Everybody Loves Your Money

From the “Spend less than you make” department. Apparently Larry Ellison is having a little trouble with this concept. It feels good to dump on Larry a bit. Probably because, even with his “spending problems”, he makes more interest on his money in an hour, than I’ll make my whole life in income. Okay. Yes, that is jealousy talking a bit.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file

For the second time in my long ownership of my Toyota Tacoma, I’m going to need to buy tires. (Had I just bought a new truck, this wouldn’t be an issue) Tires for my truck range somewhere around $100 per tire. I absolutely HATE paying $400 for rubber, but at the same time, I do like to drive on decent tires.

Last time I needed new tires, I started looking around and was able to find brand new wheels and tires from a Toyota Tundra. These new wheels and tires were much nicer than the original wheels and tires and made my truck look newer than it really was. After buying them, I sold the old wheels and tires in the classifieds and was able to get 50% of my money back. All told, I spent less on the wheels and tires than I would have on new tires alone.

Well, I’ve managed to do it again. This time the deal is even sweeter. I was able to get brand new wheels and tires and should be able to sell my old ones for the same price so I’ll get a newer style wheel and brand new tires for free. How?

Well, there is a small percentage of people that buy new cars and trucks and immediately then shell out another $1000-$2000 or more on new wheels and tires because they want a different style. You’ve seen them all driving around. Most of these people just stack the original wheels and tires in their garage until they can’t stand tripping over them any longer. Then they have a strong motivation to actually list them for sale, usually at a low price. I always like to check Ebay and Craigslist to see what people are selling similiar wheels and tires for and then I offer somewhere around 75% of the asking price. Amazingly it has worked. I think the motivation to get the large wheels and tires out of their garage, and the cash in my hand combine to make an “irresistable” desire to sell to me.

Anyway, I guess this was the long winded way to say, I bought new tires for my truck.

UPDATE 3: The hot dog sold for $1800 to, who else, Golden Palace Casino. Those guys will buy anything!

UPDATE 2: Looks like this guy might not be getting as rich as he thought off of a stale hotdog. It’s all the way down to $1750. (It has dropped a few times)

UPDATE: The hot dog is up to $7569 as of 1/28 (It went up to $10k but obviously was a bogus bid)

If you are in the market for a $7000 hotdog purchased during the Seahawks NFC championship game, you are in luck. There is one up for auction on Ebay RIGHT NOW. Current price: $7100

Click here to see the most expensive hotdog you’ll ever have the chance of buying!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/257094_studentloandebt26.html
College debt is a problem. Check out this couple. They have over $350,000 in debt from college. Amazing!

I went to Evilmart today. The draw for cheap soups was more than I could fight. Their motto, “Always Low Prices” just seemed to appeal too much to me today. For many, this might seem ridiculous. Why the heck wouldn’t a guy like me shop at Evilmart every day? Guilt, I guess. I’m not thrilled with the wages and benefits that they pay their employees just so I can have a nickel off a particular item. Well, like I said, that .05 savings per can of soup was just too much for me to fight. Okay, it wasn’t exactly that. It was a lot more than .05 per can. More like about .60 per can cheaper and on top of that, we had a coupon to drop the price even more.

Normally, I wouldn’t care, but these soups are a nice easy way to only eat 6 points (I’m sort of following the Weight watchers plan). And to be able to buy 10 of them for about .65 cheaper per can, added up to enough that I decided to go there and buy them. Some of my friends think I’m ridiculous for having this point of view, as I’m sure some of you do too. Well, as the corny old country song says, “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”. I’ve tried to make a stand against Evilmart for as long as I can remember (long before it became so hyped in the media) because I do think that they could be a better company for my community by paying better wages and giving better benefits to their employees. I read today that there are over 3100 Evilmart employees on public paid health care in my state. That just doesn’t seem right. They have jobs, yet we are paying for their benefits.

So, there you have it. I’ve gone against my own principles and shopped there. I’m not proud. Maybe the $6.00 I saved on soup wasn’t worth feeling the disappointment. Oh well. Too late now. I think I’ll go make myself a can of soup and think about my pension, health care and matching 401k at my company.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/24/pf
Americans among the worst savers in the world. Well, not exactly a surprise since our savings rate is a negative number.

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display
This guy wants to find a company with a traditional pension. Sure there are some out there, but they might not be offering them much longer.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business
Good article on investing and the value of returns.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business
Article on credit cards. Yes, they are evil.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4647928.stm
Interesting article about parts of the global economy and the fate of the dollar.

If you need a camera, I’d highly recommend trying to grab one of these before they are all gone. Even at $99, it’s a steal.

This camera (Sony DSC-S40) takes 4.1 megapixel images and also takes very decent 640X480 mpeg videos with sound. It holds the Memory stick style sticks, which Costco sells every now and then for about $35 for a 512 meg stick. That will get you a TON of photos, even at 4.1 megapixels.

Here’s a picture I took with the camera. It’s got pretty good clarity and a nice resolution size. The reality is that I don’t usually take pictures this big. I usually scale back to 1280X1024. At that setting, you can get hundreds of pics on a 512 meg stick.

Anyway, if you need one, better hurry, but if you don’t need one, Dawn from Frugal For Life, would probably tell you not to buy it.

Can I tell you a secret? Money management is kind of boring once you put a lot of things on autopilot. I know that automatically investing in my ROTH, and automatically investing in my 401k is the right thing to do but it just isn’t sexy. The money just goes in every two weeks and automatically buys a couple index funds. No adrenaline. No euphoria. I could really go for a dotcom spike. Maybe day trade ebay or google a little. That might get the blood flowing.

Of course I won’t. I’m too damn conservative to start buying and selling individual stocks on a daily basis. I have branched out a bit and bought an individual stock a couple weeks ago. Now I have a couple individual stocks in my portfolio. Too bad one of them is MSFT and I’m underwater on it. I think I bought it at it’s near peak and then rode it down. I’m just going to take their “chump change” dividends for awhile and try to ride it back up. I’m theorizing a bit that with the release of Vista and a couple other products, their revenues might go up enough to drive the stock north a bit. Who knows.

So, here I sit. I could spend time researching some stocks tonight. The only problem with that idea is that I don’t know what to look for, and even if I did, I’d probably be too lazy to actually do it. Luckily there is such a thing as dollar cost averaging in index funds. It’s a great combination for a lazy, uninformed guy like me.

One other item of note is that we bought a new digital camera today. We had a really nice Sony camera but it died. Judging by all the knicks and chunks out of the case, I’d guess that it got dropped a few times either by my wife or my two year old daughter, who wasn’t supposed to be touching it in the first place. Since I know I have never dropped it, it had to have been one of them, or a combination of both. Anyway, we’ve been talking/dreading buying a new one. We spent $300 on the last one and really didn’t want to shell out that much for another since it could very well meet the same fate as our broken one.

So, what do you do when you don’t want to shell out a ton of money for a camera but you also want decent pictures/videos out of it? Well, you head over to Fatwallet, of course. I checked in their forums and saw that Officemax had a clearance Sony camera that used to retail for $179 (so it’s not exactly their flagship model) for only $99 (after instant $50 off). The other tip was that Office Depot had a coupon on their site for $20 off any order over $100. Well, I printed them all out and sent my wife to the store (while I went off to work) to see if they had one in stock and if they would honor another store’s coupon. They did. Somehow we got this camera for $77. It’s a 4 megapixel and does mpeg videos as well. Not bad.

Click here to read more random thoughts and off topic subjects

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/money
The single biggest thing I struggle with. Living a little now and enjoying our everyday life as opposed to saving everything for the future. I don’t disagree with this article. It’s obvious that she put a TON of thought in to the decision, which tells me that she isn’t flippant about buying the new car.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business
Long term average returns of various investments. I need to move a little more in to small cap stocks.

http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp
Financial planning is harder than raising a child? Not at my house.

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/PersonalFinance
Consumer debt is driving a lot of bankruptcies. 2 million last year. Here’s a great quote from the article: “The rule that I like to use is if it’s $10 or $20, pay cash for it,” Ninfo said. “If you can eat it or drink it, pay cash for it. And the best example of that is reported in the Wall Street Journal. When McDonald’s started to allow people to use credit cards instead of paying cash, the average sale went from $4.75 to $7. Need I say more?”

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/home
Oh the ways people spend their home equity.

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Thanks againg for stopping by. I really appreciate you visiting. I’m having fun with ELYM and hope that you get a bit of entertainment out of it once in awhile. (Because, honestly, I know it can get a bit dry sometimes.)