Money Myths
Renting is not throwing money away, and neither is most of a mortgage payment
The phrase treats rent as uniquely wasted while ignoring interest, maintenance, insurance and transaction costs. Both routes have…
Leela Mathews
Contributing writer, Virgin Myth
Leela writes about etymology and the invented origins people prefer.
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16 articles
Money Myths
Checking your own credit file does not damage it
Two different kinds of enquiry get recorded, and only one of them belongs to a lender. Conflating them has stopped people looking…
Money Myths
Carrying a credit card balance does not build anything except interest
The belief that you must leave a balance unpaid to prove you are borrowing has no basis in how repayment behaviour is reported. It…
Money Myths
The wheel has no memory, and a famous night in Monte Carlo proved it expensively
The fallacy is named after a run of one colour at a casino in 1913, when the crowd bet ever larger sums on the correction that a…
Money Myths
Einstein never called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world
The quotation appears in financial promotional material decades after his death, with no source. The mathematics behind it needs no…
Food Myths
That noise from the pan is steam, because lobsters have no voice
The sound comes from air and vapour forced out from under the shell. The animal has no lungs, no vocal cords and no mechanism for…
Food Myths
Dom Pérignon spent his career trying to get the bubbles out
Sparkling wine was described in England before the French monk is supposed to have invented it. In Champagne at the time, bubbles…
Money Myths
Tipping does not come from an acronym, and America tried to ban it
The word is far older than any of the phrases it supposedly abbreviates. The practice was imported, widely resented, and outlawed…
Money Myths
There is no cheapest day to book a flight, only a cheaper way to look
The advice came from an era when airlines loaded fare sales overnight and competitors matched by Tuesday morning. Pricing systems…
Food Myths
Bread goes stale by rearranging its starch, not by drying out
A loaf left in the fridge stales faster than one on the counter, despite losing less water. The process is a slow crystallisation…
Food Myths
Letting a steak come to room temperature does almost nothing
The instruction appears in cookbooks everywhere and can be tested with a thermometer in under an hour. A thick piece of meat warms…
Food Myths
The box of baking soda in the fridge came from an advertising campaign
A company with falling sales for its main product invented a second use for it in the early 1970s. Controlled comparisons since…
Money Myths
Adam Smith used the invisible hand three times and meant something narrower
The phrase now stands for an entire economic philosophy. In his own writing it appears rarely, in specific arguments, and once in…
Money Myths
Buy cheap, buy twice is a good story with a weak record
The most quoted version of the argument comes from a comic novel about a fantasy city. Testing organisations keep finding that…
Money Myths
The customer is always right was a shop slogan, and the famous get-out is invented
Two large retailers used the phrase around a century ago as a promise about returns. The popular correction, that the original…
Money Myths
The statistic about lottery winners going broke has no source
A specific percentage is quoted everywhere, and the body it is credited to says it never produced it. The research that does exist…