<prompt> Human: I must admit that personal finance has never been my strongest area of expertise over the years, but Ive recently began to take an interest in better understanding finances and managing my own a bit better. Ive read a few articles online and then I picked up a book from my local library The Everything Personal Finance in Your 20s 30s Book by Howard Davidoff, and I keep seeing some common themes in advice which is based on what seems to me to be a very unrealistic view of the world. For starters, the majority of online sources Ive found make this strange assumption that their example people somehow have 10,000 to start with; I know from personal experience that neither myself nor any of my peers started out with anything more than what we could scrape together paycheck to paycheck and many of us are deeply in debt, not figuring out things with a magic 10 grand deposit.The second axe I have to grind is how savings examples always seem to make very unrealistic projections. In Davidoffs book, for example, he sings the praises of saving money by arguing that if you saved 25 a month at 6 percent interest, in five years youd have 1,744. If you saved 100 a month at 6 percent interest, in five years youd have 6,977; in ten years, youd have 16,388. Wow! Thats great, but where is someone going to give you 6 interest on either 25 or 100? When I do a bit of basic Google searching on the subject, CNN Money tells me The average savings account has a measly 0.06 APY annual percentage yield, or interest, and many of the nations biggest banks pay rates as low as 0.01. But there are actually some accounts that pay yields closer to 1. So if the best youre gonna get is 1 if youre lucky, and the average is 0.06, why do these sources talk about 5, 6, or sometimes even 10 or more return on savings?  <response>: 6 is the average for the stock market return over decadesAlso the super low savings interest rate is a rarity. ING Direct was paying 5 in 2001. A normal account was paying over 10 in the 80s. But then interest rates were very high across the board 