Today I was talking to a person who reviewed various products for a living. Now the assumption is when you do a review you have to thoroughly go through the product so that you can then summarize it for potential buyers. The funny thing was that he openly said that is not the case as most of the time he only uses it for a little while and then makes a review out of that. In many cases it is more like a first impression rather than a full evaluation.

I was thinking about it too and in some ways it is almost like reviewing a movie based simply on the trailer. Almost makes you wonder where if you are submitting your item for a critic to review on whether or not you should simply give them a specific version as like in this case they aren’t going to truly go through the product anyways to base their opinion off of. Reasons like this is usually why sometimes I am a little weary of simply taking say a review magazine’s word for it as like the final say on whether or not something is good or bad.

I was watching this interesting bit where there were a group of people who were struggling with money as it seemed like they were compulsive spenders. Of course their friends and family members tried to help but it seemed like nothing was getting through. Some of the tactics were pretty interesting I thought such as trying to yell at the person as if it was an army or simply having someone follow them daily to make sure they don’t spend recklessly.

The funny solution that finally got around was that they got a third party person involved who simply heard the story and the person knew that other people know now. Apparently that in itself was a pretty strong factor as I guess it is like putting someone on TV where it feels like thousands of people are watching your bad habits. I actually don’t doubt that would work too. Heck, some people have gotten out of debt by simply writing about their money problems publicly as it is a way to keep themselves accountable where you have a lot of outside people ready to judge you, so to speak.

Interesting story I heard today about a person who works as an executive at a company and manages millions of dollars like a pro. But when it comes to his personal life he is simply swimming in a massive pool of debt. As part of the plan to turn things around he was simply given a third party person to be accountable to where he would have to report his finances and budgeting.

Funny enough, just that alone seemed to be a a big enough factor to get him to start budgeting and following through with a plan. I guess in many ways it’s like a person that constantly has a messy room where as soon as you have a third party constantly seeing the mess you kind of naturally just want to make sure it is clean as it will leave a bad impression.

That kind of makes you feel silly in many ways where you can give someone all the advice and strategies in the world and knowing something simple like that can help turn a financial budgeting problem around just seems too simple to comprehend in many ways.