Can you hear me now?

I have officially landed in blogland. I must say starting a blog is already way harder than I ever imagined. The choices made now will forever impact the future of the site and ultimately determine who finds their way to my modest contribution to the blogosphere (it only took me 3 days to come up with a name). The goal of my first post is to explain who I am, why I am here and what I expect readers to get out of this blog.

So how do you start a blog? Good question; if anyone knows please let me know! I would generally start a conversation by asking my conversational counterpart a question. This strategy takes the pressure off myself and prevents me from rambling. Since I do not have the luxury of asking my (potential) readers any questions upfront I suppose will start by introducing myself and explaining why I am here. For various reasons I have decided to post under the pen name of TRC (The Rational Choice) and not under my own name. This was a decision made for a number of reasons but mostly because I don't want strangers, prospective business partners or employers to be able to google me and know every opinion I've ever had. I feel by remaining anonymous I will be able to be much more true to myself and the readers. I am a mid 20's graduate from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a major in Economics and minor in History. I became interested in finance at a very young age, which can primarily be attributed to my late grandfather who introduced me to the stock market, mutual funds and the world of CNBC. We would spend hours watching the ticker go by. I was assigned to watch for KO (Coca-cola co.). I was amazed how the value of a company could go up and down in a single day and even more amazed an everyday person could be a part of it. I must admit I really didn't understand it but it opened a new world that I would never forget. Before I was even old enough to fully understand credit and lending I was very opposed to debt. I could never understand why people borrowed money and vowed I would never borrow any one's money. I have accomplished this with a little luck, a lot of work, a LOT of help and by always being mindful of the future impact of my decisions. I have grown up and learned there are such things as good debt and "rational" reasons be in debt but I still prefer to be on the other side of the coin. I work in sales for one of the largest discount brokerage houses in the country helping people transition assets from retirement accounts (401k, 403b, 457, 401a etc) into other savings vehicles like IRAs (hopefully) and have the pleasure of seeing people commit financial suicide on a daily basis.

This is the primary reason for my blog. Most people will never know the true cost of the majority of the financial decisions they will make in their life. How can you do a true cost benefit analysis of a decision without all the information? Unfortunately the world in which we live has become so complicated by taxes, fine print, governments, contracts, hidden fees and regulation that even simple transactions have become bogged down in the technicalities that the real cost is lost (anyone buy a phone lately?) Pile on top of that the lack of education and formal training in the area of finance and your everyday consumer is going to war (shopping) against a modern military (finance/credit companies) with nothing more than a medieval knight's suit. One of the most tragic aspects of our education system today is the fact that you can spend 16,000 hours in class to get your high school diploma but no one took three of those hours to explain how to balance a checkbook, why you should take money out of an account yielding 0.5% to pay down a loan that is financed at a 19.96% variable rate or if you spend more money than you make it will eventually ruin you. The reality is, this is information that would would take less than a semester to teach and could save people hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their life. When was the last time knowing what an atom was or how to write a geometry proof saved you any money? This is where TRC comes in. I am here to to do a true cost benefit analysis of some common financial problems facing people in the world today. First I will examine the ways people make decisions, identify the flaws in our everyday decision making process and help you uncover the true cost of that next big purchase.

This has evolved into quite a long first post but I want to set the expectations with the readers as well as myself about what this blog is about. This blog is more for myself than anyone who may stumble upon the blog and spend a few minutes surfing through a few key paragraphs. For a long time I have wanted to put my thoughts and beliefs in writing. I want to learn and I want to teach. Most of the situations I will explore in this blog will be situations I do not know the answer to. I hope this becomes an interactive site. Feel free to contact me (therationalchoice@gmail.com) or post comments on any of my posts. If you are facing a decision, have read an article or have a question you want me to explore please let me know! You can expect the writing to be crude - grammar, spelling and lingual finesse are not my strong points. Practice makes perfect? You can also expect me to ABUSE the parenthesis. Many times my thoughts come out on multiple levels, it is almost like I am interrupting myself. Since I do not have the lingual prowess to integrate these thoughts into a sentence, I am forced to use these parentheses as a way to cram extra information into a sentence without having to figure out where to put a comma, semi-colon or period. I do not expect this blog to be riddled with opinions and preaching although I imagine it will come up from time to time. Some ideas I have in mind for future posts: the real price of a 20,000 car financed over 5 years, interest cost of carrying credit card balances, good reasons to borrow money and the danger of leverage. First we must find the real value of our dollar.

Let the games begin...

TRC