- a discussion of the economies in MMOG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Games, you know, Everquest, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, etc.)
- more book reviews
- hopefully more leet food (cheap, nutricious, fast) setups.

That’s all for now.

Saw this in the grocery last night, cracked me up. I guess it’s at least good that the marketers for shampoo are trying to lighten up the situation that is the stress of credit card debt.

In other news, on the radio this morning, they talked to a guy who bought a $40,000 car on his credit card this week, and when asked why he did it, he said, “I didn’t want to have to get a loan, I wanted to pay outright for it.” The DJ’s attempted to talk some sense in to him, but it’s hard to talk past a fundamental lack of understanding (you know, the whole, “you-didn’t-pay-outright-for-it-you- still-got-a-loan-and-a-bad-one-at-that-dummy” thing).

Hope you all have a great weekend.

In reviewing the posts it occured to me that while it can be useful in some contexts to go on and on about describing a problem, I personally was doing very little to actually alleviate the problem. I mean, I try and be helpful on the blog, but there’s only so much that can be done through this type of communication.

That said, I propose the following: if you struggle with money, let me know. While I’m not certified in anything (and make no guarantees, etc), I can at least set you on the right path. There are thousands of evil people preying on the financially desperate or ignorant, and I don’t want anyone to fall victim to any scam that they don’t have to.

Some of you know me in real life, feel free to call or email me at my personal account. As you can expect, anything discussed is confidential, given the nature of the topic. If you don’t have my personal email, email me here: EMAIL.

It doesn’t have to be anything huge. It could be something simple like, “What’s the interest rate for an online savings account?”, or, it could be something alot more complex. I’m not saying I have all the answers, but during my time of being an enthusiast of this stuff (personal finance), I can at least point you in the right direction.

Operators are standing by.

That said, we now turn our attention to Matthew and Mary Winkler. Names don’t sound familiar? Matthew was a pastor at a church, and his wife Mary shot him in the back while he slept with a 12-gauge shotgun, killing him.

Today on CNN there is a report about the court case for the charges brought against her and it really broke my heart. According to witness testimony, Mary had been engaging in check kiting, which is basically trying to “float” money between banks using checks, as a means of preventing them from being overdrawn. It takes advantage of the several-day processing time that checks traditionally had. As the Wikipedia article notes, it’s likely going to be a thing of the past as digital image processing allows checks to be deposited the same-day as the transaction.

Anyway, while the prosecutor and defense attorney obviously put their own spin on this, the fact remains - she was at very minimum stressed over financial concerns that were hidden, and it was at least a contributing factor to the murder. It also notes, “Freeland said Thursday in his opening statement that the couple’s finances, which were handled by the wife, were in ’shambles.’ Mary Winkler, he said, had been cashing fraudulent checks sent to her by con artists overseas. She had set up accounts in various banks and was creating false balances by juggling funds between them, he added.”

Now… I’m all for personal responsibility as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t excuse the actions of scammers praying on the naive/financially uneducated. I hope this sad type of story can all the more spurn us on to get our finances in order.

My guess is that being a pastor, the husband didn’t earn a whole lot of cash. The wife received some fraudulent checks in the mail, probably guaranteeing some amazing deal, while in reality having horrible fees and penalties tacked on. She doesn’t tell her husband, ends up having to pick and choose which bills to pay. She begins taking calls from creditors asking for their money. Her husband may question her about it, but she handles the money so she just blows him off. Eventually, she can’t deal with it, snaps, and kills her husband.

I’m not saying that she isn’t responsible. Obviously, something besides just debt was the problem. But debt and financial worries certainly exasperated the concern.

As an interesting sidenote, I was looking at the Wikipedia article for the Virginia Tech shootings, and it linked to the Bath School disaster of 1927, which is the worst school killing in U.S. history.

The event killed 45 children, and here’s a snippet from it:

“The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe, who was upset by a property tax that had been levied to fund the construction of the school building. He blamed the additional tax for financial hardships which led to foreclosure proceedings against his farm. These events apparently provoked Kehoe to plan his attack.” [emphasis added]

This week, we’ve been discussing the hidden nature of money. On Monday, I discussed a few truths that people need to hear. On Wednesday, I fleshed out those ideas and shared a incredible story about a girl and her engagement ring. Today, I’m going to do a more formal review of Green With Envy: Why Keeping Up with the Jonses is Keeping Us in Debt by Shira Boss.

This is one of those books that really brought some things to light that I had never put together fully. I’m not sure I would call it relevatory, but it was certainly insightful.

The author’s goal throughout this book is to explore the social aspect of money. You won’t find the formula for how compound interest works or what stocks to put your money on, instead a collection of interviews and research that document how various segments of the population deal with money.

The book goes through the following “segments”:

• the neighbors next door: When rumors spread that the new neighbors paid for their NYC apartment with cash, the author and her husband begin to build up a picture of them as lavishly wealthy and happy. Through some very honest interviews, we learn this isn’t exactly the case.
• the nuclear family, living in the cheapest house in a rich neighborhood: an account of a family living well beyond their means, trying to keep up with their friends, and ending up in bankruptcy.
• the politician: Boss looks at the life of a politician at the federal level: not quite as rosy as it would seem.
• the aging boomer: classic case - aging Baby Boomer, not enough set side for retirement, still working.
• the billionaire: the author interviews and examines the life of a billionaire and his wife, while discussing the effect of money on the ultra-rich.

Throughout these chapters, Boss also discusses a more general view of the social side of money: how we feel when our friends excel financially, our tendency to hide our financial affairs from those close to us, and the pressure people feel to succeed.

My favorite parts of the book had to do with bankruptcy: during the chapter about the family, she shares some thoughts on the topic that I had never considered. For example, she discusses the effect of bankruptcy on children. It’s a topic they aren’t allowed to discuss and probably don’t understand, but they know its causing their parents incredible amounts of stress and shame. In event of another type of stressful event - divorce - at least the parents let other adults in the children’s life to be on the watch for any signs of distress in the child. In bankruptcy, no such alert is given, and the child may feel all alone with regard to the topic - not unlike how their parents likely feel.

The section dealing with the rich among us was also very interesting. Since people feel that being rich should make you happy, when the rich aren’t happy they feel like something is wrong with them. Even more so among those who inherited large fortunes - they have no motivation or ambition to work whatsoever. There certainly is lifelong fulfillment in having a satisfying career that money can’t buy. Some rich people move into middle-class areas, and hide their wealth in an attempt to live a “normal” life.

Other profound topics were more research based: Boss cites a study of money, and found that given the options of: A. earning $50,000 when your friends all earn $25,000, or B. earning $100,000 when your friends all earn $200,000, nearly half would choose option A despite it being half as much.

Another study has to do with a game where player A is given $10, and must give some portion of it to player B. If player B accepts the portion, both players get to keep their money. If player B rejects it, both players lose their money. In situations where player A gave less than half of the $10, player B was very likely to reject, despite the fact he would still stand to gain between one and four dollars. Amazing.

I highly recommend this book to those of you who are intrigued by the topic of how money and the social structure of our country are intertwined. Boss does a great job of highlighting a variety of in-depth issues surrounding the topic.

Today, on my favorite radio station, they had a particularly notable woman call in and discuss a decision she had made, of which she was sure she was correct. She had recently gotten engaged, and the engagement ring she was received had a diamond that was alittle over two carats (that’s alot). She took this diamond to a pawn shop, sold it, secretly replaced it with a cubic zirconia stone, and used the money to pay off credit card debt her fiance did not know she had.

Her justification for this was breath-taking: “I’m sure other people do this. It makes alot of sense, it’s not like he’ll ever know. He’s really good at saving and he would totally freak out if he knew about the credit card debt. Besides, I racked up the debt before I met him, and the whole reason he was attracted to me was because of the outfit and handbag purchases I put on the credit cards.” [rough summary, she said all of these things throughout the discussion].

As far as an example for the hidden nature of money goes, this is about as perfect as it gets. This woman has managed to put two huge strikes of trust against her future-husband before he’s even her husband!

For one, she concealed her credit card debt from him, even as the relationship got serious. I’m not saying you should have a sharing-of-the-bank-statements on the first date, but it seems like pretty important information to be shared before discussions of marriage take place.

I don’t mean to dwell on the negative and harp on and on about this. There are certainly some encouragements to both everyone and specifically to couples to offer on this topic.

• 1. Everyone Else Has It All Together:

As I stated in the first post, we first have to move past the point that everyone else has it all together. This is a lie, end of story. This is the same lie that tells Christian guys that they’re the only one in their circle of guy friends who struggle with pornography/lust. It’s not every single guy, but its almost impossible that they’re the only one.

I don’t have to quote statistics to point out that on average, most people aren’t sittin’ pretty with their finances (though I will on request =). They struggle. They worry.

More personally, I don’t have it all together. Though worrying about money is my cup o’ tea (this tea tastes bad), the wife and I have roughly 10k in student loans. We’ve got a trip across the ocean for a wedding of a close friend coming up that’s gonna be painful on the bank account.

The problem is people feel such shame or guilt that they are unwilling to share in expectation of being rejected. It requires vulnerability on the part of the first person to speak up about such struggles, and there simply aren’t a large amount of people doing so, inside the church or out.

• 2. The Spender/Saver dynamic: In many relationships, there’s one person who plays the role of the Saver, and one of the Spender. In my family, I get the dubious role of Spender, ‘deh wife’ gets Saver. Go wife!The encouragement I offer in this situation is to the Saver, not the Spender. In the story about the pawned ring above, there’s one very telling point: she says she couldn’t tell her fiance about the credit card debt because he’d freak out, presumably because he was good at saving. Despite who’s fault it is, the fact of the matter is that the girl didn’t feel she could tell her fiance about her debt. This in no way condones her action, but it certainly didn’t help.

  If you’re the Saver in a relationship, please, make it explicitly clear that you will forgive and try to be understanding to your mate should they falter financially, either in the present or the past. It’s easier to deal with such problems when they occur than after months/years of secrecy and distrust.

• 3. Help!: The above encouragements only really serve to deal with open discussion of finances. They do very little for the actual process of budgeting or paying down debts. In alot of cases, your friends or spouse may be just as helpless as you when it comes to the skills to work toward financial stability.Though I have not personally gone through the program, I’ve heard only good things about Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Though not free, it has produced results in people and very simply and plainly lays out steps you can take toward putting your financial house in order. If you want to go more in-depth than that, the web is full of personal finance blogs that discuss financial topics every day of the year. A few of them that I enjoy are linked on the sidebar.

I sincerely hope this post and series will be helpful to you. Please feel free to comment!

I recently finished a book entitled Green With Envy: Why Keeping Up with the Joneses is Keeping Us in Debt, and it’s really got me thinking about such things. I will also do a review on this book later this week.

Before I get too far in to this, I want to throw some truths out there, that people need to hear:

1. You’re not the only one who worries about money.

2. Your friends and neighbors, though they may give off the impression that they have everything together financially, they more than likely do not.

3. Statistically, if you knew two couples who got divorced last year, then you also knew three families that went through a bankruptcy, but you never knew about it. (this one from aforementioned book)

We’ll discuss these in greater detail later this week.

Last time (post linked above), I discussed a beef and vegetable stir fry with brown rice. mmm.

This week, we turn to another way of doing things:

Some of you may be thinking… “what?! Whole Foods isn’t cheap! How you gonna eat there for under three bucks!”

Calm down, calm down. I’m about to tell you!

You see, at the Whole Foods here in Georgia, they have this amazing hot bar/buffet that has a wondrous variety of foods on it. Like many to-go buffets, the price you pay for your meal is dictated by its weight. At Whole Foods, that price is $6.99/lb. This may seem abit steep. And perhaps it is. As such, our goal is as follows: locate the highest quality and most expensive per pound foods on the bar, and build a balanced meal around them.

This means certain foods, especially ones that are served soaked in water are unacceptable. The chief culprit being rice, here. I have spent a decent amount of time surveying the buffet here, and here’s what I’ve found.

The best food that I’ve found has been the Blackened Catfish, at least as far as nutritional value, taste, and cost per pound go. I also get one serving of broccoli and one serving of cauliflower. Since these all three are cooked in a liquid, I make sure to drain off all the water/sauce I can. Paying 6.99$/lb for water is painful.

If I get one fillet, and then the servings of the vegetables, the bill comes out to around $2.75. I wish I had a picture, will try to remember to update this post with one next time I go to Whole Foods.

Most of them have passed, but given the amount that sneak beneath the radar of your average person (myself included), I thought I might try and aggregate them all in one place, in a little sub-blog from this one. So far, the following places have had promos that give you something worthwhile (costing between $1.70 and $7.00 ish) while requiring you to purchase absolutely nothing:

• Starbucks
• IHOP
• Chick-Fil-A (x2)
• Chipotle
• Dunkin’ Donuts
• Ben and Jerry’s

Sadly, almost all of these have already occured. Except for the Ben and Jerry’s one.

I’m happy to let you know that on April 17th, 2007, you can goto any Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Shops between 12pm and 8pm and pick up a free ice cream cone. Be sure to check where your nearest store is located here: Store Locator

The radio station I listen to in the mornings, Q100, had a call from a listener on Friday that really sounded almost too crazy to be true.

The caller was engaged and was planning to be married in September. She and her fiance had saved up $80,000 together, each about half, towards their coming wedding and down payment on their first house.

On Thursday, the caller learned from the fiance’s best friend’s wife that the fiance and the best friend had placed a $75,000 bet on UCLA, without telling his fiance.

This is where it gets fun: when she confronted him about the bet, he exhibited what I like to call a FLU: a Fundamental Lack of Understanding. His defense to her anger was, “don’t worry baby, UCLA is gonna win, I’m sure of it.” Though its plainly clear to me, the problem wasn’t the terms of the bet, it was the money he used, and the secrecy with which he placed it.

The radio station took a couple of calls, basically all saying the same thing: you need to break up with this guy, now, before you get married. One particularly insightful caller offered this tip up: half that money is yours, goto the bank TODAY and withdraw your half and deposit it at another bank.

So that was on Friday. Fast-forward to this morning. UCLA has lost.

They talk to the gal again this morning. She broke off their engagement, took out her half of the money, and mailed her engagement ring to him with a note saying, “pawn this if you want, you need the money more than I do.”

Man. This is one of those, “what the HELL was he thinking?!?” stories. The utter lack of concern and thoughtfulness involved is legendary. One of the DJ’s made the comment that this is the type of action that isn’t just a simple mistake, but more a revealing of his character. Better to happen now than before she got married.

So what have we learned? Well, every couple has a “magic number.” This magic number is the amount of $’s you can spend without consulting with the other person. I imagine it’s as low as $5 for some couples and as high as several thousand for others. $75,000 is probably alittle on the high end for most anyone.

For more reading on topics like these, I highly recommend Make Love, Not Debt. It’s a blog written by a couple that focuses on relational finance, and it’s good stuff.