There is a major crisis out there. People with various degrees, experiences, claims are all giving out personal finance gyan.

Most of them have good intentions, many of them have personal experience, and a few of them have burned their fingers in the market. However nothing really allows them to claim themselves as experts giving gyan, but they all do.

In fact like religious gurus some of them even have the audacity to claim that theirs is the only path, and all other paths are taken by ‘kafirs’.

Go back to news items of say 2008 , 2010 etc. and look at the advice that people have given. Check for yourself whether you would have liked that. The chances are you would not have liked it. In 2008 one south based news paper gave a very conservative asset allocation to a 42 year old EARLY RETIREE. Inflation would have gnawed his portfolio.

We need websites who will rip apart such recommendations.

Sadly people do not have the ability to understand the difference between ‘free’ advice by salesmen (these days it is respectfully couched in a website) and ‘free’ calculators like freefincal by Pattu.

So many websites, so many planners, so many advisers, an alphabet soup of qualifications, I really do not blame the common man. Most of them would be better off with PPF, Index fund, term insurance, and NO ADVISER kinda model.

One website which asked for reactions to their articles is here…read on…

http://sawbonessurio.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/planning-ones-retirement-with-1-1-crores-corpus-fund/