Credit Report Card: A Truly Free Look at Your Credit Record (left): "Credit.com launched a new, truly free online tool called Credit Report Card, which gives you an easy-to-understand snapshot of your credit report, along with estimated scores from the different reporting agencies."
Should I Buy It? A Flowchart to Help You Decide: "The purpose of my 'should I buy it?' question and the purpose of April's flowchart is the same: to force you to stop and think before buying something. Sometimes, a small delay between impulse and action is all it takes to avoid making an unnecessarily costly purchase."
Immunize Yourself Against Sneaky Sales Tactics: "Using insight gleaned from Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational, Jeff Atwood goes through marketers' sleazy tactics, one-by-one, telling you how to avoid falling prey to them."
Can You Save Money with a Self-Watering Gardening Container?: "I bought three 'Ready to Grow Complete Kits' from EarthBox for $55 each and set them up on my deck. Besides all the components (including casters so you can roll the boxes around), they come with potting mix, a bag of organic fertilizer, and a bag of dolomite with trace elements. As the website says, all you need are plants and water."
Using Brain Scans to Beat the Free Rider Problem: "The house I live on is on a private street shard by about 20 other houses. The City of Los Angeles does not maintain the street, so when repairs are needed, the residents must pay for them. Over the last couple of years, a lot of big potholes have formed. Several of the residents decided something needed to be done about it, and sent copies of repair estimates to everyone who lives on the street. If everyone pitched in an equal amount, the price per household would be $2,500 to fix the street. Most of the households paid the $2,500, but a few refused to pay."
The High Price of Ignoring the Future: "Would you rather be given £45 in three days, or £70 in three months? That was the question put to 40,000 people who took part in an experiment conducted by the BBC and the University College of London."
Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation: "Dan has been studying the psychology of human motivation. In this video, Dan offers some counter-intuitive advice about using financial rewards to incentivize people."
Would You Steal Medicine to Save Your Spouse's Life?: "Heinz broke into the drugstore and stole the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that?"
Money Can Buy Happiness, After All, as Long as You Don't Spend it on Yourself : "It turns out that money can buy happiness -- provided you spend it on the right things."
The Curse of Winning the Lottery: "This article reports on the sad fates of eight lottery winners who experienced bankruptcy, drug abuse, and sometimes even prison as a result of winning the lottery."
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re: free rider
Couldn't the people who ponied up decide that in addition to fixing the potholes, giant speedbumps directly in front of the moochers' driveways were necessary?
I have to say that if I lived next to the entrance to the street a brain scan would be insufficient to get me to pay a full share.
The High Price of Ignoring the Future
I agree with the commenter on creditblogger.com. I'd take the money now, unless I don't need it.
Suppose, just for fun, that smoking/mascara/hair-gel/tattoos gets you laid, even married - because it makes you look cool. You make kids. So what if you die of cancer from it at the age of 65?
Eating that canned salmon will give you cancer.
In forty years.
Not eating it gives you, maybe, no_cancer, but fer_sure starvation.
Turn the scenario around: Say driving a Smart Car is the best choice to make, given your job/residence/etc. And you look like a sap and die alone.
It's not that straightforward. Sometimes what Ariely calls the stupid decision is the better decision. Isn't there an article floating around the 'Net about 'second best is good enough', about operating systems?
Would You Steal Medicine to Save Your Spouse's Life?
Contrast the pharmacist's response with the 'High Price of Ignoring the Future' above.
From the text: He asked the pharmacist if he could buy the drug for $1,000 with the promise to pay the other $1,000 later. The pharmacist said no."
So, according to Ariely, the pharmacist is making a bad decision, no? Especially since pharmacist's recalcitrance/greed resulted in a broken window, no? Not to mention, the pharmacist's taxes will have to increase in order to pay for the prison.
The Curse of Winning the Lottery
Lastly, that's eight people who lost everything after winning the lottery. Out of how many people? The articles don't say.
Suppose it's 88. So if, a year later, the 80 other people ended up with more than ten times in assets than this eight saps lost, the group of 88 people is better off. So the lottery IS a good idea.
Actually, there's insufficient information to formulate a coherent answer for these situations.
So what do you do if the average of the sums the street residents are willing to pay is less than 25k?
And about Heinz...the problem with this moral reasoning is that it assumes you're trying for one universal answer. It could be morally right (from Heinz perspective) to steal it, and morally right (from the pharmacist's perspective) to not sell it at a discount.
Assuming there's one morality that works in all situations for all people is likely an error.
Cicada,
"..morally right (from the pharmacist's perspective) to not sell it at a discount."
Only if you presume that the pharmacist is only a "pharmacist", and not (for instance) also a human being who is part of a community, or perhaps also an entrepreneur who could use the news of his benevolence to aquire more $1000-customers than he would have if he only had limited numbers of $2000-customers.
Although the scenario, as presented, is pretty black and white (as logic puzzles tend to be) the real world isn't, and the best solutions, or just better debates, are had by introducing real-world details and motivations.
@6- Arkizzle- Or he could be donating the profits to a charity that feeds starving orphans. One woman for two grand, or a couple dozen kids for the same amount?
In any case, pretty much anyone above absolute poverty in the western world functionally sides with the pharmacist-- we do not give the majority of our goods to starving third worlders to keep them alive: we pick and choose how much charity to give rather than allowing the recipients to dictate that.
"..pretty much anyone above absolute poverty in the western world functionally sides with the pharmacist."
Only if you presume nobody gives a portion of their earnings to charitable organisations, or indeed their time and sweat.
So there is still room for us to be unhappy with the exploitative business model of the pharmacist, who could halve his profit and still make 5x his overhead.
If it was as clear as you say, it wouldn't be a conundrum. The pharmacist has made a moral judgement, valuing his arbitrarily-high profit margins, over an altruistic (but still massively profitable) model - akin to charity, in your example.
I don't side with the pharmacist.
The comments on the post about credit.com highlight a big warning: credit.com will almost certainly sell your information to "match you with offers for products and services."
Uggggg...
You point out that they won't share your email address, but this is a piddling piece of information compared to everything else you've given them.
This should have been seen immediately. Really, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and credit.com isn't doing this just because they are nice guys and had a nice chat with you. It looks like they suckered you.
(Let us know if you find out our fears are unfounded.)
Hi SamSam et al.
I'm the VP of Products at Credit.com and hope to address your fears about our use of your personal information.
We're not interested in selling your soul to third parties. Really.
We created the Credit Report Card to provide you with answers and actionable information about your credit profile. That's it. If, in the future, we think it might be helpful to offer you products and services that help you take action to improve your credit standing, we might do that. We'll do it directly as part of the Credit Report Card - not through email or other solicitation. We don't have any interest in spamming you or offering you useless products and services. That doesn't help anyone.
Feel free to email me directly at judith@credit.com if you have more questions about how we store and use your personal data. We aim to be completely transparent in how we store and share data, and I hope that we can earn your trust with that.
Best,
Judith Zissman
VP Products
Credit.com
I think that, in your title, you meant posts at creditbloggers.com, not credit.com...
I'm skeptical that a company like Credit.com Inc can sustainably give free credit reports without strings attached. How would such a business model work? They no doubt have to pay for the reports, so without some method of deriving revenue, they're going to fail. In this case, it seems that the method of revenue will be pushing products and services, and they just haven't developed those yet. I think it's unlikely that such a business model will be sustainable.
As for the flowchart, I have to disagree with it. I don't need very much, and buying things only based on need would be depressing. Money exists to be spent; while one can spend too much, one can also save too much. My great-grandmother spent her life making money, and never spent any of it. Apart from the happiness she found in making money, she was never particularly happy, as she lived only with what she thought necessary. I'm quite willing to buy things that I want, depending on how they will affect my finances and whether they are worth the price. Do I need a collection of antique pens? Certainly not. Their purchase, however, doesn't affect my finances significantly, and they do make me happy. Even in cases where financial effects are significant—I only need an apartment that costs less than a third of what I pay—happiness needs to be taken into account.
Samsam and Wa: I know the folks at credit.com (which also runs creditbloggers.com) and I can vouch for their integrity. These are good, honest people.
RE The "free rider" problem: I'm very surprised that your HOA doesn't stipulate exactly how such repairs are supposed to be handled. (Or whatever paperwork was written up and signed when you and your neighbors gated your street.)
I'd consider buying a house attached to a HOA that required me to pay for street maintenance. I would not ever consider buying a home attached to a HOA that required me to undergo brain scans. =P
The Caltech study is very cool indeed! But what a funny way of reporting it! =D
Also RE the self-watering garden containers: I bet it's even cheaper to MAKE one. (Wouldn't it be fun to see an issue of MAKE focused on gardening?) ;)
Hmm, another way out of the free-rider problem — which would probably work among 20 people — might be a system of mutual matching contributions (with ratios and caps). That is, each person says "I will contribute X% of the total collected up to $YYYY". Done properly, it should work nicely...
Of course, I may be proposing a technical solution to what is a social problem.
Regarding the 45now/70 later problem.
I'd take the $45* in 3 days over the $70 in three months for a simple reason. I'd have to wait ten times as long for a less than 50% improvement.
This would be like asking the kids in the marshmallow experiment if they wanted one marshmallow now, or one and a half marshmallows in 15 days.
Or scale the question up. "You can have $4,500 at the end of the year, or $7,000 ten years from now." To me the answer to that one is simple, that is a bit over 5% interest, but I can do far more with that $4,500 now and it would have more value to me than $7,000 likely would ten years from now (and that even assumes no inflation so that $7K has the same buying power in a decade).
*using $ as I am in the US.
Re 45 v 70
I wonder what would happen if everyone was simply given the 45 pounds and then offered the ability to purchase a three month certificate of deposit with a 500% annualized return. What would be really interesting would be if people could invest a variable amount from 0 to 45.
Re Dan Pink
I made a post on CreditBloggers, but I'll repeat it here. This talk seems like a summary of Alfie Kohn's excellent book, Punished by Rewards. I came across that book quite accidentally a number of years ago, and it changed my thinking about the world in ways that few books have. It's ultimately a scholarly work with thorough citations, but it also is a very easy and enjoyable read. I've recommended a number of times, but no one has ever read it. Hopefully someone here will.
re: free rider
people value different things. i would rather have $2500 and potholes than no potholes and not have $2500. seems unfair to make everyone buy into that. on the other hand i am willing to pay more taxes so that everyone has healthcare. health means something to me. potholes aren't great, but $2500 sounds like too much. plus some neighborhoods have speedbumps that the city pays to install. potholes do the same thing, forcing people to slow down, but you get them for free.
i am a night person and have to live in a world that generally favors morning people. there are all kinds of people and values out there and we shouldn't be forced to buy into other people's values other than to have a basic respect for them--we shouldn't have to foot the bill for them. democracy means we do foot the bill for them sometimes, whether it's a war we don't want or abortions they don't want or executions, etc. etc. but these decisions should be made very carefully.
@ #16 Pixel:
I think your error is in the term "ten times as long."
It doesn't matter how many times longer it is, what matters is the absolute time.
Since you suggested it was analogous to one extreme, the one year/ten year situation, let me give you the other extreme: would you take $45,000 in one second or $70,000 in ten seconds?
The answer to that should be obvious, and should show that stressing that they had to wait "ten times as long" is specious.
In fact, if they "invest" their $45, they gain a 100% rate of return in just three months! Find a savings bank or investment anywhere in the world that can guarantee that kind of rate of return.
@Arkizzle- My point's still standing: we decide how much (if any) to give to charity. In robbing the pharmacist, the _recipient_ decided how much charity was going to be.
I have a hunch that one of the couple billion people living on the planet for less than two bucks a day would be unsympathetic about the average disposable income in the western world.
"No, really, I need my iPhone. Need!"
Mark,
As an indirect complement to you, when I saw this I went right to credit.com and got a report, just trusting that if you were participating there, that they had to be fair dealers. The free report was very helpful. Good to also see the reassurances above. Good site.