Search Results for: trent hamm

Carnival of Wealth, Wristwatch Edition

December 9, 2013

At the very least, think about how much of the price of each watch they must have to pay an endorser who's already worth hundreds of millions.

At the very least, think about how much money they have to spend to lure an endorser who’s already worth hundreds of millions.

How are people still buying watches? There is nothing of less utility. Even (other) jewelry, earrings and pendants and the like, doesn’t pretend to be functional or anything but decorative. But we’re supposed to believe that this Breitling Chronomat should somehow be duodecuple the price of an iPhone? The Breitling not only tells time, assuming that you set it correctly without benefit of it connecting to a server, it takes up space on your wrist. While doing nothing else. Find a smartphone that can perform all that, why don’t you?

People are idiots. But not the Carnival of Wealth submitters, at least not from our cursory peek at this week’s roster. Which starts with a pity submission from Nelson at the newly revamped Financial Uproar, who saw last week’s dismal festival (really more of a neighborhood piñata party, for a crippled kid who lives in the barrio) and decided to contribute. Nelson discusses payday loans, those prohibitively expensive advances that poor and/or stupid (mostly the latter) people use in lieu of making enough money and watching how much they spend. More specifically, he cites yet another idiot personal finance blogger who is comically inept about money, to the extent that she takes out payday loans (plural) of her own, yet who has the audacity to say that payday lenders are evil.

It is my belief that Payday (sic) lenders make the bulk of their money on those interest payments.

That’s like saying “It is my belief that Toyota makes the bulk of its money on vehicles.”Ever notice how losers love to set goals? As a rule, the more numbered lists of future accomplishments a person has posted on the walls of his or her sad little apartment, the less that person ever gets done. It’s similar to the phenomenon of the most out-of-shape people at the gym wearing the fanciest weightlifting gloves. Jason at Hull Financial Planning explains that equating goal-setting with success is like equating owning a North Face jacket with summiting Everest. Here’s a better idea: find someone hypersuccessful – like, say, a U.S. Military Academy graduate who built and sold a lucrative business – and just do what he tells you to.Harry Campbell at Your PF Pro either got paid to write a post about American Express, or really, really likes their social media promotions.Jim at Critical Financial crapped out a post about billionaires donating to charity, and now we’ve already run as many submissions as we did last week and are thus entering the gravy part of the CoW.

Once again, the intimidatingly brilliant PKamp3 at DQYDJ.net writes a better one-line synopsis than most anyone else’s entire post. As he describes it, this is “[t]he first ever article in which I compare debt bloggers to people infected with toxoplasmosis.” This is one of those few posts where almost every line in it could serve as a representative quote. Here are 3 to get you started:

just because you’ve got $0 in debt and a $10,000 emergency fund doesn’t mean you’re financially independent.
Don’t catch the [debt payoff] fever…because the only solution is more debt payoff.
The problem […] isn’t the new drive to pay off debt… it’s the complete denial that there are any other ways to improve one’s financial situation.

Everything he said.

And nothing this guy says: a submitter making his first and presumably last visit to our shores, Mo Wally at Success Mnual (sic). Seriously, that’s the name of his site. He spelled “success” correctly, which isn’t always easy for some people to do, yet dropped the ball on “manual,” thinking you can somehow get by without any kind of vowel between the m and the n. This post is 300 words long, 15 of which are “distill” and its variants. To wit:

One technique to help propel us faster on our journey to peak performance is to distil wisdom from our days.

Is this Peter J. Buscemi, writing under a pseudonym?

Got dang it, you encourage more submitters and this is what happens. Welcome Jon Haver at Our Insurance Canada, who mistakes one preposition for another and comes up with this unintentionally funny title, “Scary Facts About Canadians Traveling Without Medical Insurance.” Would you like to know a way to avoid high medical bills when visiting other countries? Here, we’ll make it a hangman-style puzzle:

B _ Y I N S _ R A N C E

Shh. No hints. Also, Jon has a handy link to a clearinghouse for a company that sells…some sort of guaranteed coverage in exchange for payment of a premium.

Alright, fine. These awful posts are fun to make fun of. Doesn’t mean we enjoy doing it, though.

Let’s close this out with a flourish of competence, shall we? Starting with Justin McCurry at Root of Good, who’s 3 months into the glorious realization that the conventional office is a dreadful place to be.

I’m still waiting for the nostalgia of the workplace to set in.

Told you he’s funny. This post is also an elegy, or possibly eulogy, for his oven. Which lasted 41 years. If we were ratiocinating crazy person Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar we’d have calculated that Justin (and the oven’s prior owners) averaged .24917¢ of oven depreciation per meal, excluding the untold billions wasted on the energy used to cook and possibly illuminate the food therein. But we wouldn’t do that, we’re not insane.

Justin also admits that

I still don’t feel like there are enough hours in the day

A quandary we here at CYC Headquarters marvel at daily. How do people manage to cook/clean/enjoy life/exercise/run errands/visit friends/have sex while stuck at a workplace 8 hours a day? It stumps us.

It also stumps Paula Pant at Afford Anything, who touches on PKamp3’s realization that there’s more to life than the freedom of paying down one’s debt. In fact, she categorizes debt freedom as one among a triumvirate of freedoms, the other 2 being location freedom and financial freedom. HEY IDIOT DEBT BLOGGERS AND THOSE WHO READ THEM: THAT PAULA DISTINGUISHES DEBT FREEDOM FROM FINANCIAL FREEDOM SHOULD CLUE YOU IN THAT THE TWO ARE VASTLY, VASTLY DIFFERENT. Just read Paula’s entire archives. Imagine a writer who has all of Tim Ferriss’s good ideas and none of his pretentious stupid ones. Also, Paula’s sexuality is unambiguous.

Nothing like a post from the long-dormant Andrew at 101 Centavos to continue the nostalgic theme. Andrew was one of our favorite submitters, his posts an eclectic mélange of historical references, arcane jokes and sound advice. Then, 7 months ago, he disappeared. He returns this week with Ten Things You Can Do To Impress People At Work, a title which would foreshadow a crushing bore of a post if anyone else wrote it. Andrew makes it interesting, and even semi-controversial. (For the record, we’ll endorse things #2 through #9, not so much #1.) Here’s a highlight from #6:

Ladies, read some fashion magazines and pick outfits that complement curves.

Followed by an even better sentence:

Resist the temptation to show cleavage

Relax, he has sartorial advice for guys, too. But the advice for women is clear. Also, it puts the thought in our heads that through our (this is the male half of CYC doing the typing, and the thinking) old corporate careers, we might well have had female coworkers who were dying to show off some chestal area but opted to go conservative instead.

There we go, just like old times. A few gems, a few pieces of dross. Check us out on Investopedia, download us on the Stacking Benjamins podcast, and be kind to animals. As you were.

Filed Under: Carnivals Tagged With: carnival of wealth

Stay In Bed, You Fools

November 22, 2013

iPads were a luxury item even in the 1930s

This year we’re giving you a week’s notice before you camp out like a masochist. Today’s rhetorical discussion question: Is your time worth anything? Anything at all? If Black Friday represents something other than an unmarked holiday for you and yours, an opportunity to do nothing that’s normally required of you, a day on a par with Veterans Day and Christmas, only without an official designation of its own, shake yourself. Here at CYC we don’t underestimate the pull of the mob and the temptation to embrace and be a part of overarching cultural fads (hell, it’s gotten at least one President elected), but thinking with the crowd often makes no sense. Sometimes it can get you trampled to death for your troubles.

Maybe you like retail shopping as recreation, which we can’t quite understand but to each her own. Still, shouldn’t the shopping itself be pleasurable? Leisurely? Not only is Black Friday inherently frenetic, it’s senseless. Literally senseless. It makes no sense. There is no reason why you should be going out of your way to be at a mall on by far its busiest day of the year.

We have this thing called Amazon now. It’s been around for a while. You can buy our book there, but that’s not the point. You can buy millions of other items there too. There’s also eBay, and for those of you less concerned with fraud protection, Craig’s List.* What, are we explaining this to our great-grandparents? How do you not know this? (More rhetorical questions, although not for discussion.)

How much time does it take to purchase anything on any of the above sites? Negligible. You don’t have to lose a night’s sleep, or freeze, or engage in the continuous hell that is associating with other people. And good luck finding another personal finance site that modifies Jean-Paul Sartre quotes. Maybe DQYDJ.net, but that’s it.

Not only do people never learn, it only gets worse from one year to the next. If you work in local news, congratulations: on the last Friday of every November you have a ready-made feature for your highlight reel, until you finally escape to a bigger market and get out of your current hick town forever. Hey, who’s going down to the post office on April 15 to film the last-minute tax filers?

Here’s a quote from one of 2012’s Black Friday imbeciles, courtesy of South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel:

Orlene Thomas of Palm Beach said she came to Town Center when the mall opened at 6 a.m. because she wanted to soak up the spirit of the holiday season. She bought a few things at Macy’s, but said she wouldn’t think of missing Thanksgiving dinner to wait in line, as many people did.
“I would never do anything that crazy,” she said. “Thanksgiving Day is for family and friends.”

It’s good that she has a sense of perspective, then. Think about your own Thanksgivings past, and honestly assess whether spending the day fumbling for conversation topics with your in-laws and drunk cousins is more or less crazy than waking up early enough on a holiday to wait in line at a mall at 6 a.m. In Palm Beach, no less. Why was this woman doing anything other than spending the day frolicking in the sand and surf? It was 78° that afternoon, with no precipitation. Ms. Thomas might not even be the dumbest person quoted in the article:

Michelle Esteves, 28, of Boca Raton arrived at Town Center at 6 a.m., hoping to beat the crowd at clothing retailer Hollister. It didn’t help. She and her friend waited in the checkout line for an hour and 40 minutes.
“It was horrible, but last year we waited in line for two hours,” Esteves said.

That’s 3 hours and 40 minutes of this woman’s life that she’s never going to get back, assuming she never did this in previous years and won’t do it in subsequent ones. She could have knitted her own chiffon skater skirt in less time than she waited in line.

Things you should wait in line from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. for:

North Korean exit visas
Emergency surgery
Space Shuttle flights
Eternal salvation

That’s our entire list, and yours shouldn’t be much longer.

You’re familiar with the following mental exercise, right? (We probably featured it on the site once, can’t remember where and are too lazy to look.) The store next door is selling dress shirts for the regular retail price of $50. It’s an ordinary weekday, not Black Friday or anything. However, another store across town is holding an 80% off sale! Mildred, load up Junior and the girl, we’re taking the Oldsmobile to Marshall Field’s!

Meanwhile, the Bass Pro Shop down the street is selling Nitro Z-7 sport boats for $39,795. But the boat dealership 30 miles away is selling them for $39,755. Are you going to attach the hitch to your Delta 88 and drive to the other side of the county so you can save .1% off the price of a boat? Of course not, you’re not insane. (No one should own a boat, not when you can make friends with someone who already has one.)

Of course, the point is that a $40 saving is a $40 saving, and if you’re going to inconvenience yourself for that amount of money once then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it twice.

And this is just depressing. Same article:

Saul Gelin of Plantation got in line about 6 p.m. Thursday looking to score a 32-inch HDTV for $97.

(By the way, it appears that Mr. Gelin is black, not [likely] Jewish, so don’t accuse us of reinforcing stereotypes about frugality.) There was a publicized limit of 6 TVs available at that price, and incredibly enough, Mr. Gelin later discovered that he was no better than 7th on the list.

(Dammit, now we inadvertently reinforced a stereotype about black people being late. There’s no winning with you, is there?)

Saving money is great. We highly encourage it, so you can purchase assets with your savings. Which will position you to free up more of your time in the future. But spending time, ridiculously long amounts of it, to garner piddling savings? This is no different than the Goldbergian process for making Trent Hamm’s laundry detergent. Wake up late next Friday, fix some breakfast, visit Amazon and start shopping. And be grateful that you live in a society where the kind of nonsensical hyper-commerce your mouth-breathing inferiors are engaging in is not merely tolerated, but encouraged. They’re keeping the internet tubes clear for the rest of us.

*It’s a possessive followed by a noun. Spelling it “Craigslist” is for illiterates.

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Healthy Living Tagged With: black friday, thanksgiving sales

5 Secret Black Friday Deals Retailers Don’t Want You To Know About

November 15, 2013

Use coupons! Get there early! Make a list!

We don’t do that list nonsense here. That’s just a disconnected headline crafted in an unscrupulous attempt to get more eyeballs viewing our site than normal. Same deal with the picture.

Instead we’re going to tell you the mobile phone equivalent of why you should never trade in your vehicle at the dealer, and how you can effortlessly save $180-200 or so in the process.

But why would you want to read about that when The Simple Dollar is holding an earnest discussion on the wisdom of saving $8 a year by not flushing your toilets? Yeah, go read that instead. 520 words that Trent Hamm spent a minute excreting out and then let fester in the bowl for some reason. And more people read his blog than this one. That makes sense.

Electronics go obsolete, that’s what they do. If you’re Naomi Klein or some other similarly joyless harpy, you consider obsolescence to be the result of corporatist overlords dictating your purchasing habits. If you’re a normal intelligent person, you understand that progress is dynamic and that things improve. Miss Klein would have you driving a 1975 Pinto with no air conditioning, no anti-lock brakes, no satellite radio, no airbags and no foldable 3rd row seat. But enough about her and her carbon-sustainable lifestyle.

The Apple iPhone 5S, 64GB, retails for $849. (Yes, we linked to Apple.com. Because they need our uncompensated help to sell iPhones.) Its predecessor, the iPhone 5, is defunct. Its predecessor, which we’re guessing more people upgraded to the 5S from than from the iPhone 5, is the 4S, and here our journey begins.

A CYC author’s 2-year-old 4S was starting to act a little groggily. Also it was 2 years old, which as anyone with a mobile contract knows means that now’s the time to upgrade without having to pay a fee. Of course, it also means you’re locked in for a couple more years with said provider, but there are only 3 others to choose among and the price differences are minimal. Either that or use a pay-as-you-go service like Boost Mobile, but those are for poor people and drug dealers.

Buy My Tronics is a slick and effective resale market for folks looking to upgrade their phones, laptops et al. We’d used it in the past, not knowing any better. There was no bidding involved, no fear of dealing with someone unscrupulous on the other end, so it was our natural first choice for resale this time around. And then, as fate would have it, two days before the brand-new 5S was supposed to arrive from China, this happened:

…to an otherwise well-maintained phone that had endured only the most superficial of scratches over the previous 2 years. After countless drops it never lost resiliency nor effectiveness, and then one morning it looked like that. Placed it on the bed, on a soft fluffy mattress, and it came up looking like that. No idea why.

On Buy My Tronics, that unmistakable but purely cosmetic rupture cost $94, reducing their offer from $147 to $53. At that point, taking the trouble to go to the post office and mail it to Buy My Tronics’ processing facility was debatable. Could we get $53 worth of remaining fun out of the iPhone 4S by taking it out into the desert and shooting it instead? (Yes, that’s our answer for everything.)

Now what? A Craigslist ad costs nothing, but there’s also no quality control among buyers. Particularly for an easily stealable item that retails for hundreds of dollars and that fits in one’s hand. An eBay ad costs 10% of the sale price, but you have to go to the trouble of creating an account in order to bid. And, of course, there’s also the feedback ratings.

Long story short, we got $265 for the phone. From a guy in Russia, but he used PayPal and we’re confident we won’t get hosed.

Here’s a truth that’s easy to ignore, given that it’s so self-evident: multiple bidders means happy times for a seller. Especially when the bidders know what each other are bidding. The point of this post isn’t “Stop the presses, the CYC people figured out how eBay works.” It’s reminding people that the incremental effort involved in spending a few minutes writing an eBay ad makes a hell of a lot more sense than shipping your still-valuable goods to an institutional buyer who a) offers only a single, take-it-or-leave-it price and b) is going to lowball you because they’re going to sell the phone to someone else.

One more time: Always look at each transaction from the other party’s perspective. The Russian guy just wants a phone, or so we think. At the very least, he’s willing to pay something approaching retail price for our 2nd-hand, slightly damaged remnants. Buy My Tronics wants to pay wholesale prices, seeing as they’re essentially a wholesaler. There’s no reason to do business with the latter and not the former.

Do we even need to mention that we didn’t bother looking at selling it back to our wireless provider? Its $147 offer – and that was pre-crack – served only as a starting point. Free information for us, giving us an opportunity to gauge our phone’s worth on eBay and set a reserve price. Again, the fewer bidders, the worse the deal you’ll get. If you can’t increase the number of bidders, at least figure out what the other party’s looking for.

Filed Under: Capitalism, Uncategorized Tagged With: ebay, iPhone