Black Coffee: Yes, Virginia, They Really Do Make $350 Baby Shower Cakes

It’s time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a Little Joe.

(No, a little joe. Don’t be silly.)

In a stunning display of hubris, Len thought he could hand the Black Coffee reins over to yours truly and that his readers would enjoy the finished product. That was last summer. This week he decided to do it again, what with him being in Maui, and Hawai’i not yet having the Internet (and even if they did, they’d probably charge him in Hawai’ian dollars to use it.)

Speaking of Hawai’ian dollars, let’s dispense the …

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Blogs We’ve Been Following this Week

Oblivious Investor – If parents and teachers could explain financial concepts half as well as Mike Piper does…well, the average American wouldn’t be holding obscene amounts of credit card debt, for one thing. This week Mike debates the merits of standard index funds vs. exchange-traded ones.

Financial Uproar - Nelson Smith writes from Drumheller, Alberta, a hamlet east of Calgary. He’s almost as funny as me, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. This week, he reiterates that it’s foolish to focus on small changes to your finances (the infamous “latte factor”) when you can make painless big changes. Case in point, his father’s rusted-out ex-car.

You Have More Than You Think – Why don’t you have her bookmarked yet? Shawanda Greene is intelligent, erudite, and not without attitude. She uses a non-financial story featuring a bird’s corpse to make a point about how delaying the inevitable is never worth it. Quote: “I traded a short period (less than a single second) of severe mental anguish for a long period (days) of moderate mental anguish.”

Mr. Money Mustache – The eponymous man behind this blog is equal parts bold and sage. I’d been reading him for a few weeks before discovering this week that he’s an engineer, which makes perfect sense (and probably makes him a man after Len’s own heart.) This week, MMM details the logic behind his safety margin in staggering detail. Bonus: unprecedented use of the word “complainypantses.”

Those are the good posts. If you want to see some the Internet’s bottom scrapings, interspersed with the occasional diamond, check out the Carnival of Wealth on Control Your Cash during this or any other week.

The Way-Back Machine: Past Posts of Len’s You Might Have Missed

From January 2009:

Condition Yourself To Hate Paying Interest – Most personal finance sites blow chimp. (Yeah, I said it.) One thing that got my attention about Len’s was that he was unafraid to state unpopular opinions, and back them up with data. Len couldn’t understand why people who marvel at the magic of compound interest insist on paying it. Me neither.

Debits and Credits

Credit: The Honeybee and Len, who are currently on what Condé Nast Traveler magazine has named the best island in the world 17 times. (4-way tie for worst island in the world: Elba, Devil’s, Alcatraz, Manhattan.)

Debit: The National Basketball Players Association, which couldn’t be handling the current labor talks any worse if Paris Hilton was their chief negotiator. The players are losing $80 million in salary every 2 weeks, and for what?

Credit: The NBA owners, who are reducing their losses without lifting a finger. Granted, they’re reducing losses by cancelling games, but any bad PR the owners are encountering will be forgotten once (if) we resume play. Fans have short memories, and no one but me and a dozen other people care about the league before Christmas anyway.

Credit: eBay member ebtago, who bought my Garmin Oregon 450t GPS receiver for $330 as I’m typing this. Lucky so-and-so got herself a unit for about one-third off retail.

You do price items on eBay before making any big purchase decisions, don’t you? Even if you never buy or sell anything on there, it’s an amazing informational resource. Don’t sell your old iPhone back to Verizon when you can get twice as much for it through a private party.

Debit: My girlfriend’s ex-husband’s wife’s daughter. Got that? She’s 28, single, lesbian, and decided to go hetero for one night. Well, guess what happened?

Never mind that she’s unequipped to have a kid. She’s thousands of dollars in debt, won’t be able to work for a few months (she’s a cop), and recently bought a $350 cake for her baby shower. I didn’t know $350 cakes existed. Now that she’s being idle for two, she needs to be more frugal than ever. But instead she’s going in the other direction.

Credit: Google, whose quarterly financials beat some already exospheric projections. According to analysts, the company was supposed to profit by “only” $8.76 a share. Instead, Google earned $9.72 a share.

Debit: Investors jumping on the Google bandwagon. In the 24 hours after the financials were released, the stock price rose $36.41.

Huh? That 1-day increase represents almost a decade’s worth of additional profit. Google is a crazily successful company, of course. But all growth eventually recedes, or reduces its rate of increase. The sudden increase in stock price is a killer example of irrational exuberance. When everyone else is hopping and skipping, be cautious.

Credit: Speaking of which, people who bought BP last summer. Remember when the American public considered the petroleum manufacturer to be Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot all rolled into one? Last June, 2 months after the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP’s stock bottomed out at $27. Now it’s trading around $40.

Debit: Every last unwashed protester on Wall Street. If they could articulate one semi-rational point of contention, they wouldn’t be on the list. But a series of demands that stops just short of unicorns riding on vanilla-scented rainbows tells the rest of us (you know, the 1% who rule the world) that the protesters would rather get TV face time than be taken seriously.

Credit: President Obama, who has somehow managed to continue his predecessor’s m.o. of choosing winners and losers instead of letting the marketplace do it, invite the chairman of GE to preside over his (Obama’s) “jobs council”, and use his political muscle to lend $535 million to a defunct solar cell manufacturer, yet not have the protestors  hold him even indirectly responsible for major corporations having undue influence on our political system. I don’t know how he does it.

Credit: Mitt Romney, who has managed to jut out his chin and look presidential enough to have become an overwhelming favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. A month ago Rick Perry was a slight favorite on InTrade at 4-to-1, with Romney just behind him. Today, Perry’s at around 9-to-1, and struggling to keep ahead of Herman Cain. Meanwhile, Romney’s at 2-to-5.

Wait, you’re saying you’ve barely heard Romney’s name mentioned lately among those of the other candidates? Exactly. Regardless of his positions or pedigree, Romney’s managed to play an unsympathetic media just by keeping quiet and, when he absolutely has to open his mouth, reciting platitudes. People claim they hate politics as usual, but they’re lying. They can’t get enough of it, and the 2012 presidential election will be no different.

By the Numbers

67,305 LenPenzo.com’s current Alexa rank.

68,532 Official football capacity of Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles.

68,532 Number of lashes we’d sentence Lincoln Financial Field’s most famous denizen, Michael Vick, to if we had our druthers.

81,915 Control Your Cash’s Alexa rank, conditional on whether you click on this link.

1 million Incredibly rough estimate (or incredibly unlikely exact total) of the number of Apple iPhone 4Ss sold on October 14, its first day on the market.

145.8 million Number of jobs President Obama is “preserving” at this very moment. The measure used to be “jobs created,” then it got reduced to “jobs saved,” whatever that means. So we thought we’d lower the bar a little more. As we define it, if a job existed 5 minutes ago, and still exists now under the administration, that’s a preserved job. Yang dipilih* deserves some credit for that.

203 million Dollars Apple spent to create those iPhones, if you believe CNET’s estimates.

950 million Number of your dollars “borrowed” by Lincoln Financial under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

953 million Dollars Apple expects to gross on said iPhones, by the old-fashioned method of selling a product that there’s demand for.

Other Useless News

October 21 is National Nurses’ Day in Thailand. That’s the best I could come up with, meaning that October 21 is possibly the least interesting day on the calendar.

Approve of what you see? Here’s how to get even more:

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Letters, Len Gets Letters

This one’s from Li Park, who seems forthright: “Get back to me if interested for details as regards the transfer of $44,500,000 to you. This money initially belongs to a client who died and had no next of kin in his account-opening package. In order to achieve this, I shall require your full name, and telephone number to reach you. Most importantly, a confirmation of acceptance from you after which I shall furnish you with the full details of this transaction. Reply via this email only : conlipk@yahoo.com.hk”

That’s an email from Hong Kong. Special Administrative Region or not, you’d figure the Chinese government would cut off your thumbs for stuff like that.

He’s Len Penzo, and he approved this message.

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*Indonesian for “The Chosen One”