Welcome new Yahoo Finance readers

October 8 19 Comments latest by I Will Teach You To Be Rich » How to use a separate debit card for discretionary spending

If you’re visiting from today’s Yahoo Finance article on personal finance for young people, welcome.

I’m a recent Stanford grad and this is a blog on personal finance and personal entrepreneurship for college students, recent college grads, and everyone else. (Featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, US News & World Report Online, etc.)

This blog is me ranting about a few things and trying to get the points across. Getting started is more important than being the smartest person in the room. Making mistakes is ok. Action is more important than reading 50 blogs. Ordinary actions get ordinary results. And there’s a difference between being sexy and being Rich.

Here’s a quick guide to get started:

Some recent popular articles
Conscious Spending: How My Friend Spends $21,000/year Going Out
The $28,000 Question: Why Are We All Hypocrites About Weddings?
Chicken Little and Kooks Who Don’t Know What They’re Talking About
I Hate Indian Network Marketers So Much
Set Smaller Goals: Impress Friends, Get Girls, Lose Weight

Introductory Articles
Why do you want to be rich?
The Best Decision vs. The Financially Smart One
Cheap versus frugal
A big fear I have of this site
2006 Makeover, Step #4: Open your retirement accounts

Investing
Chicken Little and Kooks Who Don’t Know What They’re Talking About
An analysis of 1000+ IWillTeachYouToBeRich survey responses– and some new decisions (Best feedback ever)
Dumb: “Don’t invest; you can’t beat the pros”
All about stocks and bonds
All about mutual funds
Read Warren Buffet’s letters

Personal Entrepreneurship
Set smaller goals: impress friends, get girls, lose weight
Barriers are your enemy
I Hate Indian Network Marketers So Much
We love to debate minutiae
Your College is Not a Technical School
On greed and speed
The Myth of the Great Idea

Miscellaneous
Here are 50 books I recommend
What are we doing on this site?
I bought a tie (I love this post because of how angry the comments are)
Cost vs. value: Why I bought a new car (Sorry guys, but I stand by what I wrote)
Probably one of the best comments this site has ever gotten
Boy am I stupid

Saving
Conscious spending: How my friend spends $21,000/year on going out
Here’s how I set up my financial accounts
Letting your parents manage your money is dumb
The Power of Compounding
Time is NOT money–at least, not yours
Cook at home, you lazy bastard
An Ode to Jim Blomo

Full list of articles
The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Table of contents (hundreds of articles)

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19 Comments latest by I Will Teach You To Be Rich » How to use a separate debit card for discretionary spending

I Will Teach You To Be Rich featured in US News & World Report online

October 5 13 Comments latest by AuntEm

I’m featured in US News & World Report’s Alpha Consumer blog today. (New US News readers, please click here for an easy-to-use introduction to this blog.) Kimberly Palmer, a US News reporter, asked me these questions (and a few more):

• “There are so many books out there on young people and money…what’s different about your advice?”
• “What kind of stories do you hear from your readers who are frustrated with their financial experiences?”
• “Name three things young people can do to improve their financial situation.”

In my responses, I discuss why personal-finance advice is usually boring, give some quick tips for getting started, and threaten to commit suicide if I read another column about not spending money on lattes.

Click to see my answers.

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13 Comments latest by AuntEm

Walgreens gets it wrong when marketing to me

October 5 15 Comments latest by Ted Stryker

Here’s a quick marketing thought I had just now. I know I usually write about personal finance, but this week I’m stuck on marketing, so I hope this is useful to a few people.

Recently, I used my Snapfish account to order photos and I decided to pick them up at a nearby Walgreen’s. It was awesome — no shipping charges and the photos were ready in about an hour.

About five days later, I got this email:

What’s going on here? Clearly, Walgreens is trying to maintain a relationship with me and upsell me to their own photo service. I understand this, but the method is so clumsy that I can’t resist commenting. (As a marketer, I also know you can’t always get it perfect, so this is just my suggestion, not me blaming Walgreens.)

Here’s what Walgreens knows about me: My name, my email address, the fact that I bought photos, and the Walgreen’s I ordered them from.

• Their goal: To get money from me.

• Their message: If you click through, you see a page called “Celebrate sweetness” about using their own proprietary photo service and ordering prints or personalized gifts. I sincerely believe that I have never been described as “sweet” in my whole life.

Where did Walgreens go wrong?
And assuming they’re getting negative ROI on this campaign (I bet $100 they are), why is that? Let’s take it step by step.

They already know I use Snapfish. How likely is it that I’ll upload my photos to another service? Answer: zero likeliness. They’re taking a limited view of making money by assuming that I “should” spend my money through their service. But what about the other ways they make money? What about building a permission asset and giving people something they really care about?

What I would do
If I were Walgreen’s, I would take the same data they have — my name, my email address, the fact that I bought photos, and the local Walgreen’s location — and make a radically different pitch.

Look what the I get: A personalized letter that gives them a coupon for a service they actually care about (Snapfish). Maybe they could even get Snapfish to foot the bill. And Walgreen’s gets me to come in to the store. Guess what happens then? I’m more likely to buy something, and I also have to talk to the manager, who will be trained to upsell me on a new service Walgreens is offering — perhaps something relating to photos?

The best way to make money isn’t always the quickest.

Thanks to Scott Hurff for the graphic. Scott Hurff (scotthurff.com) is an entrepreneur and founded Fuego (thefuego.com), a chillingly great modern men’s publication served up weekly by email. If you want the best information on wine, lifestyle, food, apparel, fashion and anything else any classy guy should know, sign up for Fuego.

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15 Comments latest by Ted Stryker

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