During my trip a few months ago to New York City, I picked up some “I Heart NY” t-shirts as souvenirs. After some haggling at one of the hundreds of tourist shops near Times Square (cheap enough so I felt like I didn’t have to take the subway to Chinatown), I happily packed up about 10 of them, brought them home, and doled them out to family and friends.
This is what they looked like after one washing:
See anything missing? Caveat Emptor!
Have you heard of this? A network of dentists will buy back your Halloween candy for $1 to $2 per pound at HalloweenCandyBuyBack.com. After a few zip code searches, there actually does seem to be a few dentists in many metro areas. They are then encouraged to donate the candy to be sent to troops overseas.
Seems like an idea with good intentions, but somehow seems funny to me. Candy is bought by my neighbors, which is given out free to kids in costume, which gets sold to dentists for cash, and then is finally donated?
As a kid, the best part was trading candy between friends afterward. (I’ll add that I was always made to brush regularly and have never had a cavity in my life.) What was your favorite Halloween candy? I still love Dum-Dum lollipops.
This might be cool for kids. The Spend Save Bank randomly deposits coins into either the ‘Save’ or ‘Spend’ section. It’d be even better if there was a option to set what percentages you want to split between spend and save, but I guess that would be a lot more complicated than a swiveling tray. Via Gizmodo via bookofjoe.
“Like a slot machine that never loses.” Ha! Here are some more funny piggy banks I’ve ran across.
ABC is running a one-hour TV special called Un-Broke: What You Need to Know About Money on Friday May 29th. As part of the promotion, Seth Green provides us with his financially-savvy edition of MTV Cribs.
I wonder if that is really his house? Somehow I seriously doubt it. Family Guy has to pay better than that, yo!
[Direct video link. Via Mrs. Micah.]
How about some Friday afternoon humor:
I love the scene with a bunch of speakerphones in an empty conference room talking to each other. With the growing popularity of virtual personal assistants from sites like GetFriday, I bet this is happening more often than most people think. I remember the story about medical transcriptionists where a big company got a contract for something like 50 cents a line, who subcontracted to a self-employed woman in Florida being paid 25 cents a line, who then subcontracted to someone in Pakistan for 3 cents a line. [Direct video link]
TreasuryDirect, which allows individuals to buy securities online directly from the US Treasury, has to be the least accessible financial website in the country. It takes me about 20 minutes to log in each time! Let’s look at all the hoops we get to jump through:
Account number – Of course it can’t be a username you can remember like “bob222”, but is more like Z-334-946-124. This makes me have to dig up my encrypted login/password file.
Password – Use your own keyboard? Nope, you must click it out on a randomized virtual keyboard. Gets around basic keyloggers, but not something that catches your screen as well. I’m actually okay with this one, but I’m glad my password isn’t very long and my vision is good.
Access Card – Finally, you need to read characters off a Access Card in order to access your account. (Like a secret decoder ring!) Of course, being a physical object, I can never find it. I ended up transcribing the entire card contents onto a spreadsheet file, and shredded the card.
Now, finally you can buy a savings bond. Can you imagine the hassle if every financial institution were like this? I understand the need for security, but I think having a physical type of verification token should be an option for the customer, not a requirement.
Lost TreasuryDirect Access Card?
If you lost your card, you’ll have to call (304) 480-7711, verify your identity, and request for a new one to be sent to your mailing address. Your old card will no longer work. In the meantime, no access. Call early and keep trying until you reach someone, because if they’re busy you have to leave a message (no hold system?), and they never called me back.
(I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, debating whether I wanted to deal with the comment moderation that will inevitably follow. Oh well, gotta stir things up a little bit now and then. 😉 Just don’t take this too seriously.)
If you have insomnia like I do, you’ve probably seen those commercial for 900 numbers to talk to beautiful, attentive women (or men). Well, if you think about it, wouldn’t being on the other end of the phone be an interesting part-time job? Obviously, not for everyone, but let’s look at the pros:
How do I get paid? You get paid for your actual talk time, but your per-minute wage is based on how long you keep the caller on the phone. Many sites claim to send checks out weekly. According to one report:
For the first 5 or so minutes that you take a call you will be paid about .12 – .15 cents per minute. If you keep the caller on the line for more than 5 minutes, but up to 9 minutes, the pay raises to .30 cents. If the caller remains on the line for 10 minutes or more, expect to make between .40 cents – .60 cents or more. A good sex operator should be able to keep the customer on the line for 15 minutes or more.
I didn’t hear of any exceptional April Fools’ Day jokes this year, but this one caught my eye. Many customers of Zecco Trading logged into their brokerage account yesterday to be greeted with a slightly higher buying power than before… on the order of 6 to 13 million dollars! Thanks to reader Nick for the tip to check my balance. Here is a user-supplied screenshot:
Well, that’s one way to qualify for the Zecco free trades! People on the forums speculated whether this was a April Fools’ Day joke, or a system glitch. They joked about making a big ACH transfer and quitting their jobs.
However, one brave/foolish person posted that he actually put in an order to buy a million dollars worth of shares with their newly found money, and the order was executed! The bad news? The shares were quickly sold later by Zecco… at a market price loss. On top of that, they were charged the $19.99 commission for a broker-assisted trade. Doh! If it was indeed an April Fools’ joke, it definitely wasn’t implemented very well…
The entire Jim Cramer interview with Jon Stewart last night are now up on TheDailyShow.com. It’s split up into a few parts, here is the first one:
It was kind of fun to see Cramer squirm a little bit (deny everything!), but I think most experienced investors would find very little surprising out of it. Making fun of CNBC and Cramer is like shooting fish in a barrel. Cramer should have known they would dig up this video of him mocking the SEC. I’m surprised he showed up at all. He definitely took one for the CNBC team.
Even Stewart admits Cramer isn’t the real problem, which is that the purpose of 99% of the financial industry is not to make you rich. It’s too extract money from you, while you think they might make you rich. From brokers to hedge funds to bloated 401(k) plans. Cramer was worth millions before starting Mad Money, guess where that money came from? And CNBC is part of that machine. Hopefully more people realized it after tonight.
CNBC is financial porn. It’s air-brushed to look better than reality, and is scripted for your entertainment. Do people really want to watch responsible reporting on CNBC? Invest in index funds. Don’t trade too much. Don’t look at the Dow ticker every five minutes. I’m not so sure that would sell. Still, will TDS kill Mad Money like they nuked Crossfire? That would be impressive.
If you don’t watch The Daily Show regularly, you may have missed more “drama” between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart after the TDS roasted CNBC last week.
Cramer responded by saying his words were taken out of context. Jon Stewart responds, saying Jim Cramer didn’t recommend buying Bear Stearns stock a week before it collapsed – what Cramer called an “urban myth”. No, he did it five days earlier:
Then I guess more defensiveness by NBC. It seems even they don’t realize that TDS is a parody show, not a real news show. Yes, they take soundbites and then make fun of them. That’s the entire basis of the show! It’s on Comedy Central.
You can’t win, Cramer! In reality, I’m sure both NBC and TDS are loving this, because controversy = ratings = $$$. TDS will milk this as long as they can. CNBC is already financial porn, where the whole point is to talk out both sides of their asses all day long. Buy! Sell! Do something! Trade Trade Trade!
Proof? Jim Cramer will be a guest on The Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight (Thursday 3/12), assuming he doesn’t cancel too.
Who’s that annoying co-worker a few cubes down who keeps giggling at some stupid video on Friday afternoon? Just go home already, ya jerk! Yeah, that was me, watching this Daily Show clip making fun of financial pr0n channel CNBC.
The first part is about Rick Santelli’s rant about “loser” homeowner bailouts, but the good stuff starts at about 2:45 minutes in. I wonder how many hours they spent compiling these clips!
“If I only followed CNBC’s advice, I would have a million dollars today! …Provided I started with a hundred million dollars.” – Jon Stewart
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