You may have heard this expression:
“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
If you’re one of the people who fell for that old email scam about millions of dollars tied up in Nigeria, you certainly know of what I speak. The thing that was particularly sinister about that one was that it was more than just sending them a few thousand dollars and then hitting the jackpot.
Some of these scams actually involved the victims being required to go to Africa to pick up the money. When they got off the plane in Lagos, they were kidnapped and held for much larger ransoms.
Or a little closer to home, people send thousands of dollars for courses that will tell them how they can become billionaires in real estate. It’s gussied up and called a university, but it’s maybe one step up from getting kidnapped in Africa and fet to howler monkeys.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but generally if you see something advertised on television, it’s a good idea to be at least a little bit suspicious.
I think it was in the 1970s when they started putting together packages of things to sell on televisions. I think it was the wonderful comedian Robert Klein who did a bit about it.
“Now you can have every record ever recorded!”
Everything from Johnny Mathis songs to Lithuanian language records.
“Sessue yes, sessue yes.”
And of course, the bonus.
“And if you act now, an ice crusher.”
Back then, commercials like this were mostly inflicted on those watching television in the middle of the night. I remember watching repeats of “The Outer Limits” in a Houston hotel room in 1989. I had a 7 a.m. flight and it was a period of my life when early flights gave me insomnia.
For three hours, from 2-5 a.m., they had the same commercials every quarter hour. Some were PSAs, although the funniest thing about it was the first and last commercials ever 15 minutes were used car dealer extraordinaire Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot). I remember the incentive Cal was offering for a test drive was a cordless phone.
It got worse before it got better. I remember watching late late shows on an independent station out of Sacramento that broke for three minutes of commercials after six or seven minutes of programming.
People used to talk a lot about how many murders the average American child saw on television by age 18, but I think a far more significant statistic would be how many advertisements they’ve seen by that age.
Eventually there were entire channels devoted to getting people to spend their money, and of course the sales pitches became more and more sophisticated. There were entire lines of products that rarely showed up in stores. “As Seen On TV” became a marketing pitch, especially with generations of Americans that had grown up with television at the center of their lives.
I saw a statistic recently saying that the average American spends a third of their waking hours watching television. That sounds high to me. If you figure seven hours a night for sleep, that would mean people were watching about 40 hours a week of TV.
That would work out to about five hours a weekday and 7-8 hours on weekend days.
Now most of you will doubtless say you don’t watch anywhere near that much, and since you have already spoken up for yourself as a reader for getting this far into the story, you may be right.
But that survey can’t only be polling toothless hillbillies scratching their testicles while watching “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” And yes, PBS does count in that 40 hours, although you can deduct for pledge drives.
John D McDonald’s iconic Travis McGee character doesn’t have a TV set on board the Busted Flush.” Indeed, at one point McGee dismisses television by pointing out how rare in is to see a character in a movie or on a TV show watching television. After all, the real purpose of television is to indoctrinate and to separate you from your money.
Along those same lines, I remember once hearing an executive at one of the papers where I worked say that the purpose of articles in the paper is just to get readers from one ad to the next.
Look back a hundred years and you’ll see how much things have changed. No television, no radio, no portability of music. Billboards and print ads were pretty much the only advertising, and the idea of the U.S. as a consumer society was decades in the future. Planned obsolescence wasn’t part of the vocabulary.
There is one area in which I have tremendous admiration for my parents. When they were starting out, they budgeted everything very closely, and they always managed to put aside at least a few dollars each pay period as savings. They didn’t spend money on dinners out or entertainment. In fact, on our yearly trips to New York, when they went to Broadway shows, they nearly always bought standing-room tickets, the least expensive of all.
They wanted to buy a house and they wanted to save money to put five kids through college.
They did both and they managed to save enough money that my mother still has enough to live on at age 93.
That’s something of a generational thing, but they were exceptional even for their generation. I honestly can’t think of any time they were frivolous or wasteful in their spending. They lived below their income for most of their lives and then were able to spend 15 years or so traveling the world after they retired.
My dad died more than 12 years ago, and I can imagine what he would have said about the reverse mortgages Tom Selleck has been plugging in television ads. In fact, reverse mortgages have gotten such a bad rap that Selleck has done a second set of commercials saying he would never support something that would take people’s houses away.
Well …
Traditionally, the main way working- and middle-class families have been able to build wealth and pass it on to their heirs is through equity in their homes. That already took a beating starting in the ’90s when people started taking equity loans. More and more mortgages never got paid off completely.
If we had stayed in California and not retired, we would still have five years left on our mortgage. As it was, we sold our house and had enough equity to buy a beautiful home in Georgia with no mortgage at all.
We were also prepared enough for retirement that we don’t even need to consider Selleck and his reverse mortgages. Even if we spend everything we have saved — an unlikely occurrence — we will still have the house free and clear to leave to our children.
As for the people who do take out reverse mortgages, I would bet they’ll get less than they thought and owe more.
Try to remember this:
Companies that run ads don’t do it to lose money. They’re in it to make a profit off you.
No matter what Tom Selleck says.