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Archive for the ‘Funny Money’ category

Siphon

December 20th, 2007

I’m a whiner. Here’s a goofy poem from my trip to the doctor this morning.

For symptoms I went to the doctor
Looking to get some help
What I told her just shocked her
Or that’s what I’m telling myself

She gave me a script for some ointment
Something to deal with signs
I’ll have to make another appointment
If my skin blisters or whines

Each trip to the doc is covered
A thirty dollar co-pay
“Happy Holidays,” she muttered
As I sadly shuffled away

Give me a diagnosis for the problem
Don’t just hand me a fix
I don’t want to mask yet a symptom
So that figures I’ve paid number six

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Posted in Funny Money, General

Tags: doctors funny humor

This morning I went into the bank to withdraw cash for the envelope system and in doing so I broke the bank. I don’t feel good about it, its not something that I intended to do. Its embarrassing in front of other customers, the staff looks at you funny, and it delayed me on my scheduled errands. Fortunately an employee was able to help me get my funds taken care of so that the cash could be stuffed into the envelopes. What did I break?

Well, I didn’t break it literally, but the machine that dispenses cash was overwhelmed by the total volume of cash I asked to get out – seventy bills are apparently too much for the slot.

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Posted in Funny Money

Tags: banking humor

How to Practice Safe Socks

November 27th, 2007

As I was putting on my socks this morning I had a recollection of a conversation I overheard one day when I was traveling through LAX airport. It was a conversation that caught me off guard but one that has stuck with me and now as a frugal blogger is relevant, but funny.

The Setup

I was in a terminal at LAX and I was waiting to get on a flight to head to Reno, NV, which was the closest airport to home at the time. I was sitting there probably tired since that’s usually the way airports make me feel when I saw a tall cowboy hat wearing man and his son walk past us, and then curve around to some seats behind us. I didn’t think much of their sitting there at the time and minded my own business. I try not to eaves drop too much lest I make it a habit or find out things I ought not to know. When you work around confidentiality long enough you begin to learn that knowing the dirt isn’t useful very often because its a liability.

However, I was at once awakened by the sound of the father chewing out his son for taking off his socks and boots. The son was scolded and told to put his socks and boots back on. What happened next is the part that has stuck in my mind over and over replaying to my own private comedy theater: the father scolded the son for putting his socks on the wrong way. Not the wrong foot, not inside out, not on his hands… but the wrong way. You see, there is a frugal way to put your socks on.

The correct method to put your socks on helps preserve the sock, make application to the foot simpler, and saves cowboy daddy hundreds of dollars in socks, I’m sure. To correctly apply the sock you must use your thumbs on the inside of the sock and roll it down into a very short tube in contrast to the long tube of a tube sock. You then put your toes into the small cup that you have created and slowly pull the sock up your leg unrolling the tube as you go. This serves two purposes: 1) It allows you to be a perfectionist about how your sock goes onto your foot and 2) it preserves the elastic bands in the sock so as to allow the sock to give you decades of good service. Assuming that a growing boy, which in this case was the case, wears the same size sock for decades.

I find this amusing, but do you think this is great frugality, normal for you, or super cheap?

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Posted in Funny Money, General

Tags: frugality humor

Watching the Lobsters Boil While I Row to Set Them Free

November 13th, 2007

Have you ever watched a frog or a lobster boil in water? Me neither. I can’t afford them. But I have seen it on TV, which is like reality, only fake. But fakeness aside I recently watched a woman nearly panic filling out a form. At the UPS Store. Looking for a checkbox or some way to not get on a mailing list. You see she worked in the direct mailing industry. She was so worried that she might get on someone’s list and start getting a flood of mail. The staff tried to re-assure her that the form was for recording who she was in case they needed to contact her to let her know her package was accidentally dropped into a vat of acid and the package was destroyed. No dice. She knew that she was going to get huge amounts of mail because of the UPS store.

Part of the work I do for one client is in the email industry. I don’t worry about spam because the protection the email server offers me is so excellent. It comes in periodically, but I move the message into a spam sniffer and the computer gets smarter and the spammers have to work harder to get around the growing technology that makes the email safer to read, and more useful to read. I’ve grown care free when it comes to giving out my email address because I know that real email will reach me while fake email will flounder in the pits of some trash folder for less than 24 hours and then magically disappear.

The problem with both positions is problematic: we can develop a paranoia as humans and we can also get a little too naive. I need to be slightly more careful with my email address, and people like this woman need to relax and realize that junk mail is not going to end her life, though some tree somewhere gave up its life for the envelope and the paper inside.

As financial managers we need to regularly be watching our finances so that we can be aware of what is going on, we need to plan so that we can grow our resources, and we need to not be checking our bank accounts online every 5 minutes. If you know your direct deposit is going to come in on Friday, check it Friday afternoon to make sure its gone through, but don’t babysit your bank’s site looking for the cash to come in… even if you really need the cash to come in. But don’t just ignore the account Friday – confirm that the transactions are all in place.

Your financial life is not a lobster, but you want to make sure its not in hot water… or leaking like this dingy I’m in right now. Where’s the caulk?

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Posted in Foundations, Funny Money

Discover Card Canceled: Who is Diana’s Dad?

November 1st, 2007

In an effort to get rid of all debt and opportunities for debt I canceled my Discover card this morning. First I called their toll free number and spoke to Penny in Utah. After telling her that I wanted to cancel my card she asked why. I asked her if she knew who Dave Ramsey was and she said, “No.” So I said that he was a financial adviser and I was closing my account on his advice. She said she was sorry to hear that I wanted to close the account and that I would have to be transferred to someone else to close the account. Apparently she didn’t have permission to close the account. Right. And monkey might fly out of my bum. A recording told me I was headed to Arizona.

So I was on hold for a good while, just in case my patience would run out and I’d choose to keep the Discover card. Diana in Arizona picked up the phone and began by re-assuring me that I was a valued card member since 2006. She then asked me what she could help me with. I told her I wanted to close the account. She told me that closing out the account would take a bit of time and began her script/schpiel/drivel. She had numerous reasons to keep the account alive. At one point in time she was telling me that her dad earned $400.00 a year from Discover card. Who is Diana’s dad? Why does his financial practice of utilizing the card effect me? Should I also have named my daughters Diana 1 and Diana 2 so that I could be even more like her dad? What kind of car does he drive because surely I would want to be like this wise, older man!

Then the gasoline prices came into play: I could make money on gasoline! Like my car didn’t have any expenses except gas and that Discover was going to pay me to have gas in my car. Nope. No dice. Please cancel my card.

Ah! Credit scores impact various things in life and I should keep this card so that my credit score could go up and the world would be a better place! Nope, please cancel my card.

So I pulled out my big gun, the one that you’re looking at right now: I told her I was going to blog about this experience because it was abnormal and not customer friendly. Miracle of miracles she said the account was closed and that I would still have 90 days to call back and ask them to re-activate it. No thanks, I think I’ll avoid that headache a second time.

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Posted in Debt, Funny Money

Rich?! That’s Not Rich.

October 24th, 2007

Apparently if you want to be wealthy in parts of the United States you need fifty million dollars. That would be approximately way more than I will make in my life unless something heavily surprising takes place. To bring that in perspective that means that you’re making several million dollars a year in interest if you’re only making 5% interest, which no self-respecting multi-millionaire would do. Mind blowing, isn’t it?

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Posted in Funny Money

Should US Citizens Demand Financial Responsibility from the Government?

October 9th, 2007

As a US Citizen, who is trying to be financially responsible, I am disheartened by the blatant abuse of debt that the federal government has displayed. If you look at the current total federal debt you will see that the United States, at the time of this writing is in debt by over nine trillion dollars (which is their conservative estimate). This debt has not been so severe historically and reflects the general attitude of the three branches of the United States Government. They have had a paradigm shift as has been reflected by their constituents in some regards.

I would love to see the government try to operate on a genuine, limited by the amount of income, budget. According to the latest information I could find (from 2005) the government received around $934,703,000,000.00 in taxes from US citizens [this does not include other debts that were paid to the US from other countries and returns on any federal investments]. That number should indicate a budget of around nine hundred billion dollars. If the federal government were to spend one tenth of that (ninety billion dollars) to pay off debt and stopped accruing more debt it would take it one hundred years to pay off that debt! That’s a long time, but its possible that they could pay off the debt with some major trimming.

This site is not about political activism, its about financial management, and so I don’t want to go into politics on a specific level. However, I do think that the federal government and the state governments need to get their act together or the problem of debt will effect the US economy severely – worse than its current dollar value decline. I don’t have an answer as to where ninety billion dollars can be trimmed out of the budget (plus the $536,550,000,000.00 a year of excess debt they’re accruing) but I think it is reasonable for the United States citizen to communicate with their congressmen to get things changed.

Of course if I were to try to live like the US government I would accrue $147.00 a day in new debt. Or to put that into perspective $53,655.00 a year. And if I live for another 40 years operating like that I would have over 783 million dollars in debt. I bet I would have the sweetest hummer, though. Oh, and a great sized house. And I would have every iPod ever made. And a recording studio. And interest payments like you wouldn’t believe! I would have to pay 3.62 million dollars a month in interest [assuming a federally available 5% interest rate]. Sweet googly-moogly that’s just insane!

Be financially responsible, tell your government they should be responsible, and for goodness sake don’t run with scissors!

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Posted in Debt, Funny Money

The Colorado Rockies, Sports and Retirement

October 1st, 2007

Only a tiny, tiny percentage of young baseball players make it into professional baseball. Our local home team is the Colorado Rockies, they’ve just now, moments ago, made their way into the playoffs vying for the position of representing their league in the World Series. What continues to amaze me in all of this is the salaries of the players. The players are signing multi-million, multi-year contracts that should allow them to retire at whatever age they choose and take up coaching, broadcasting or sitting on their backsides. I was just looking on the CBS sports site at the Rockie’s Roster and salaries for their players.

For example if Matt Holliday had no endorsements, no external cash flow from bonuses resulting from post-season playoff action, he would make $4,400.000.00 this year. With a salary that big you know he has to be paying a lot in taxes (though maybe a smaller percentage than we would think) , but after taxes he’s got money that he can put into investments that should help him clear a good chunk of interest every year until his grand-kids inherit a piece of the action. Assuming a 10% investment of that money ($440,000.00) at 12% interest for the year that would earn Matt$52,800.00 in interest. Ten years, without adding any more money to the investment (at 12%) would give Matt a compounded value of 1,366,573.21. Now, lets assume that he adds $100,000.00 to that every year between now and his retirement in ten years (which may or may not be reasonable… but we’re just playing with numbers) that would have him earning a grand total of $3,332,031.54 in his investment account. The good thing is that the number is going to continue to grow. Assuming that he makes 12% from that point forward from interest for do years, but lives off of 4% of that interest (effectively only earning 8% in compound interest) he’d end up with $15,530,456.21 at the end of 30 more years. Living off of the four percent interest the first year he’d get $133,281.26 to spend on whatever he wanted. Assuming he’s already got a paid for home and set of vehicles that’s a lot of money to do whatever you want with – and its also assuming he’s not working for a salary as a coach or as some sort of public personality.

Sports is amazing world to look into, a tiny percentage of the players make it big, a smaller percent can demand such huge salaries, but if you look at players like Alex Rodriguez who got paid $22,708,525.00 for this last season (again, just for the regular season and without any endorsements or other bonuses) it jumps to even more astronomical numbers. Ten percent of that salary is $2,270,852.50. That is to say that one tenth of A-Rod’s salary covers more than 50% of Matt Holliday’s salary. In essence the same assumptions made earlier about Holliday’s income and investment potential can be multiplied five times to represent A-Rod.

To set it all into a greater contrast evaluate this: The best paid team in the Major Leagues is the New York Yankees. They get paid a collective $189,639,045.00 a year to play professional baseball. The lowest paid team in the league is the Tampa Bay Devil Rays who get paid $24,123,500.00 collectively. One player on the Yankees gets paid almost as much as the entire team of the lowest paid players. The three best paid Yankees make a collective $67.7 million. The Devil Rays paid their top three paid players a collective 8 million dollars for the season.

All of that is to say: don’t sweat your income in contrast to others: even in the big leagues there’s a disparity. Get your job done right, get your job done well and look for opportunity. You never know when someone may be looking for a professional in your arena to pay a quarter of a billion dollars for the next ten years

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Posted in Funny Money, Investing, Money Management, Outside the Box

Poor McThinkin’

September 14th, 2007

Dollar Menunaire - think rich my buns If you like McDonalds, I apologize. I really, really don’t like their food. When I travel across the country in a car I stop there to use their clean bathrooms, often buying something to support their restroom cleaning staff, but outside of that we don’t frequent their establishments. I was listening to music on Pandora.com, my favorite place to get legal, free music online, and I noticed that they had an advertisement for McDonalds. A very, very sad advertisement referencing “Dollar Menunaires.” I’m pretty sure that eating out there regularly is going to reduce your chance of being a millionaire.

Consider being a millionaire with dollars saved, invested and multiplied in contrast to dollars spent, plus tax, then having to exercise even more to handle the caloric intake. I’m pretty sure that the wealthy people I know don’t eat McDonalds and think, “This is the rich life.” I do, however, know that they enjoy going to fine restaurants that offer quality food, better nutritional value, and buns that don’t taste and have the texture of cardboard. It could just be me, but I think that the rich life is has nothing to do with golden arches, but instead being goaled.

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Posted in Funny Money, Money Management

Credit Guitard Picks

September 12th, 2007

If you like to play the guitar and you use thick guitar picks (I normally use such a pick on my bass guitar when I want a harder rock sound) you could always save a few dollars in interest and a few dollars at the music store by cutting up your credit cards with some sturdy scissors. In fact because you’re cutting it to your specs you may be able to get an abnormal shape that you can hold onto better. If you like to have some texture the card numbers are often embossed on the card so you could have the bumps from the embossing press against your fingers for greater gripping.

Plus if you wear the card down it’ll be really hard for the identity theft folks to piece the card back together to get any information – unless they can pull the plastic powder from around your guitar playing zone back into shape Sure, they could break faster due to being a different type of plastic, but its better to break a pick than it is to break the bank!