I have literally never seen as much traffic as last night — not even when I was on the FRONT PAGE OF YAHOO.COM.

• At 6:50pm, I logged onto my webcam and finalized everything
• At 6:55pm, I logged into my blog to add a link to the webcast URL. By this point, my server had slowed to a crawl
• At 6:56pm, over 1 person/second was trying to access iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog
• At 7:01pm, we had my webhost on the phone attempting to resolve the issue
• It took until 7:21pm to completely fix the server problems, leaving me fuming and frustrated

If you’re interested, I recorded a video with more details of what happened.

Here are some pics from the carnage (look at the time stamps and note that this is OVER AN HOUR later past the webcast’s start)

When I first noticed the problem:

Couldn’t wait any longer…so I went live with what I had:

All right, so obviously this really sucked. Thousands and thousands of you were left out in the cold, and I feel terrible.

3 things:

• I’m getting someone to help out on the server side so this never happens again. Stay tuned
• I’ll do the webcast again as soon as that’s set up
• I wanted to tell you more about the Boot Camp (registration is closing today), but just know that whether you go with my program or something else, make a plan to automate your finances before the end of the year. There’s nothing like starting the year off fresh.

What do you want to learn so you can start 2010 off fresh?

• FIGURING OUT the differences in investment/saving options.
• TAKING ACTION setting up / automating / optimizing your finances. ‘I’m tired of just reading stuff.’
• CONVINCING your friends to manage their money.

What do you think?

Do me a favor and fill out a quick answer here so I can run some metrics on your response.

Make sure you do, because I have lots of bonuses for you, including private interviews I did with other entrepreneurs and bloggers where we cover advanced strategies for productivity, entrepreneurship, and personal finance.

If you don’t have the receipt, send a pic of yourself holding the book along with the best piece of ACTION you took after reading it. Only attractive people get the bonuses, though.

Winners: How other people have used my book

• Sachit Gupta: “I got rid of $60 in late fees by using your script (didn’t even have to go past the FIRST question !)”
• TheBaconFat: “I really can’t recommend Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich enough. Unlike just about every other finance book out there, instead of preaching at you about budgeting and “exploring your relationship with money” (*gag*), it tells you straight out what to do to take control of your money and your credit, deal with your debt, and set up automatic savings so you don’t have to, well… count on yourself to be responsible with your money.”
• Josh Crocker: Since reading the book my wife and I have: * Increased the size of our checking and savings accounts dramatically * Set up a systemitized finance system that saves, pays bills, and helps reduce debt, ALL automatically! * Checked-in on our finances for a grand total of less than one hour per month!
• bouldlife: “Two phone calls. Total savings for one year? $1455!”

More amazing stories of people using my book here. THIS is why I love what I do.

If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, get a copy for about $10.

And forward the receipt to iboughtthebook@iwillteachyoutoberich.com for bonuses!

Every time a provocative article about personal finance comes out (like this recent one about 401(k)s), dozens of people forward it to me, complaining, “Ugh, if only we had better education.” Kind of like how everyone looks at me, expectantly, whenever I’m in a club and bhangra music comes on. Get a life.

Doesn’t it seem like people throw “education” around as the solution to every problem in personal finance? Oh, if we could just get young people better educated. How? Who’ll do it? Why hasn’t it been done for 50 years? Oh, those are just details.

This has been driving me nuts for a long time, and I’ve been spending the last few years thinking about better ways to change people’s attitudes and behaviors (here are some of my results). I’ve recently ranted on how personal finance is not about willpower, and how we love to demonize fat and poor people for not trying hard enough.

So when it comes to education, I start rolling my eyes when people suggest education is the magic bullet. Let’s get real, please. As heretical as it is to say in our society, “education” is not the panacea for personal finance. That’s a simplistic throw-away answer that does nothing to address real solutions.

People have been saying that for 50 years and it hasn’t worked for many, many reasons. “Wishing” there was more education doesn’t accomplish anything except making us feel better about ourselves for feeling bad about our society.

Here are a few ideas I’ll argue:

• Nobody wants to learn about financial literacy — but instructors and organizations keep teaching this worthless topic. People may want to learn about being rich or paying for their wedding or how to travel to Tahiti, but I’ve never, ever heard a young person say, “Hey Ramit! I really want to become financial literate!” Its dry, boring, and unrewarding.

  In fact, even I don’t care about financial literacy. Did you know that the back cover of my book says, “6 weeks to financial literacy” — copy I accidentally glossed over when we developed the design — and when I noticed it after launch, I immediately had it changed for the next reprint?

• There are powerful interests against teaching personal-finance in schools for reasons including the following: Not enough qualified people to teach it, perceived (or real) liability, “it’s never been done,” “what are the metrics?” and “we are already overloaded.”
• Many purported “educational” seminars and organizations are really thinly veiled fronts to sell expensive, scammy products that benefit their salespeople. I have no problems charging people premium prices for premium goods, but when people are paying unnecessary fees that cost tens of thousands of dollars, I start getting pissed

And by the way, when we say that people in America are financially illiterate, what do we mean? Let’s take a look at a sample quiz:

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow?

a. More than $102
b. Exactly $102
c. Less than $102
d. Do not know

2. Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1 percent per year and inflation was 2 percent per year. After 1 year, would you be able to buy more than, exactly the same as, or less than today with the money in this account?

a. More than today
b. Exactly the same as today
c. Less than today
d. Do not know

3. Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”

a. True
b. False
c. Do not know

The results are predictably terrible. Here’s an example (see more at the Jump$tart Coalition):

[F]ewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification.

Ok, so people suck at personal finance. They don’t know what they’re doing, they get into all kinds of debt, pick incorrect investments and asset allocations, and then blame everybody else for their problems.

So what should we do?

We should make powerful defaults that do the right thing, because most people will never change their defaults. This is also known as “libertarian paternalism.” For example, automatic enrollment has produced astonishing results to encourage people to contribute to their 401(k)s. Isn’t that better than no default at all?

Whenever our own judgment has proven time and time again to be incorrect (see investor psychology), we should have products that make up for own fallibility. This is the same reason I have a GPS device in my car: because no matter how hard I try, no matter how much willpower I use, no matter how important it is…I still get lost.

We should segment people who are willing to invest time and resources for bigger wins, and reward them. Most people take what’s given to them and never proactively seek out a personal finance book or the huge amount of free, great information online. (That’s because we don’t want information, we want solutions.) But if you do — if you’re willing to pay for value — there should be tools that help you get far ahead of others who accept vanilla defaults.

We should unite the disparate behavioral elements to improve us in a holistic way. Think about career, negotiation, entrepreneurship, health and fitness. If you can use techniques to master one, you can use similar techniques to master all of these.

I’m going to start suggesting possible solutions over time, some of which will be controversial. For example, my blog works for a very self-selected group of internet nerds who read a lot of blogs. You guys are not typical — you are an elite, niche audience. I love that, but this is just one piece of the puzzle.

Bottom line: Don’t think that the magical idea of “education” will solve all personal-finance problems. Yes, education is important — both the quality of education and the quantity — but more important is changing the surrounding systems: better investment products for customers, understanding how our community affects our health and money, offering tailored options for different people (e.g., poor immigrant family of 5 vs. upper-middle-class of 3) and using automation and technology whenever our own judgment proves consistently faulty.

I’ll dig into these more over time.

Ice lolly? Awww. What other funny words can I learn?

To get notified when the UK edition comes out (January 2010), enter your email below.

But I need your help — it will take 2 minutes to vote for my talk.

1. Click here: Vote for Ramit’s panel: Building a Bulletproof Financial System.
2. On that page, click the thumbs-up button

Thanks for your help.

For the past few months, my friend and I have been putting together a bootcamp to help people earn more money on the side. We’ve written pages and pages, catalogued hundreds of ideas, started recording a bunch of videos (including case studies of people who earn lots of money on the side), and started thinking about pricing.

But before we go any further, we want to get your thoughts. If you want to earn more money on the side, can you spare 3 minutes to tell us what exactly you want to do? At the end of the survey, you’ll get a chance to sign up to get an early look at the bootcamp.

Let us know why you want to earn money on the side! [Edit: The survey is now closed. 1,300+ responses! Thanks, guys.]

After this happened to a number of my friends, I started thinking.

Not just about how horrible men are at online dating, but how to use this to my advantage.

Introducing The Craigslist Penis Effect

The Craigslist Penis Effect describes situations where everyone else is so horrible that, by being even half-decent, you can dominate everyone else and win.

These moron men on Craigslist would be better served writing 5 half-decent responses, testing to see which got the best response, and then sending it out instead of a picture of their generally mediocre manhood. I did exactly that for my friend on JDate and ended up getting very good at introducing girls to him. (Jewish women, beware of my Ashkenazi skills.)

Let’s take some examples where everyone else is so terrible that you can dominate by being even somewhat competent.

• Negotiations. Most people are awful negotiators (especially for jobs and especially in America). That’s because nobody teaches us how to negotiate — indeed, we’re actively taught that it’s “weird” and “awkward” to negotiate. By contrast, I find it “weird” to lose $10,000 because you didn’t take 5 hours to practice your negotiating pitch beforehand, like my friend Rachel did. By simply starting a negotiation, you stand out from 80% of other applicants.
• Writing effective emails. Most people send out dozens of emails per day. Yet when was the last time they studied the best emailers to learn techniques to (1) get busy people to respond to them, (2) cut down on back-and-forth emails, and (3) get what they wanted via email? (I’m working on a product with 50 email scripts you can use today. Newsletter subscribers get first crack.)
• Conferences. Most conferences are boring and bad. But so are most conference go-ers, who don’t do their homework beforehand, eat with their co-worker, and miss the prime benefits of networking. (The book Never Eat Alone has a magical chapter on how to be a master networker at conferences.)
• Exercise. Go for a 30-minute run every day and you’ll be in better shape than 90% of adult Americans. Stop debating minutiae about health and get off your ass.
• Holding onto expensive purchases for years (even decades). We love to buy expensive things like houses and cars, then turn around and sell them 5 years later. This is literally one of the most poisonous financial decisions you can make: Not only do you incur huge transaction costs, but you condition yourself to think that buying and selling expensive goods every few years is normal. Instead, if you can use the Tripod of Stability to make major purchases, you can spend that money on things that you love — rather than transaction fees.
• Earning money online. As Erica Douglass recently said, “If you earn $1 online, you’re doing better than 90% of people.”

There are thousands of other examples: Writing winning scholarship applications that secure over $100,000 in funding. Or creating blog posts that drive hundreds of thousands of views. Or simply learning about the basics of social psychology for every day use.

The examples go back to my post about Big Wins, including why trying to save money on lattes is pointless for many people.

As you can see, many Big Wins are actually easily within reach — if you choose the right targets and differentiate yourself from others. While you’ll have a few areas of life where you’ll have to go up against formidable competition, many other areas of life are wide open.

For those, don’t waste your time competing with lame Craigslist penis guys in a race to mediocrity. Instead, think about areas where your competition is mediocre (where everyone is doing the same thing, and doing it poorly) and carefully test multiple strategies to dominate. The Craigslist Penis Effect is a guide to standing out from others when being even half-competent can get you superb results. There are literally thousands of these opportunities.

See me in San Francisco: I’ll be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this Monday, 8/24. Considering the background — they frequently host Presidents, military leaders, authors, and scientists — I probably won’t be mentioning the Craigslist Penis Effect. Event details.

I’m working on a new post to give you a strategy to leave your friends in the financial dust.

But first, I need your help to tell me what you wish you’d saved for 10 years ago (surveys take less than 1 minute).

• If you’re in your 20s, click here.
• If you’re in your 30s, click here.
• If you’re in your 40s, click here.

Look for the post soon.

Thanks for helping out.

The 60-second survey is here. Over 1,000 responses in less than 12 hours. You guys are ridiculous. Thanks.