The end of personal finance?

Helaine Olen of The Big Money writes about how a lot of the personal finance coverage of the past decade has been so wrong, including a story that she wrote a decade ago where a consumer asked about putting money into gold, which has since tripled in price.

Olen writes, “The advice proffered by the vast majority of analysts, would-be gurus, and television pundits came down to one word: stocks. Some, like CNBC’s infamous Jim Cramer, advocated stock-picking strategies. Others encouraged mutual funds. But very few — at least of those that could get publicity via mainstream outlets — doubted the efficacy of the market.

“That our personal finances weren’t fully ours to seize didn’t seem to occur to many of us until recently, when the stock market plunged almost 40 percent in a mere year, housing went into free fall, and the unemployment rate began to climb perilously toward double digits. All these facts suddenly left the personal finance industry facing a conundrum of its own making. The backbone of the self-help complex is the idea that you can do it. You. Singular. But what happens when you lose your job and can’t find a new one before your six months of recommended emergency savings runs out? Or a good chunk of your retirement income is in the form of a pension from your former employer—and that employer is named Chrysler? What then?

“‘Personal finance has come to substitute for the role government should play for people,’ observes Nan Mooney, author of (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents. ‘In the past 20 years the myth of the person succeeding on their own has gotten bigger and bigger. This myth is dangerous. It tells you if you can’t balance everything and you are in debt, it is your fault.'”

Read more here.