OT or not OT: That is the Question

The other day, one of my fave bloggers, Funny About Money, took up the question of a blogging glass ceiling, since generally, the guys make the big bucks and the gals do not. She wondered if part of the reason lay in the tendency of the female personal finance bloggers to go off-topic. She did a compare/contrast and discovered that the guys stayed on topic, while the women did not.

Yours truly was one of the test blogs under examination. Funny listed my topics--pantry organization, children's books, other stuff--most of which seem to be OT, especially compared to the fellows who were taking up such classic personal finance topics as buying gold or ye olde Roth vs. Traditional IRA. First I confessed: guilty as charged. After all, women have long been thought to be blabbermouths who cannot stay on topic. Example: Chaucer's Wife of Bath.

Part of the humor of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue (oops--there I go into the literature AGAIN) is that Chaucer really is spot on in presenting a woman who (in modern paraphrase) "wanders by the way" and frequently says (again in modern paraphrase) "Oh, where was I. Oh yeah. I was talking about my fourth husband."

Oh yeah, personal finance. After my confession of off-topicness, I thought for a bit. First, I don't profess to be a personal finance blogger: I write about frugality. My supposedly OT post on children's books was about how many of the most beloved children's books are about frugality. The pantry post was related to the idea of stockpiling or "investing" in your pantry--a frugal habit endorsed by many, including Funny's very own SDXB. That post was also about using up stuff that was getting old--also a frugal principle.

So, IMHO not OT at all. There is some overlap between personal finance and frugality. In fact, frugality has allowed me to participate in the personal finance world--in real life. Even aside from that, I would guess that learning to stockpile sale items in your pantry is of more immediate use to many of the debt-ridden and unemployed than any meditation on whether or not one should invest in gold. In fact, you can't invest in gold unless you have quite a wad of excess cash. If I had only $1200.00 to my name, I wouldn't buy an ounce of gold.

It would be better to practice frugality and get an immediate 20-100% return on your $1200. Everyone has heard--via Dave Ramsey--of the debt snowball with its variation the debt snowflake. Well, it works the other way with frugality. Not as rapidly--because your return on savings and frugal practice generally is not as big as the drag of debt.

So here's a double assertion. I was not OT because I write on frugality, not personal finance. And I was not OT because frugality is a branch of personal finance.

The rest is silence.