemed one of the most important women of the 1970s by Ladies Home Journal, but rather the simple query: “Who?” There isn’t even a single nostalgia-trip clip of this once ubiquitous television presence on YouTube Sylvia Porter’s descent into oblivion began at the height of her fame The oil shocks, inflation, . © Helaine Olen, 2012 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Olen, Helaine. Pound foolish : exposing the dark side of the personal finance industry / Helaine Olen. p x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" POUND FOOLISH POUND FOOLISH Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry HELAINE OLEN PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin. the founding book of the pull-yourself-up-by- your-bootstraps movement. But while always present in American culture, self-help as a way of life would not go mainstream in a major way until the