• About
  • Mortgage Basics
  • $40K Challenge
  • Aunt Doris
  • Grandfather Says
  • Privacy
  • Archives
  • 100 Words

Len Penzo dot Com

The offbeat personal finance blog for responsible people.

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

By Greg McFarlane

Its time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a Little Joe.

(No, a little joe. Dont 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 Hawaii not yet having the Internet (and even if they did, theyd probably charge him in Hawaiian dollars to use it.)

Speaking of Hawaiian dollars, lets dispense the …

Question of the Week

How much do you typically tip your restaurant server for good service?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Blogs Weve 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 wouldnt 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. Hes almost as funny as me, and he doesnt suffer fools gladly. This week, he reiterates that its foolish to focus on small changes to your finances (the infamous latte factor) when you can make painless big changes. Case in point, his fathers rusted-out ex-car.

You Have More Than You Think – Why dont you have her bookmarked yet? Shawanda Greene is intelligent, erudite, and not without attitude. She uses a non-financial story featuring a birds 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. Id been reading him for a few weeks before discovering this week that hes an engineer, which makes perfect sense (and probably makes him a man after Lens 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 Internets 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 Lens 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 Lens was that he was unafraid to state unpopular opinions, and back them up with data. Len couldnt 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, Devils, Alcatraz, Manhattan.)

Debit: The National Basketball Players Association, which couldnt 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, theyre 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 Im 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, dont you? Even if you never buy or sell anything on there, its an amazing informational resource. Dont sell your old iPhone back to Verizon when you can get twice as much for it through a private party.

Debit: My girlfriends ex-husbands wifes daughter. Got that? Shes 28, single, lesbian, and decided to go hetero for one night. Well, guess what happened?

Never mind that shes unequipped to have a kid. Shes thousands of dollars in debt, wont be able to work for a few months (shes a cop), and recently bought a $350 cake for her baby shower. I didnt know $350 cakes existed. Now that shes being idle for two, she needs to be more frugal than ever. But instead shes 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 decades 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, BPs stock bottomed out at $27. Now its trading around $40.

Debit: Every last unwashed protester on Wall Street. If they could articulate one semi-rational point of contention, they wouldnt 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 predecessors m.o. of choosing winners and losers instead of letting the marketplace do it, invite the chairman of GE to preside over his (Obamas) 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 dont 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, Perrys at around 9-to-1, and struggling to keep ahead of Herman Cain. Meanwhile, Romneys at 2-to-5.

Wait, youre saying youve barely heard Romneys name mentioned lately among those of the other candidates? Exactly. Regardless of his positions or pedigree, Romneys 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 theyre lying. They cant get enough of it, and the 2012 presidential election will be no different.

By the Numbers

67,305 LenPenzo.coms current Alexa rank.

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

68,532 Number of lashes wed sentence Lincoln Financial Fields most famous denizen, Michael Vick, to if we had our druthers.

81,915 Control Your Cashs 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 wed lower the bar a little more. As we define it, if a job existed 5 minutes ago, and still exists now under the administration, thats a preserved job. Yang dipilih* deserves some credit for that.

203 million Dollars Apple spent to create those iPhones, if you believe CNETs 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 theres demand for.

Other Useless News

October 21 is National Nurses Day in Thailand. Thats 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? Heres how to get even more:

1. Click on that Like button in the sidebar to your right and become a fan of Len Penzo dot Com on Facebook!

2. Make sure you follow Len on Twitter!

And last, but not least

3. Dont forget to subscribe to his RSS feed too. Thank you.

Letters, Len Gets Letters

This ones 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”

Thats an email from Hong Kong. Special Administrative Region or not, youd figure the Chinese government would cut off your thumbs for stuff like that.

Hes Len Penzo, and he approved this message.

***

*Indonesian for The Chosen One

October 22, 2011

Comments

  1. 1

    Belinda Richardson says

    Anyone who is thousands of dollars in debt and spends $350 on a cake must be crazy. I was quoted $350 for a Harry Potter fondant cake for my daughter’s birthday. I told the baker, “No thanks, I hadn’t planned on spending that much.” I bought a cake mix and frosting and made her one for less than $3.00.

  2. 2

    Shawanda says

    Thanks for the link, man! And, as always, the entertaining read.

  3. 3

    Squirrelers says

    $350 cake? That cake would have to do some incredible things for me to spend that kind of cash!

  4. 4

    Betty Kincaid says

    These professional cakes look beautiful but they usually taste *meh*. I’m sure Belinda’s cake was delicious.

  5. 5

    car wheel and tire accessories says

    Постоянно просматриваю ваши посты.

The Question of the Week:

How is your investment portfolio doing this year?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Recent Posts

  • Grandfather Says: Net Worth and Real Value
  • The Top Daily Deal Sites on the Internet
  • Proper Financial Planning for Individuals With Irregular Income
  • 14 Things You Should Never Spend Money on While Traveling
  • 18 Amazing Facts You Didn’t Know About ATMs
  • Black Coffee: Chunk and Run
  • 100 Words On: Why Tracking Your Net Worth Is So Overrated
  • Six Ways to Create a More Professional Social Media Presence 
  • How to Get Great Deals with Drugstore Coupons
  • 11 Ways to Ensure Your Summer Vacation Doesn’t Bust Your Budget

Disclaimer

This site is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and the content herein should not be mistaken for professional financial advice. In fact, making investment decisions based on information published here, or any other website for that matter, is more than unwise; it is folly. This website accepts advertising in the form of monetary and other compensation; as such, topics of discussion are occasionally influenced by these advertisers. Sometimes, an article may also include affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, this blog earns a commission if you click through and make a purchase (for example, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases). Remember, you and you alone are responsible for the decisions you make in life, so please contact an independent financial professional for advice regarding your unique personal situation.

Sign up for the weekly Len Penzo dot Com newsletter
Len Penzo dot Com Delivered Weekly
Join more than 40,000 readers and fans who enjoy personal finance and macroeconomics with an offbeat twist!
Invalid email address
Thanks for subscribing!

Popular Now:

  1. 1. The 6 Most Valuable Grocery Store Products
  2. 2. Series I Savings Bonds Are Now Paying 9.62%; Here Are Their Pros & Cons
  3. 3. 25 Examples of Shrinkflation That No Longer Fool Consumers
  4. 4. 7 Big Reasons Why a Roth IRA Isn’t the Best Way to Save for Retirement
  5. 5. 3 Ways That Great Sleep Helps You Get Richer
  6. 6. What’s the Fastest Way to Pay Down Your Mortgage Early?
  7. 7. How to Save Money on Dental Care So You Won’t Go Broke at the Dentist
  8. 8. Historical Gold & Silver Benchmarks for Wages and Commodity Prices
  9. 9. Tip Inflation: We’ve Got Nobody to Blame But Ourselves
  10. 10. 4 Good Reasons Why Some Quarters Are Painted Red

All-Time Most Popular:

  1. 1. 19 Things Your Suburban Millionaire Neighbor Won’t Tell You
  2. 2. Dear Friend: Here Are 41 Reasons Why I’m NOT Lending You the Money
  3. 3. Why Your Expensive Luxury Car Doesn’t Impress Smart People
  4. 4. If You Can’t Live on $40,000 Annually It’s Your Own Fault
  5. 5. 21 Reasons Why Corner Lots Are for Suckers
  6. 6. 4 Smart Reasons Why College Isn’t for Everyone
  7. 7. 18 Fast Facts About Social Security Numbers
  8. 8. My Ketchup Taste Test: Upset! Guess Which Brand Topped Heinz
  9. 9. Why I Prefer a Spreadsheet to Track Expenses and Manage My Finances
  10. 10. Here’s a Simple Trick for Getting Credit Card Interest Charges Waived

Copyright © 2022 Len Penzo dot Com · All Rights Reserved · Designed by Nuts and Bolts Media

© Len Penzo dot Com 2008–2022