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I wrote about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic effort to spread NYC’s promising model of personal, one-on-one financial advice for ordinary citizens. Mayors in five other cities (Lansing, MI; Denver, CO; Nashville, TN; Philadelphia, PA; and San Antonio, TX) will get a shot at using a total of $16 million in seed money to leverage some additional private investment and provide unbiased, reliable, one-on-one financial counseling to folks in need. The model is called “Financial Empowerment Centers” and I think it has a great deal of promise. Here’s Mayor Bloomberg on today, talking about the initiative:

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Contorted analogies aside, the Mayor seems pretty compelling to me here. Moreso when you consider a related point that I saw put very well by journalist and author Helaine Olen in this with Time. Olen’s is about the “dark side of the personal finance industry,” and this bit jumped out at me:

“…there never was a golden age of financial literacy. There was just a lot less to know and a lot less ways to get in trouble. Most people had a basic savings account, a fixed-rate mortgage, maybe some life insurance – and no one was surveying them to know if they understood that stuff…our financial lives have grown more complex and complicated since then. The mystery isn’t why people’s financial literacy is so low. It’s that we ever expected it would be better.”