Ninjas are normally really cool. They are from the mammalian family, they fight MOST, if not ALL, the time, and their sole purpose is to do stuff and kill people (source). Can you say awesome? But some other types of NINJAs are totally lame, don’t kill anything, and have absolutely no skills whatsoever. No, you won’t find these different types of NINJAs in any epic films and absolutely no one sends their three year old child to the hill country to train to be one. That’s because these NINJAs are people who have No Income and No Job (and no) Assests. You definitely don’t want to train your child to become one of these!

Here are some helpful hints for setting your kids straight about what type of ninja they should become when they grow up:

1. Real ninjas have discipline and can control things just by thinking about it with their minds. Lame NINJAs can’t even wash themselves properly. In order to teach your child to use their brain have them play Sudoku religiously. Once they can complete an evil puzzle in under five minutes you will know that despite their inability to take a shower they probably won’t end up as a NINJA.
2. Real ninjas have large skill sets while NINJAs complain about how cable TV costs so much. Train your child to do without the TV by not watching any yourself. Ever. Real ninjas absorb huge amounts of information by eating the world’s supply of floppy disks.
3. Ninjas are flexible and can vanish from the face of the earth in an instant. NINJAs can’t seem to evade collection agencies or get out from under heavy burdens of debt. It is important that children don’t overstretch themselves, but kids are so stinking flexible to begin with it shouldn’t take too much effort on your part to keep them that way.
4. Ninjas don’t need stuff to be happy or even to live. NINJAs always seem to be wanting more and more stuff and have no way to keep up with their wants. To ensure that you child doesn’t think the world revolves around them, have them play with wholesome wood toys and start learning a trade at age 5 - like they used to do a 1,000 years ago. You have to do things old-like if you want your kids to be ninja like.

This is intended to be more of a primer than an exhaustive list on how to train your child to be a ninja. If you were to only follow these tips you’ll at least save your child from being a NINJA, and that is definitely worth it.

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Posted in Money Misc. ~ 2 Comments

Its been nice getting back into the posting and reading swing and I’ve dipped my finger into more than one pie this week. Here are some of the things I’ve found interesting around the financial web sites on the internet:

An article over at the Financial Blogger got me thinking about how I fall into the trap of working harder. When I think about having a child and the costs associated with that it almost always ends up with me thinking that I will need to get second job somewhere. That is definitely not ideal since I know that you can become quite sleep deprived with a newborn and working two jobs would probably pretty near wipe me off the face of earth. I am sure people have done it before, but I think working smarter will probably be the better choice for me.

Madame X over at My Open Wallet asked the question, “What if You Contribute Too Much to a Roth IRA?” Her post was pretty informative and let me know about Publication 590. I don’t expect to be close to not being able to contribute to a Roth IRA any time soon, but its good to store away in happy unicorn land for future reference and to feed the unicorns.

Nick over at Punny Money wrote about a sweet contest for people who can make jokes about stupid things like taxes. I think I have about three jokes for my video, but no matter how slow I say them they just can’t seem to fill the three minute time limit. Stupid quick jokes making me miss out on winning a million pennies.

Budgets give me the warm tingly sensations all over my body, but moneychallenge seems to think that some people think ‘budget’ is a dirty word. Abudgetloversayswhaaa? It’s true though, some people just don’t know what budgets are for. If that is you, do one of them clickity-clickities on the linkity-linkity and practice Jedi mind tricks. This is not the cup of Starbucks you are looking for …

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Posted in Rounding Out My Reading ~ No Comments

Image Taken From Whiplash Rides

I have always wanted to own a monkey. They are are ridiculously awesome and having one as a pet would be even more awesome. I recently saw some videos about a sheep dog riding cowboy monkey named Whiplash that got me pretty pumped about the idea again. Since this is a blog about money, I wanted to see how owning a monkey would affect the bottom line of my family.

Purchase Price:
Did you know that you can buy a monkey on the internet? I didn’t either until the all powerful Google told that you could. After a quick trip over to the Primate Store I discovered that you can purchase a monkey at the rock bottom price of $1,200 - but that was for a Fat Tailed Dwarf Lemur, a minuscule monkey that looks like it has little training potential. But it also seems to have little pooh throwing potential, so I guess that is okay. I guess if I had a choice between a Yorkshire Terrier and Fat Tailed Dwarf Lemur I would definitely take the Lemur. The highest price I saw at the primate store was $9,800 for a baby Female Miniature Crested Celebes Ape. I’ll split the difference and figure that a quality, trainable monkey would cost me $5,500.

Running Total: $(5,500)

Monkey Maintenance:
From what I have read, it may be difficult to find someone to take care of your monkey. Since a monkey it about 10 times better than a dog, I figure that a monkey will run about 8.5 times the price of a dog’s vet bill and food expense considering the coolness factor of inflation. That would up my monkey bill between $2,550 and $4,250 a year. Since monkeys can live 15-20 years that would bring the expenses of owning a monkey up by about $59,500, give or take several thousand.

Running Total: $(65,000)

Time Lost to Cleaning and Cage Maintenance:
Monkeys are really, really, really dirty. It takes time to clean a cage and I doubt you’ll be able to teach a monkey the wonders of indoor plumbing. Unless you already regularly clean stinky, dirty animals this could be a full time maintenance mess. Using the same coolness factor of inflation I figure it will take 8.5 times more work to clean up after a monkey than it does a dog. That means it takes 2 hours a week worth of cleaning. That is about $30 dollars worth of time a week given my current wage. That is an additional $1,560 a year for a total of $27,300 for the life of the monkey, not taking into account the increasing value of my time.

Running Total: $(92,300)

Legal Fees:
Monkeys can be dangerous. Once they reach sexual maturity they can become aggressive and pound for pound are very strong. It is also very possible for humans to get diseases from monkeys. That could turn Junior’s birthday party into a hepatitis B party - I love party favors. I’ll figure that nothing terrible happens, but I have to pay a lawyer for 2 hours just to cover my butt. Price paid: $300.

Running Total: $(92,600)

Monkey Revenue and the Intangibles:
The only reason you have a monkey as a pet is to train it to do cool things. These cool things can also earn you money, if you know how to crack the competitive birthday party/rodeo market. Lets assume that my monkey isn’t smart enough to be a public spectacle until he is 5 years old and I put him out to stud for the last two years of his life. That leaves me about 10 years of use out of the monkey. Then lets say that I earn $125 per birthday gig, speaking engagement, rodeo, or old west reenactment. I would only have to do one event a week for a ten year period in order to recuperate all of my monkey expenses - and that doesn’t even include all the paid sex my monkey will be having with other monkeys.

There are also the intangibles of owning a monkey. You probably couldn’t put a price on what it would do for my family. My house would be the house that all my kids’ friends would want to hang out at simply because we had a monkey. They would have the best show and tell presentations this side of the Reformation, making them at least the second most popular person at their school. Until they were in the fifth grade they could always scare bullies by telling them that they would bring their pet monkey to school to whip their butt if they didn’t stop. I mean I could make about 50 Priceless commercials just off the top of my head if I wanted to. You can’t put a dollar amount on intangibles, but I am going to any way - $100,000.

Clearly owning a monkey is not only a strong personal and family move, but it is also a sound financial investment. You will earn $100,000 worth of money and enjoyment out of your monkey if you play your cards right.

Action Points:
Buy a monkey once I have a place to keep one and sufficient funds to care for it.

Useful Monkey Links:
The Perils of Keeping Monkeys as Pets
MONKEY VS. SEA MONKEY: WHICH IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

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Posted in Featured, Money Misc. ~ 19 Comments

This past weekend has provided some serious blogging material - we saw a foreclosure, filed our taxes, and we ran into some serious frugal frustrations. Our frugal frustrations all began earlier in the week when my wife failed to take full advantage of a certain CVS deal involving free hair care products. She didn’t know that you could use coupons for buy one get one free (BOGO) items so the freeness that she had read about alluded her. She had also had a small mental error in taking advantage of the sweet Vons catalina (*snicker*) currently available through some NASCAR promotion they are running these days. For those that don’t know what a catalina is, my wife tells me that it is like a $x off your next receipt type thing. Now her blunder was thinking that the catalina was dependent upon the price of the items rather than the number, so instead of getting the sweet $20 catalina we got a $5 one.

We went into Sunday with some big plans to remedy the situation and milk these loss leaders for all they were worth. My wife had built a rather excellent spread sheet for our trip to Vons that had us buying 25 items and earning about $2 when you consider the cost of the items and the sweet catalina. She also had organized the coupons for the free hair care products that we don’t really need but would absolutely love to have for free. The short story is that we didn’t get any hair products for free and we bought about $18 worth of stuff without getting no catalina. Bummer.

The Long Story
Our first stop was CVS and my wife was picking up some items from the latest ad on her CVS card while I was to buy the free hair products on my card. We picked up our items in about 5 minutes because we knew exactly what we were going to get. I got in line first, fully expecting to not have to pay anything. My CVS card, then the items, then the coupons were scanned and I stood looking at the register dumbfounded - I owed over $4. Whaaaat? I stood stunned, like a frog blinded by a flashlight and about to be skewered by a fork. My wife stepped up with a similarly dumbfounded expression and asked what was happening. As the two of them exchanged words and the cashier got out this weeks ad to check something the line behind us grew from no people to about 5. We were holding up the line. After about 3 minutes of discussion with the cashier we decided we didn’t want the items and I apologized for the mix up. It took about 2 more minutes for the cashier to undo our transaction and return our coupons. I was at the cash register for about as long as it took us to find our items and bring them to the register.

This minor set back was quite the blow to my wife. She really wants to be frugal with our money and stuff like that makes her feel stupid. She isn’t stupid, but as was pointed out earlier by Deamiter, our brains suck.

Already dejected, we made our way over to Vons. We followed our list to the T. We only got items that fit with the promotion and we really stocked up on beans. When we got to the register I was loading our items onto the belt and felt like we were one item short. I informed my wife who dashed back to the beans isle to pick one more can for that coveted catalina. While my wife is gone getting an additional can all our items get scanned and I stand looking at the register and it rings up to around $45, a far cry from the $18 we were expecting to pay! Upon my wife’s arrival I realize that we have coupons so I handed those over. Disaster averted - these bring our total down to $25 bucks (we bought milk in addition to our catalina items). I swipe my card and our receipt prints, but no catalina - NO CATALINA! My wife is disgusted. She swears off all this frugal shopping crap and resigns herself to eating fruits and vegetables from Henry’s . Crappy cheap catalina of lies.

Lessons Learned
Talk about frustrating. But here are some of the simple things that I think we learned from this little failure in frugality:

1. You won’t know why unless you ask - the biggest question we had is why didn’t it work? I don’t know, but we certainly won’t figure it out by getting frustrated. We should have asked questions but we didn’t.
2. Don’t feel like a thief - one of the things we felt like is that we were caught stealing. We weren’t, we just missed a deal.
3. Don’t feel like an idiot - most of the time you’re not an idiot, you just made a mistake. Sometimes you are an idiot, but most of the time you are not.
4. Don’t give up - one series of setbacks doesn’t a life make.
5. Yoda is really wise - he says cool stuff like, “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”

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Posted in Frugality ~ 1 Comment