The Angry Mob Platinum Diamond Card is hilarious, but look what's really going on

I thought John Hodgeman's Daily Show riff on Wall Street reform and the Angry Mob Platinum Diamond Card the other night was a hoot.

But a dead serious report from the Pew Charitable Trust the same day is even more droll. Online credit cards offered by the nation's 12 largest banks won't be legal when new credit card rules kick in next February, Pew found. Better yet, both the Hodgeman bit and the Pew report arrived almost exactly on the 80th anniversary of one of U.S. history's most spectacular market crashes.

You cannot make up stuff this good.

Credit card problems aren't a joke if you have them, I know. And some reform of the worst abuses is both necessary and laudable. But often, our best way out of such jams is mostly things we need to do ourselves,as Associated Content contributor Ray Harris pointed out a few years ago.

CNNMoney.com last year looked at the pros and cons of 10 tools we might use to dig ourselves out of financial holes. And Forbes.com not long ago discovered SmartyPig.com., an online service that also is sort of a support group for the budget challenged. But what many of us figure out, after some trial and more error, is that you need to think beyond money to make it work. Financial-Choices.com outlines one way to do that, starting with protecting what you have before you start messing with improvements.