bad advice Archives • Bitches Get Riches

Let’s End This Damaging Misconception About Credit Cards

April 2, 2018January 3, 2024 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 18 Comments

I don’t know who started the rumor that carrying a balance on credit cards is good for your credit score, but I hope they step on a lego in bare feet every day for the rest of their lives.

You shut your pie hole, Poppins. This is serious.

Of all the damaging misconceptions about personal finance we’ve had to correct over the course of running Bitches Get Riches, this is by far my least favorite. And it keeps popping up again and again in questions from our followers! Why? How? Who is teaching all of our darling kangaroo babies such a terrible way of handling their credit cards?

Until I can find the culprit and give them their just desserts (hot oil? The rack?), I have made it my mission to set the record straight.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Financial Math

November 2, 2017August 14, 2021 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 16 Comments

I fucking hated math in high school.

It was torture. Though I did ok throughout Algebra I and Geometry, once I got to Algebra II… the wheels came off the bus. I listened to entire lectures on logarithms delivered in the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher. I didn’t understand why it mattered, its practical application, nor why I needed it.

And to this day I’m convinced my teacher was a sociopath who derived great joy from my confusion. Let’s call her Dorothy Ball because her fucking name was Dorothy Ball. (How you like me now, Dotty?) She was one of those teachers who, instead of motivating students to give it their all, slowly crushed the joy of learning out of me and convinced me that I was a feeble-minded and frivolous girl for not picking up what she put down.

Clearly I wanted to learn math—or at least I cared about my academic standing—because I remember sitting through a meeting with my mom and Ms. Ball to come up with a strategy for improving. I’ll never forget that meeting.

With great pity in her eyes, she said, “It’s ok that you’re not good at math. You’re good at other things. So let’s just shoot for passing, ok?”

The callous harridan was right: I was good at other things. Like mentally eviscerating those who dared to condescend to me.

But, as we all know… I still needed math to survive.

Bullshit Reasons To Live In a Tiny House, Refuted

June 26, 2017August 16, 2022 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 21 Comments

“I would rather bathe in 10,000 scorpions while singing the entire libretto of Rent than live in a tiny house.”
-Piggy

For a while there, I was ready to breathe easy, thinking the tiny home craze had finally passed. I saw fewer think pieces, pins, aspirational hashtags. The advent of television shows describing the movement seemed to announce its loss of counter-culture status, a sure sign of the end.

… Then I started a financial blog.

Like a recalcitrant UTI patient, I’d stopped taking antibiotics when my symptoms left. My reward was the metaphorical equivalent of pissing broken glass and lava: boundless renewed fascination with tiny houses.

I understand! Tiny homes are appealing to frugal people. On paper, they’re everything a traditional home is, but optimized: cheaper, greener, less constricting. But the proliferation reveals a less rosy truth.

I think the tiny house movement is already being lowered into its coffin, but allow me to secure the lid. The following list comes from Tiny House Blog’s Top 10 Reasons to Join the Tiny House Movement. (I selected this list because it popped up first when I googled “reasons to get a tiny house.” Interestingly, the second is 5 Reasons Buying a Tiny House is a Mistake.)

I’m going to dismantle each one because I’m a neoliberal killjoy and secret corporate shill for Big Housing.

How To Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

May 8, 2017June 4, 2021 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 28 Comments

Retirement is a difficult concept for young people to wrap their heads around. It’s hard enough figuring out how to be An Adult, let alone An Old.

We’ll be talking more broadly in the near future about the general concept of retirement. (Spoiler alert: it’s as outdated as an avocado-colored refrigerator.) But today I’d like to talk directly about the concept of saving for retirement while pretty legit poor.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to define that as someone making $30,000 a year or less. Obviously there are lots of factors that can stretch this figure. A mom of three with a high school education in Washington, D.C. is going to have a much harder time than a single, highly-educated person making the same amount in Woodstock, Alabama. And actually, that number is still more than double the official so-called “poverty line,” which is just under $13,000.

But Piggy and I feel strongly that there isn’t enough realistic, valuable advice for people in this general bracket. So we’d like to talk to them.