Twitter Wisdom from Un-Broke
June 1, 2009 by Miranda Marquit
Filed under Finance
Last Friday night, I joined Twitterers in creating tweets about the ABC special “Unbroke”. Plenty of us found something to be desired with the show. While amusing and generally educational, there were some items that could have been addressed better. (For a pretty extensive re-cap, visit Free From Broke.) My major beefs were these two things:
- Mortgage payments: I prefer to use net income to using gross, as recommended, and I think you should keep your payment to 28% of your monthly income or below, rather than being happy with 33%.
- Individual stocks: The investing portion of the special was all about the individual stocks. I really thought that there should have been some mention of index related investments.
MainStreet.com did a round-up of some of the best Twitter comments of the evening, and I was mentioned a reasonable amount (it’s really been a good couple of days for me in terms of shameless self-promotion). But there were some other great bits as well. Here are some of my favorite Twitter remarks from Friday evening:
- @singlema: Buy a house within your means, get adequate insurance & have a rainy day fund = financially secure.
- @MattJabs: I want them to say something outside the box, like “sacrifice something like your cable TV then put difference in savings”
- @mainstr: Stocks Oscar the Grouch holds: Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Bros, WaMu
- @Matt_SF: Are we really this dumb? Do we need movie stars as eye candy to learn about personal finance & investing?
- @moneyrelation: PLEASE DON’T BUY INDIVIDUAL STOCKS! I bet they are recommending that so you go out and buy Disney!
- @stephonee: Oxygen mask metaphor for college vs. retirement savings is very smart. Secure your own mask first!
- @JeremyVoh: Un-broke may be obvious for those of us who talk about finance every day, but the public needs to hear the message
- @MMarquit: The real question is this: Will we as a society actually CHANGE our financial habits? I’m not sure this will accomplish that…
Did you watch Unbroke? What did you think?
image credit: Ben Schumin via Wikimedia Commons
I see the point of the individual stocks. They talked about the indexes but didn’t explicitly say to invest in them. Still, the point was to think about long term investing in stocks which many are afraid to do these days.
Overall it gave out some good info and basically told people they were spending too much than they can handle.
Nice WSJ mention!
I can see the point of individual stocks as well, and that you shouldn’t panic. And I think Un-broke did a good job of getting that across. But I still think that they could have made brief mention of index funds. I remain unshakable in that point ;) There are few ways that are as simple for regular folks to make money in the stock market while limiting their risk to a certain degree.