When I worked at America Online, the company regularly brought in financial “experts” to offer “advice” to employees, some of whom were freshly minted millionaires thanks to the hypergrowth of AOL stock. The advice these “experts” sometimes offered made my jaw drop.

A mortgage banker from a local company came in and suggested all first-time homebuyers should take out low- (or no-) down-payment, interest-only loans, under the theory that home values appreciate and almost all you do for the first few years of a loan is pay interest, anyway. Stockbrokers came in and suggested AOL stockholders should take a margin line against their holdings and buy yet still again more AOL stocks.

There is a word describing both of these nuggets of expert advice: Stupid. They were stupid ideas then, and in the cold light of the financial days we now are living through, the true stupidity of these actions is even more harshly visible.

After I sat through a few of these sessions, I realized these people weren’t advisers — they were salesmen, and I assume they were were paying the company for the right to pitch their wares. And people listened to them, because if you can’t listen to “experts,” who can you listen to?

I write about this today because the Dow is tanking again, the latest in a series of days when the markets are sucking all the air out of the room. And this is the collapse of the castle of financial contrivances that’s been built over years, even decades. And now, a lot of people are going to suffer, many in ways previously unimaginable.

Including, probably, me. I didn’t buy into this stuff, pay off my credit cards every month, have an emergency fund in cash in the bank, bought far less house than the experts said I “could afford,” contribute the max possible to my 401K and also contribute to a Roth IRA. I made these choices only after years of making many dumb choices, getting scarred for making them and deciding that I had to do better.

So I educated myself, played by the rules, straightened out my finances and married someone who has a similar outlook on money (and more day-to-day financial discipline than me, which I need). And we made some hard decisions.

And now we suspect that we’ll be targeted to pay for the many bailouts that have started and are to come — not to mention the fact that we’re both working in dramatically shrinking industries, making both of our jobs insecure. And I’m bitter about that.