CheckMate

I’ll admit that it’s pretty tough to write anything really relevant and useful right now because of how fast and furiously things are changing, not to mention that the news seems to be one bad thing after another. And, as I said last time, I’m all out of predictions.

I’ve already seen a bunch of “best things to do now” articles, both about personal finance in general and job searches in particular. A big part of the problem there is that you can feel like you’re already behind the curve - if you didn’t take action before now, it’s too late to do anything. Not so…

One of the best personal finance blogs I know of - if not the best - is Get Rich Slowly. (I know what you’re probably thinking, but, trust me - if you only read one, this is the one to read.) It’s been around for several years now, and the guy who writes it - J.D. Roth - learned his lesson the hard way: he was $35,000 in debt, and paid it all off. And, no, he didn’t win the lottery - you can read the story in “Free at Last! Saying Good-Bye to 20 Years of Debt”.

His most recent post today is called “The Millionaire Quiz“, which contains a 15-question test to see just what you know about millionaires. It’s good for anyone to read, but definitely something a budding financial advisor should have a good handle on.

After you read that one, take a good look around the site - there’s a ton of information that’s always very valuable, and no more so than right now.

Unless you’re avoiding the news entirely (not a bad idea in general, but that discussion goes beyond this short post), you are no doubt inundated by now with all the financial gloom-and-doom from the past few days.

I always want to be able to add something useful or different here, but I don’t know that there’s anything significant I can add to the seeming billions of words floating around on this subject right now.

I’ll say this - take a deep breath and honestly assess your situation. If you are in dire straits (as in “I’m not gonna eat tomorrow.”), that’s one thing, and you have to take appropriate action. If you aren’t in that kind of situation - and I’m willing to bet the vast majority of you aren’t - do your best to remain calm, take a hard look at just how what’s going on is directly affecting you, and act / plan accordingly.

Beyond that, I did see what I thought was some sound, basic advice in this post at CareerHub: “Lehman Employees: Here’s What To Do Next”. The author outlines six specific steps, but I especially liked his overall theme:

“But Lehman employees - and indeed job searchers in other sectors - would be well advised to stop listening to all the noise, and instead focus on moving forward with a plan that will secure their next role.”

Sure, I know, as he also says, “Easier said than done.”, but it’s still dead on.

I won’t make any predictions, either, and I would strongly caution you to not buy into any of the predictions that others are making. The reality is that at this point, with things constantly changing minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour, nobody really knows how things are going to shake out, least of all me.

So, right now, unless you have some new overriding reason not to, if you still want a career as a financial advisor, I’d say keep pressing on toward that goal.

I see stories all the time - and you probably do, too - that are just press releases masquerading as news.

It’s not hard to spot these things - usually it’s something from MarketWatch with a location, date, and then “PRNewswire via COMTEX” on the first line. Plus they are normally very much self-promoting and self-serving - if the subject of the “news” is the source and the contact for the article…well, not too tough to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes you can actually even see the contact information for the outside person the company contracted to place the press release listed at the end of the story.

That doesn’t mean press releases are all bad - for example, in my last post I referred to an article that was picked up by MarketWatch which was the usual PR Newswire press release. In that case, though, there was actual data from a survey taken by the Association for Financial Professionals, the source of the press release, and I wanted to give my opinion about that data. Granted, still a press release, but one with some substance worth discussing, not something I tried to pass off as some landmark piece of news, and, most importantly, not something that we had anything to do with, or that was about us, or that we were the source for.

So, the next time someone touts something as “news” because it was picked up by one of the major business magazines (like Business Week, Fortune, or CNN Money), or news services (like Reuters or AP), take a closer look - you might be surprised to find out that it’s just another press release.

You know how I’m always telling you to look closely at numbers? Well, here’s yet another example…

I just ran across the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2008 Women in Finance Survey results under this headline in a MarketWatch story a couple days ago:

“Financial Professionals See Continued Weakness in U.S. Economy”

It’s full of statistics from the survey to back up that headline, including, perhaps most notably, this one:

“…89 percent of financial professionals expect their career to be impacted negatively as a result of the current economic slowdown…”

You have to go all the way to the bottom of the article to find the number that really got my attention, though, and the one I think is the most important statistic in the whole story:

“The 2008 AFP Women in Finance Survey, sponsored by Citi’s Global Transaction Services, asked 3,000 corporate practitioner members — evenly split between males and females — about the impact the current slowdown in the U.S. economy has had on job security and prospects for career advancement. The survey received 571 responses, with a response rate of 20 percent.”

Which means that all those numbers — and that headline — are based on a total of a whopping 571 people, and just one fifth of the total number of people they sent surveys to.

Now maybe a statistician would say that’s representative, but I’m not a statistician, and I have to tell you that I’m not so sure.

Hey, for all I know, the other 2429 people were too busy out making money to answer the survey…