The 100 by 30 project

Do you pay for over-priced registry items?

Well, do you?

I was assembling a gift off of a registry for a June wedding, and noticed that the registry contained a $120 mattress pad (!) and $80 salt and pepper shakers (!!).

I declined to buy these. Not because I object, although if someone were spending $120 on me, a mattress pad is among the last things I'd want them to purchase.

No, it's because I worry that the couple will forget how much the item cost! Perhaps they were giddily circling Macy's or Target or Crate and Barrel with the shooter gun, and adding whatever caught their eye. Maybe they paid attention to the price at the time, but will forget 4 months later; maybe they never paid attention.

Either way, I don't want to be seen incorrectly as the cheap couple who only bought a mattress pad and some seasoning receptacles!

Petty of me? Maybe. But I've seen so much snickering lately by newlyweds about people not "covering their plate", a concept I hadn't even heard of until recently. I don't want to spend $200 and still have people snickering about what cheap wedding guests we are!

I've been throttled.

After years of being a Netflix member who rented what I'd estimate to be one DVD every two months, I recently started becoming a more active member. For the past three months or so, I'd been pushing my two-DVDs-at-a-time plan to the limit, probably cycling through 1.5 DVDs per week (my husband and I are catching up on the brilliant but not a little bit sexist "Rescue Me").

When I first started cranking out the rentals, I was astonished at how quickly they came. It was essentially a two-day turnaround: one day to get back to their facility, they shipped out my next flick that day, it arrived the day after.

After awhile, though, the pace slowed. It would take two or even three days to get a confirmation email that they'd received my returned disk, and the new one often wouldn't arrive the day after the email.

At first I thought I was imaging it. Had I just been misremembering the speed of my earlier rentals? But some poking around revealed that this slowing down is an intentional practice by Netflix that critics have labeled "throttling".  Essentially,  Netflix  bumps frequent users to the back of the queue when it helps them to more quickly service infrequent customers; because those infrequent customers cost Netflix very little but pay their monthly fees anyway, it's important to Netflix to keep them happy.

I actually don't have a problem with this. It's not entirely a clear line: I'd raise holy hell if someone tried to rearrange customers waiting in line at, say, Panera, and I was strongly opposed to the proposal to allow people to buy their way into faster TSA lines at the airport, but for some reason this doesn't disturb me at all. Although if the service gets even slower, I might just cancel.

Post-nups

This is an interesting article on post-nuptial agreements, which are, as you'd expect, contracts about the assets made once a couple is already married.

Luckily A. and I are as close in financial outlooks as people can be, but if we weren't, I'd consider this in a heartbeat.

Advice for people who contact my department looking for tutors:

I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.

So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.

Royalties and bureaucracy

For the past three years or so, my husband has worked on a side project with a friend of his on his own time, under the direction of a PI at the same institution where he works full-time (his boss knows about the project and approves, but this has nothing to do with his full-time job).

By most measures, this project has been very successful. The product has been licensed by the institution, taken on by several producer/distributors, and demand was high for it before it was even available. They've even earned a few consulting jobs in order to assess a company's needs and see how their product might help.

Obviously, my husband and his friend were awarded the right to royalties by the institution. The royalties are laughably small -- about $2/unit -- but it was always more about working on a cool project with his friend than any expectation of a giant windfall (and hey, it's some passive income that the pf blogosphere is so wild about!).

But it's been about nine months since the first unit was sold, and we haven't seen a dime! Because payments were to be quarterly, at the extreme end we could understand a six-month lag. But nine months? My concern is not that the institution will stiff him; I know that they will pay eventually. This is bureaucracy, not fraud. But I believe that this behavior will cost the institution money. Here's why:

This is not a niche project with a few applications: this is a very general product that could sell many, many units with the right support. (Also, the institution makes a lot more than my husband does; more like $20/unit.) But my husband and his friend are not under any sort of contract and they have no obligation to keep working on this project; in fact, my husband is losing interest. Now that we're thinking seriously about having kids, he's thinking hard about ways to bring in some additional income, and when brainstorming yesterday I suggested spending time seeking companies that might be interested in the product and proactively contacting them about its merits. He was not interested in this at all. Now admittedly, primarily this is because he's a tech person, not a business person, and I think he considers hustling a little unseemly. But I think he would have done this a year or two ago because his enthusiasm for the product was so strong. But in the absence of royalty checks to make him still feel connected to the project, he's ready to move on. Most likely he will move onto something that has no affiliation with the institution and will make no money for them. So instead getting his labor to help them sell more units which they profit from and getting their name out (the institution is obsessed with getting press and being thought of as a top institution), they'll get nothing.

Bureaucracy has its costs.

"Deep down, they believe they should be like the Native Americans and use every part of the product or beast they have consumed."

Sure, I'm probably late to the party, but I love "Stuff White People Like" as much as everyone else. A few of my favorites are:

1. "Gifted" Children.
   

   White people love “gifted” children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted!  Isn’t that amazing?

   I’m pretty sure the last non-gifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, CA.  Since then, it’s been a pretty sweet run.

   The way it works is that white kids that are actually smart are quickly identified as “gifted” and take special classes and eventually end up in college and then law school or med school.

   But wait, aren’t there white people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, or even all that smart?

   Well, here is another one of those awesome white person win-win situations.

   Because if a white kid gets crappy grades and can’t seem to ever do anything right in school, they are still gifted! How you ask? They are just TOO smart for school. They are too creative, too advanced to care about the trivial minutiae of the day to day operations of school.

2. Japan.
   
   Though there is full white consensus on a number of white things, there is perhaps nothing that draws more universal white acclaim than the island nation of Japan.  It should be noted, that some white people harbor SOME ill will toward Japan because of whaling, killing dolphins or Nanking.  But those are generally considered isolated incidents that do not indict the entire nation.
   ....
   It is a dream for them to go over seas and actually live in Japan. This helps them not only because it fills their need to travel, it will enable them to gain important leverage over other white people at Sushi restaurants where they can say “this place is pretty good, but living in Japan really spoiled me.  I’ve had such a hard time finding a really authentic place.”   
   
   
3. Plays.
   

   It is not known if white people actually enjoy plays or if they are just victims of massive peer pressure from the 45% of white people who have acted in a play at some point in their life.

   The only real advice around this subject is to never accept an invitation from a white person to go see a play.  Often times you will be supporting their friend or cousin and then get stuck with a $45 ticket (at least) and three hours of trying to figure how close you are to the end.

4. Bicycles.
   
   But there is a special category of bicycles that appeal far more to white women, the European city bike (pictured). White women have a lot of fantasies about idealized lives, and one of them is living in Europe and riding around an old city on one of these bikes. They dream about waking up and riding to a little cafe, then visiting bakeries and cheese shops and finally riding home to prepare a fancy meal for their friends who will all eat under a canopy with white Christmas lights. This information can be used to help gain the trust/admiration of a white woman, especially if you can pull off a lie about how your mother told you about how she used to do all of these things when she was younger.

Most of these had me dissolving in giggles, often because of self-recognition (for one, I love plays, or as we're supposed to say, "live theater"); the only really "ouch, truth hurts" moment was the comment about the unused KitchenAid mixer. Why did we let ourselves register for that stupid contraption?

I swear I'm not going to turn into a political blogger...

... but because it's very personal finance, I'll mention it here.

I've gotten used to the fact that there's going to be a lot of very public casual sexism directed at the Clinton campaign and if I get upset at every instance I'll go insane. So my new litmus test is what I'm calling the "Robin Morgan rule", based on her comment in her new "Goodbye to All That":

Goodbye to Comedy Central's "Southpark" featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC's vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

I had noticed this very same phenomenon -- I get upset about sexist comment a prominent (often supposedly impartial) figure makes, wonder to myself, "Can you imagine the ensuing shitstorm if someone had said something  analogous about Obama, like...", and then stop because I guilty for even starting to wander down that path.

How perverse is that? Things are being uttered about Clinton every day that I can't even stand to bring myself to mentally construct an analogy to.

Anyway, here's my new rule:

Every time something passes that test, when I feel ashamed just trying to construct an analogy in my head, I'm donating another $20 to Clinton.

(Yes, it'll apply retroactively to Shuster, although luckily he does seem to be facing some the flak he's due for implying that a 27-year-old woman choosing to campaign for her mother is a whore.)

Update: My goodness, I feel like adding another Shuster-related $20 just for his laughable non-apology apology (see fourth video on this page).

"I didn't think that people would take it literally, but some people have."

David, no one took it "literally". No one thinks you actually thought the Clintons were pimping out their daughter. Astonishingly enough, people think terms like pimps and whores are inappropriate even when used metaphorically.

"To the extent that people think I was being pejorative, I apologize. I should have seen that people would view it that way."

Just uggggggh.

I need to avoid Shakesville for the next few months or I'll quickly go broke!

OK, at least I'm no more of an a-hole than '60 Minutes'

Unsurprisingly, there was a piece on the real estate crisis on '60 Minutes' tonight. But I was interested to see an angle that I've always felt but rarely articulate because it makes me feel like I sound like a complete jerk. But here it is:

Why is it so tragic that so many people are losing their homes?

Certainly, it used to be tragic when someone lost a home. But why was that? The tragedy was that the family had been there for quite some time, and that they were losing their down-payment and the equity they'd built.

But if the people losing their homes are primarily recipients of no-downpayment mortgages on which they were never paying enough to actually pay off the loan (e.g. either interest only or ARMs they couldn't possibly afford once they reset): is losing their home tragic? While it's certainly a pain to have to move, they've likely spent a couple of years in a home paying far less than they would have had to pay rent on a comparable home. And if they pulled "equity" out of the home, they might have even made money on the whole experience.

And, you know, I'm not angry at these people. I'm really not. I think the banks are as much to blame. McMansions an hour's commute from work aren't really my bag, anyway.

But I certainly don't think it's tragic.

Strong finances, strong marriage

I really like this post by Brooke of dollarfrugal.com on how to build your net worth and your marriage simultaneously. Some of her points that I strongly agree with are:

1. Open Lines of Communication. My husband and I talk often about our money. This started formally as "financial summits" (because my first two years of grad school were so insane we had to schedule time to comb over Visa statements) but has morphed into more of an understanding that we can always talk comfortably about our finances. I'm sure this open communication style will translate to other areas of our lives.
2. Even Thinking About the “D” Word Is Bad for Finances. A's maternal grandmother has a tendency to strange things, among them "I hope you and S. aren't going to get a divorce!" A's favorite reply is, "Nah -- divorce is too expensive." (In her defense, three of her four children are divorced, so I can understand why it occupies her thoughts and we just laugh off the rude questions.)
3. Find Cheap Hobbies. We love taking nightly walks together and while at my parents' house this past Christmas we rediscovered the joy of Racko, which played a big role in family togetherness time when I was a kid. (We already love board games, but they tend to be long, German-style games that only work with 3+ people; Racko is a nice change of pace.)

The value of B-school: none?

The Times has an article arguing that business school is a waste of time and money for anyone aspiring to be a Master of the Universe. They make two main arguments:

1. if you have a job in finance, a cost-benefit analysis will reveal B-school isn't worth it
2. if you do go, future employers will reject you for having bungled said cost-benefit analysis

The caveat is that if you're trying to transition into finance from, say, engineering, business school might not be your blackball.

And, of course, none of this necessarily applies if you aren't looking to be one of the hedge fund superstars.