I wanted to let everyone know that our friends over at YoungMoney.com launched a financial challenge earlier this week that looks pretty cool. They conducted a poll recently and found that only 24% of those that responded felt they had a decent understanding of personal finances. So, since their online stock market game has been such a huge success, they thought it would be a great idea to launch an interactive financial challenge to help young adults learn more about personal finance as well. If you're interested, check it out here, take the challenge, and get hooked up with some great incentives as well.
If I were going to sign up for something like that I'd want to do a bit of investigation first so the first thing I'd want to know about is their terms of service and I might even want to contact them directly first. So, about the first thing I would do would be to check out some of the links on the page. I'd probably go to the bottom of the page and see what was listed down there. In this case I quickly see a nice set of links listed where I could probably get all the info I needed. Here are the links I refer to. Privacy Statement | Advertise | About Us | Financial Literacy | Jobs | Subscribe | Terms of Use | Write for Us | Contact Us | Site Map Suppose I wanted to contact them about a job working for "your friends?" or maybe I wanted to write for "your friends"? Ok, I did a bit of digging and find out that somebody named Todd Romer owns Youngmoney.com and it is some kind of entertainment company that prints a magazine you subscribe to, full of advertising, of course. So what do you get for taking their course, signing up for the magazine and opening an investment account with them? Congratulations! You're ready to take the Young Money Challenge! After 10 years of providing entertaining financial information, Young Money has devised an easy way to help you pinpoint exactly what you need to know. But that's not all, we have partnered with some of the most respected financial companies in the U.S. to offer you incredible incentives. After we help you learn the basics of personal finance, we want to help you change your financial behavior! Pass the quiz and you'll immediately receive over $100 worth of offers, including $25 cash when you open an investment account etc... It's easy. All you have to do is: 1. Sign in. 2. Take the 20-question financial IQ quiz. (Hint: If you don't know an answer simply press the "need help" button.) 3. Enter your email address to have all the exclusive offer codes and urls sent privately to your email. After doing some more digging I finally found their terms of service deeply buried on the web site. It's lengthy indeed but I took special note of this little gem. American Arbitration Association? Just like NAF they voluntarily agreed to go out of the arbitration business rather than face an angry Attorney General. I think I'll pass on that one.
YoungMoney is a great company that has been around for about 10 years and provides loads of free information about personal finance for young adults. I do know the people that run the site personally, and I happen to like them too...great people that really care about improving financial education among our youth. Anyway, I took the challenge, and it's really just a fun 20-question online quiz to test basic financial knowledge. You don't have to sign up for anything, including a magazine subscription, and you can enter your email address at the end if you'd like to receive an email with several offers. Again, you don't have to sign up for any of those either. It's just a quiz- have fun with it and learn a bit about personal finance at the same time.
That's really not the point. Yes, it is a simple quiz but almost everything on the page is false and misleading. It says you can earn over $100 in 5 minutes. To me and most anyone else that should mean that they are offering $100 green I.O.U. Federal Reserve Notes commonly known as U.S. Dollars but that is not the case at all. It also says [Still Strong, Still Stable, and Still Hiring. Internships and full-time opportunities available nationwide.] But when you try to see about getting any of those things the links all lead right back to the same quiz page. That makes it false advertising and totally misleading. After that who in their right mind would trust them or any of their multitude of advertisers for much of anything. Real world businesses make sure people can contact them in every possible way. They widely advertise their store or office locations, telephone numbers and who to contact in case of problems with their products or services. They don't hide anything. If they did they wouldn't get any business. People would avoid them like the plague. If they have a web site they put all their contact information right up there for people to see and use. For instance, I bought two magic jack phone lines last year. I bought their 5 year plan for $110.00 but they only gave me credit for 1 year on each line. One of those phones went dead yesterday so I called them up using my cell phone and they looked up the sale and gave me a new product code to be entered on line which extended the time another 4 years on each phone. It wasn't hard to contact them and they got the job done quickly and efficiently. If that contact information had not been there when I first bought the phones I would never have bought them in the first place. The internet is no different than the real world. If people or companies play tricks with their contact information or put up false and misleading links or don't have full and complete contact information available then people should not do business with them. Buyer beware if no contact information is available. There is no reason for honest business people to hide who they are or how to contact them. Only thieves, crooks, shysters, con men and debt collectors hide who they really are and hide their true and correct addresses and phone numbers. Honest business people don't do that. Simple quiz? Maybe so but on the other hand what did the spider say to the fly?
