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WORK & MONEY
Ken Kurson
interviewed by Randy Williams on June 21, 1996
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Ken Kurson, 27, gave up the rock 'n roll life and has since become a personal finance writer for "Worth" Magazine. The unusual career move seems to have paid off -- in addition to penning the popular "Advocate" column for "Worth," Kurson now dispenses solid money tips with a refreshingly irreverent style on his weekly CNNfn segment and in the pages of "Green," his personal "finanzine" for young adults. He has somehow found the time to begin writing "The Buck Starts Here," a new series for Tripod which will launch in July.
Tripod: "Green," your "finanzine," is subtitled "Personal Finance for the Unashamed." Why? Do you think that young adults view managing their money wisely as an un-hip thing to do?
Kurson: I think there's a stigma among people who are generally within the 18-34 demographic that caring and learning about money is gross -- that somehow it's crass and puts them in an 80's frame of mind, whereas its very 90's to pretend not to care about money. That's all well and good but, as it happens, people do care about money, and when they're pretending they don't care is exactly when they start to make really bad financial decisions. If your point is to be free from those kind of concerns but you are making lousy decisions about your money, the truth is that you are actually going to end up being less free of worry. Hence the subhead.
Parents and schools are really good at dishing out clichés about saving, but they're pretty crappy at explaining just how things are done in the real world.
Tripod: Do you think this stigma is strictly a cultural phenomenon, or have schools let young adults down to the point that they just don't know how to come to terms with financial matters?
Kurson: Well, it's true that schools don't cover it at all, but beyond that parents don't cover it at all. People don't teach their kids about money. You're lucky if your parents teach you about sex and you're really fortunate if they have a good meaningful religious conversation with you, but it's extraordinary for them to have a true-life financial conversation with you. Parents are really good at dishing out clichés about saving and not getting into trouble, but they're pretty crappy at explaining just how things are done in the world. I'm a life-long personal finance junkie, but I have no idea how much my dad made, what kind of investments he used to have, anything like that -- and nobody I talked to knows how much their parents make or what kind of choices they make with their income. I think the culture, by and large, does tend to keep people in the dark -- and I think the mainstream financial press also plays sort of a dubious role in the whole process by relying so heavily on jargon and insider lingo that the Average Joe feels like, "Aw hell, I'll never understand mutual funds, I'd better just put my money in a savings account." And that's really a bad decision.
Tripod: I was just going to ask for your take on mainstream money writers. A lot of them really do seem to thrive on being sort of smug and baffling. That approach comes off as an even worse form of elitism than inside jokes -- it's an inside language, and if you don't get it you're not supposed to get it.
Kurson: Exactly right, and it's self-perpetuating. Personal finance writers are scared that if they don't use impenetrable comments, nobody will believe them. They think that the way to sound smart is to use this utterly foreign and awkward "finance-speak." They're so self-interested in keeping you in the dark! It's a bunch of bullshit, but that's the way it goes.
Tripod: You spent several years as a rock musician in Chicago. How exactly did you make the jump from that lifestyle to being a financial writer at WORTH magazine by the time you were 27? That's a pretty interesting transition!
Kurson: Well, I dropped out of my "big-name college" to pursue my fortunes as a writer. Writing had become my passion, sort of overtaking music as what I really wanted to be doing with my time. I had a string of early writing jobs, things like writing long obituaries and those kinds of goofball assignments -- but that's the best training a person like me could have had. I always tell aspiring writers who say, "You have a good career, how did you do it?" that it's a muscle you have to work. It just drives me crazy when I meet someone who says, "I'm a writer" -- and I say, "Oh really, what are you writing?" And they go, "Well, I haven't written anything in a year." Well then, you're not a writer. No plumber would say "I'm a plumber but I just haven't plumbed in a year." It's a trade and it's a muscle and you've got to work it all the time to become good. So I moved up to New York because I wanted to get away from the rock scene -- and because college had become too expensive. I knew what I wanted to do and I knew that I didn't need a degree to do it. So far so good.
Tripod: Colleges would lead young people to believe that they need a business degree to pull off what you're doing.
Kurson: That's bullshit. Total bullshit. I can think of, just off the top of my head, three different people way higher than me in the personal finance business who don't have college degrees.
Tripod: Other than having had an interest in personal finance from an early age, what prepared you to become a money guru?
Kurson: I don't consider myself a money guru. I'm not a stock picker. I don't make specific buy-sell recommendations on individual stocks, although I do occasionally on mutual funds, which are a lot safer. I think what entitles me to write about personal finance is that I'm a good clear writer who grasps much of the basics of personal finance. Like I said earlier about other personal finance writers, I think it's a fiction that you have to know some sort of obscure jargon about money. I just think that's lunacy. My greatest strength, even though I do know a lot about personal finance and have become quite an expert on it, is my ability to explain things clearly in writing.
Here I am in this room full of people listening to Charles Manson on the stereo -- and talking about mutual funds is untoward!
Tripod: When you go to a party, do people ask you for advice, or are you shunned as some sort of pariah?
Kurson: They ask me, but it's in secret. They're sneaky about it. One of my favorite stories about that happened at this totally hard-core rock n' roll party. Everyone was just too hip, and they had all these paintings by John Wayne Gacy, the mass murderer. They were playing tapes of Charles Manson -- he's recorded all these half spoken-word, half set-to-music lunatic poems. I was talking to these three people who were asking me what I do, and I said, "Oh, I'm interested in personal finance." They were saying, "Yeah, we have this 401(k) plan at work," they're asking for suggestions, and I'm kind of getting into it. Someone else comes wandering up to the conversation and goes, "Oh man, you guys are talking about money? How gross!" Here I am, in this room full of Gacy paintings listening to Charles Manson on the stereo -- and talking about mutual funds is untoward! It totally cracked me up. It really said a lot about how people view being knowledgeable about money as being gauche. But to answer your question more directly: yes, people come up to me all the time for advice. People write to "Green" constantly for advice and I'm really happy to provide it. I think it's a darn shame that people my age are so ignorant about so many areas of personal finance; it's very important to be informed. So, I'm real happy to talk about it with people.
Tripod: Some of those people may have been lead to believe that it's uncool to care about their money because of media saturation. Advertisers see the 18-34 bracket as being sort of a "Holy Grail," and the number of "hip" and totally frivolous products getting pitched to that age group is staggering. I mean, you're a lot more likely to see an ad in a trend-setting magazine like "Rolling Stone" for a $200 pair of pants than for mutual funds. Their audience is supposedly the group of people with the most "disposable" income -- yet the reality is that they desperately need to learn to hang onto more of their earnings...
Kurson: Well, yeah, but there's no way in the world that "Details", "Rolling Stone," or even "Spin" would say no to the advertising dollars at the ready of the big mutual fund and financial service giants. These companies have some of the smartest advertising departments in the world -- remember, they're selling hard-to-understand products whose differences boil down to percentage increments -- and would be happy to create hip, trendy ads for hip, trendy media. The reason they don't (and Green's hoping to change their minds) is that so far, young people haven't shown a great willingness to part with their cash to plan for a less dangerous tomorrow.
Tripod: Speaking of dangerous tomorrows, a lot of the fear and loathing concerning personal finance might have something to do with the restructuring of the workplace. Corporations are downsizing to become "lean and mean" and job security is pretty tenuous. What advice would you give young adults on navigating through such turbulent waters?
Kurson: That's a good point and a good question. I would advise young people to remember that they have to think of their own career and their own self as a corporation -- and do what's best for that corporation. That means that if I'm a 25 year-old guy making $30,000 a year at IBM or wherever, I have to assume that I can be fired any day. I have to sort of walk around with a Vietnam mentality, as though I'm on a mine-field. Everyday when I come in there, I have to say to myself, what am I doing -- I'm being paid 30,000 dollars by IBM -- what am I doing to justify that? Am I producing $30,001 of value? And if the answer to that is no, they're eventually going to figure that out and can you. So, you have to produce value in the workplace and you have to justify whatever salary you're getting so that if you do get canned, or want to leave, you have skills that are portable and that allow you to point to different ways you added value in a real sense. I think people, especially people my age, think that just sitting, keeping a seat warm is enough to produce a raise every year. The way corporations are run now, they're essentially owned by the public so thoroughly that it's not like this "old boys network" who think small profits are okay. Now shareholders want and demand large profits, and companies are forced to be so lean that if you're making $30,000 and producing $25,000 of value for the company, eventually you're going to be canned. So you need to take a good look at what kind of value you're adding to a company, what kind of goals you have, and see if you're meeting them.
With the instability of social security and the end of permanent employment, people have to look after their own financial needs. That's just the way it is, baby.
Tripod: Because employees have to jump from one job to another in this new work climate, young adults really need to put some of their earnings aside for the proverbial rainy day -- or even start saving for retirement early if they're going to take advantage of compound interest and have a nest-egg for their golden years. If talking about mutual funds at a party seems like a social faux pas, then retirement must seem like an absurdly distant eventuality.
Kurson: Yeah, it sounds so ambitious. People are only 25 and they're going, "Retirement? I don't even think the planet's going to be here in 40 years." But you've got to plan to live a long life in which you want to be prosperous at the end of it, or at least have the freedom to do the crap you've got your sights set on. Presuming you will be around when you're 55 or 65 -- or whenever you want to retire -- you're going to need some money to pay for that. I try not to use fear as a motivator, I try to not to say, "Uh-oh, you're going to be working at McDonald's when you're 70." To put a positive spin on it, don't you want to be able to travel, to take five years off to read all of the Shakespeare plays, or whatever your goals are? That takes money -- I wish it weren't so, but it is so. It does take money to do nice things and to lead the kind of life that you want, and you've got to plan for it. Nobody's going to come and take care of it -- these days less than ever. With the onslaught of self-directed retirement plans, the instability of the social security system, and the end of permanent employment, people have to look after their own financial needs, not just in retirement, but their whole life. That's just the way it is, baby.
Tripod: A good number of our readers have recently found themselves fresh out of college and well into debt. What sort of advice would you give those people and what kind of topics do you think your Tripod columns will cover that would help some of our members who are in that shape?
Kurson: Well, one thing I want to address is looking at why they got into that mess in the first place. Either, a) they borrowed a lot of money to go to college; b) they not only borrowed a lot of student loans to go, but they also ran up enormous credit card debt while they were in college and didn't have income to pay it; or, c) they lost those income producing years when they went to college and grad school and were sort of off the marketplace. It's not a popular opinion these days, but I think that college has to be subjected to cost-benefit analysis just like anything else. People just automatically go these days, and it just drives me nuts how people just say, "Well, I'm 18, I guess I have to go to college." It's really not true. People no longer say, "I'm 25, I guess I have to get married." They weigh it out -- is it right for me, is it something I want to do, is it something that's going to work with the rest of my lifestyle? But nobody subjects college or graduate school to those kinds of criteria. They go after a bachelor's because they "have to" and they go to graduate school because they couldn't find a job they liked with the bachelor's. It's like extending this womb period far beyond it's usefulness and wrecking their chances of enjoying the rest of their life because they're so deeply in debt.
Tripod: Does that really describe most of the college graduates you come into contact with?
Kurson: Maybe not most, but a lot. My brother, for example, is a lawyer and he went to probably the best law school in the country. The whole time he felt like he didn't really belong in law school, but by the time he got out he owed over $100,000 and it's very tough to break out of that kind of obligation. You can't just walk away from that. Then you're stuck being a lawyer. They don't give a shit if you want to be or you don't want to be. You have to pay up, even if it doesn't lead anywhere. That's how college loans are.
Tripod: You're doing personal finance segments on CNNfn now. How did you stumble into that gig, and isn't it a bit surreal to be on a network that tends to skew much older?
Kurson: It is totally surreal, that's exactly the right word for it. I personally think I'm horrible on TV. They asked to come on one time, probably as an oddity -- you know, freak show, this kid's got a fanzine about money -- and the response was overwhelming. I go on every week now, I've done 20 some shows and I've got little fans now who call in every week. I still can't stand to watch my tapes, but something seems to be clicking. Go figure -- who knows what's going to work in the shallow cesspool that is known as television?
I'm not pretending that people would rather read about money than movies -- but it's possible to make this topic lively and endurable.
Tripod: Are you still putting Green together in your apartment? If so, do you consider it a success?
Kurson: It's true that we're putting it together in my apartment. But how do you measure success? We have a lot more readers than we used to -- we started with fifteen copies and now we have 8,500 regular subscribers. That's a lot of growth, but we lose money on it. The bigger it gets, the more we lose. It's personally very fulfilling, very fun, and I love doing it, so for me it's a success. It's like, why do you guys do the Tripod site? Everything you read says that nobody's making money on the Web. But you provide a good service -- there's personal fulfillment issues and stuff like that. The difference is that I think Green will make money one day, while Tripod has no chance of ever breaking even. (Laughs)
Tripod: You don't say? All kidding aside, is there any sort of last thought or "sneak preview of coming attractions" for your Tripod columns that you'd like to end with?
Kurson: Well, I'm going to try to do my best to speak plainly and help people make sense of the big scary world of money. I should make my motto "Speak softly, but carry a big shtick." I intend to use conversational English and make what can be a boring subject as painless and as fun as possible. I'm not pretending that most people would rather read about money than read a novel or read about movies and stuff like that -- but it's possible to make this topic lively and endurable, and that's what I intend to do.
GREEN: PERSONAL FINANCE FOR THE UNASHAMED is published quarterly and is available for $3 an issue or $10 for a year's subscription. For more information or to subscribe, write GREEN at 245 8th Avenue, Suite 286, New York, NY, 10011.
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