- RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
- @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
- Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
- A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
- RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #
Time vs Money
In this corner, weighing in at the only thing you have in this life that you can’t possibly get more of: Time!
And in this corner, weighing in at the thing people think they need to be happy: Money!
Keep it clean. No biting, scratching or hitting your opponents with a chair unless my back is turned. Fight!
Yesterday was Jimmy John’s customer appreciation day. They had subs for $1, but you had to go there in person to get it. At noon, there were more than 50 people standing in line. If it takes 1 minute to make a sandwich, that’s almost an hour in line. To save $5.
Good for Jimmy John’s. They brought thousands of extra people into the restaurant and had a huge line running down the sidewalk. That makes them look great to everyone driving by.
But, the people? Really? Would you work, at any job, for anyone(excluding charitable work) for $5 per hour?
Round 1: Time!
My mother-in-law regularly drive 6 miles out of her way to save 5 cent per gallon on gas. If usually takes 10-15 minutes to get there, if the stoplights behave and traffic is decent. If she arrive with her gas gauge on “E”, she gets to put 15 gallons of gas in her car, for a savings of 75 cents. That’s an effective rate of $2.25 per hour, not counting the gas used to drive there. However, if I ask her to give her $2 to stand in her driveway doing nothing for an hour, she looks at me like I’m nuts!
Round 2: Time!
My wife will occasionally make a shopping list that includes coupons and items spanning three grocery stores. If that were to happen, there would be an extra hour wasted, just traveling between the stores, minimum. Then another hour wasted walking past the items in the first store that were slated to be purchased at the second, or third store. Add another 15 minutes per store to check out, and we’re looking at 2 and a half hours down the tubes to save a possible $20?
No freaking way.
Round 3: Time!
My time is valuable. No matter what I do, or how hard I work, I can never get more than my allotment. Why would I waste it to save a fraction of what I can earn by using it in other ways?
And the winner is….Time!
What’s the craziest thing you’ve done to save a few bucks?
Why I Hate Payday Loans
I hate payday loans and payday lenders.
The way a way a payday loan works is that you go into a payday lender and you sign a check for the amount you want to borrow, plus their fee. They give you money that you don’t have to pay back until payday. It’s generally a two-week loan.
Now, this two week loan comes with a fee, so if you want to borrow $100, they’ll charge you a $25 fee, plus a percent of the total loan, so for that $100 loan, you’ll have to pay back $128.28.
That’s only 28% of actual interest; that’s not terrible. However, if you prorate that to figure the APR, which is what everyone means when they say “I’ve got a 7% interest rate”, it comes out to 737%. That’s nuts.
They are a very bad financial plan.
Those loans may save you from an overdraft fee, but they’ll cost almost as much as an overdraft fee, and the way they are rigged–with high fees, due on payday–you’re more likely to need another one soon. They are structured to keep you from ever getting out from under the payday loan cycle.
For those reasons, I consider payday loan companies to be slimy. Look at any of their sites. Almost none are upfront about the total cost of the loan.
So I don’t take their ads. When an advertiser contacts me, my rate sheet says very clealy that I will not take payday loan ads. The reason for that is–in my mind–when I accept an advertiser, I am–in some form–endorsing that company, or at least, I am agreeing that they are a legitimate business and I am helping them conduct that business.
In all of the time I’ve been taking ads, I’ve made exactly one exception to that rule. On the front page of that advertiser’s website, they had the prorated APR in bright, bold red letters. It was still a really bad deal, but with that level of disclosure, I felt comfortable that nobody would click through and sign up without knowing what they were getting into. That was a payday lender with integrity, as oxymoronic as that sounds.
Time vs Money Redux
Saving money is a good thing
Saving time is a good thing.
Somewhere in between, there has to be a balance. It’s possible to spend far too much time to save very little money.
For example, on September 30th, I left for the Financial Blogger’s Conference. Thinking I’d be frugal and save a little money, I told my GPS to avoid the toll roads. According to Google maps, the cheap route should have added 20 minutes to my trip. Coming into Illinois from Wisconsin on the toll roads, it’s easy to spend that much time waiting to pay the toll, since I don’t own an Illinois magic toll-paying box.
Unfortunately, the little smart-a** suction-cupped to my windshield sent mebthrough every construction zone between Wisconsin and Schaumberg, Illinois.
That sucks.
I went through a series of little towns with speed limits that randomly changed from block to block. Road construction had half of the roads down to just one lane. All told, I saved $3.40, judging by the tolls heading home, but the horrible detour cost me well over an hour and a half of time.
I saved $3.40, but lost 90 minutes. That’s not a good return on investment.
Just a month ago, I was ripping into my mother-in-law for wasting half an hour to save 75 cents. Then I have to go and demonstrate how horrible I am at making that save time vs money judgement.
I need to work on that.
What’s the most time you’ve spent to save a small amount of money?
Rebates Suck
About a month ago, I bought a new laptop.
The old one still works, but it’s kind of slow, and kind of in demand, especially when Kid #1 has friends over. When I need to get on the computer and whip up some side-hustle money, I shouldn’t have to fight with kids and deal with the whiny “Are you done, yet?” every 10 minutes.
This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment purchase. Since the old laptop still worked, we had quite a bit of time to find the new one, so I started watching sales. And I waited.
Eventually, I found a great deal. I got a much bigger/faster/smarter/nicer laptop for about $375 with tax. There was a sale, a coupon code, and a rebate all in play to make that happen.
I don’t mind coupons and sales. In fact, I am a fan.
Rebates, however, irritate me.
It shouldn’t have been bad. After all, I was going to Staples, home of the Easy Button®. I should have been able to go home, fire up their website, fill out a form, and get my money in a couple of weeks, right?
Grr.
Apparently, the easy rebate doesn’t apply to the good rebates. If you’re getting $1.05 back on a $100 printer, you can do it in a few clicks. But if you’re getting $50 back on a $400 laptop, watch out. Then, Staples has the same horrible rebate process as everyone else. Print the forms, peel off the UPC label, snail-mail it to the middle of nowhere and wait 4 to 100 months for a gift card.
Double grr.
Obviously, they are hoping a statistically significant percentage of their customers forget to claim their money.
Shady rebate garbage.
Rebates are a marketing ploy to convince customers they are getting a sale, while hoping the customer forgets to ask for the sale price, thereby paying full price and being happy about it.
Ethical businesses would just have a sale and be done with it. Treating your customers right is good for business. Really.
Now, where did I put that receipt?
Can EverQuest Next Compete with World of Warcraft?
Legions of MMORPGs have graced the internet to do battle against Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, yet no challenger has bested
Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online juggernaut. Huge marketing campaigns and years of development by the makers of games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift have left players less than satisfied, with an initial big burst of player excitement and eventual failure.
As with other game releases, the developers at Sony Online Entertainment have tried to suggest that their game will be “new” and “different.” It’s not difficult to understand why skepticism is high. Every game that has seen release in the past few years has had developers boast the same and has crashed and burned just a month or so after the release.
Players of EverQuest Next will find a game focus that includes some familiar fantasy elements of an MMO game (like elves), but developers have sought to step away from the traditional, linear questing experience and offer some world-building opportunities for players (much like EVE Online). One of the interesting features expected of the game is the ability for players to impact permanent change upon the landscape.
For example, during wartime a player might decide to build a wall somewhere, and he or she can accomplish this and actually have that wall erected as a permanent feature in the game world. Similarly, when players fight one another or monsters, a spell or explosion that creates a hole in the world will remain permanently. One of the developers likened this feature to the idea of putting Minecraft into an MMORPG.
Although absolutely everything in the world can’t be destroyed (certain structures will be permanent), this opportunity to build, create, and destroy represents a jump forward from the same opportunities players have had in games like EVE Online. World of Warcraft has occasionally offered players the opportunity to change the landscape, but not on a regular basis. Such changes have generally been implemented after a reset with all the realms taken offline, after which players would log in and see the changes.
However, the lack of appreciable impact on the environment hasn’t stopped players from flocking to World of Warcraft for nearly a decade, and EverQuest Next will need to bring an amazing player experience to lure away current players as well as retain them. The ebb and flow of Warcraft’s player base often coincides with the new release of another MMORPG, but after a month or so the new game’s servers are ghost towns. It won’t take long to see whether EverQuest Next can compete with World of Warcraft.