central planning

I have mentioned before how much I love my bank (in the US – I merely tolerate Deutsche Bank and curse them often for charging annual fees just to maintain my savings account and forcing me to wait for three months before awarding me a check card as I came from a strange, exotic, and untrustworthy land).  But in the US, I belong to the loveliest of credit unions, complete with insanely helpful employees who offer up coffee, lemonade, remember names, and are still emailing and faxing me things in Germany.  Oh, customer service.  How I miss you.

Anyways, as if I needed yet another reason to sing their praises, this year they started a blog.  I have been a part of many conversations around “corporate blogging” and appropriate image and content and I have read my share of awful and boring company blogs.  But this one, I can highly recommend.  Targeting a younger audience (ie: the audience that would actually read blogs) this is entertaining enough to read just for fun.  A healthy balance of practical advice (dealing with finances when moving in with a boyfriend/girlfriend, benefits of a health savings account) and dismissing annoying practical advice (if you’ve paid taxes, rent, bills, and are debt free, go ahead and have a latte!  who cares if $2 per work day = $10 week = $500 year?  You’ve already taken care of the important stuff).

I personally enjoyed his advice on combining finances:

How you spend money as a couple is also tricky. Some couples spend what they each earn. Others do the allowance type thing. Kinda like government…you have communism, dictatorships, democracy, etc. Take your pick.

Our household currently operates under a capitalist system, with clearly defined property rights.  This system was severely tested during the Ironing Revolution, in which one party refused to acknowledge the proven advantage in total output of division of labor.  Negotiations proved unsuccessful, but this  is a rare protectionist policy.  Other than some contributions to public goods and infrastructure (taxed according to income bracket), it is a free market.  Clearly, parents must really love their children to move from this set up into a welfare state.