When I heard that two enterprising sisters were had sold a cornflake shaped like the state of Illinois, I was curious about some of the other crazy foods people have sold. The first that popped into my mind was the infamous piece of toast with the face of the Virgin Mary, purchased by Canadian-run, Antigua-based GoldenPalace.com Casino in 2004, but there are many many others (GoldenPalace has bought a ton of them). The requirements in order to make the list are only that it’s an “original,” so not a spinoff of an existing idea unless a significant amount of time has passed, and it had to have sold for a relatively significant amount. What’s significant when a cornflake costs a fraction of a cent? Well in that case, $1,350 is.

So, if you’re looking for some ideas as to how to make a few extra bucks, hopefully this list will provide some inspiration! And a word of advice, eBay forbids the selling of food (probably for good reason) but you can get around that by selling a coupon for food or billing it as something else other than “food.” (calling it ‘not for consumption’ or an ‘artifact’ or whatever)

Virgin Mary Toast: $28k

Probably the most publicized eBay auction for a piece of food was this little gem sold by Diane Duyser of Florida in 2004 for $28,000 to GoldenPalace.com. Duyser claimed she made the sandwich in 1994, saw what appeared to be the face of the Virgin Mary, and then kept it around in a plastic case! Not surprisingly, she then said it gave her good luck, including winning $70,000 at a casino in Florida (are there casinos in Florida?). Burn some toast until you get a famous face, then call up GoldenPalace.com because buying crazy stuff on eBay has become one of their primary advertising and marketing strategies. [BBC]

k-Fed Egg-Salad Sandwich & Corn Dog: $520

GoldenPalace has bought a lot of other ridiculous food and this time it was a vacuum-sealed half-eaten egg-salad sandwich and corn dog dinner. [PRNewswire]

Jesus Shaped Fish Sticks: $79

Victoria Landis of Elyria, Ohio, sold fish sticks fused together “in a way that made three mini crosses, and the way they fell on the pan it looked just like the hill where Jesus was crucified.” She managed to get score $79, which included next-day shipping in dry ice, for her discovery. Unfortunately no picture exists and not much more information is available on the sale. [UPI, Clevescene]

Illinois-shaped Cornflake

The most recent entry into the group comes from Melissa and Emily McIntire of Virginia. They sold a cornflake shaped like Illinois to Monty Kerr of Texas for $1,350 in March 2008. Money Kerr runs TriviaMania.com and wanted to add it to a traveling museum… or just trying to get some affordable advertising by way of crazy eBay auctions! This isn’t the first time Kerr tried to buy a cornflake, he bought “world’s largest” in the past but it broke! So he was left with three pretty big cornflakes, poor guy. [CNN]

Mrs. Micah, a great personal finance blog with a wonderfully personal touch to it and one of the blogs in my “Must Read” list, recently referred to a conversation on The Simple Dollar about the middle class. In her response, titled What’s Wrong With Being in the Middle Class?, she says:

Ideally, yes, I’d like to never have to work another day in my life. It’d be nice not to have to worry about money (though I’d still be careful how I spent it). But I know that I would still work because there are certain types of work I find challenging and meaningful.

I think many people aspire to be independently wealthy, able to do whatever they want, but fail to recognize that having a job and financial responsibilities puts structure in their lives. They fail to realize that, in the absence of that structure, very few of us become Tim Ferriss’s and more of us would share the fate of this unfortunate lottery winner.

Having to wake up to go to work, having 8+ hours of your day occupied, and having little time to get yourself into trouble is a comforting thing. You may not like it, but the reality is that you probably would be hard pressed to fill up a day if you didn’t have a job or a business to run. There’s a reason why so many movie stars turn to drugs… they have a lot of hours to fill and not a lot to fill it with.

It’s nice to do “whatever you want,” until you realize you have no idea what you’re going to do!

What’s your take on this? Am I off my rocker? Is money the ultimate goal? Or is it merely the oil that lubricates life?

Several weekends ago I attended a Personal Finance Bloggers Conference in San Francisco held by MyStrands, NetworthIQ, and Expensr. The trip itself was a blast, I met a ton of new faces, including many personal finance bloggers, and had an opportunity to discuss what I’d be interested in with a new personal finance tool. A full recap of the weekend can be found at Get Rich Slowly, who also happened to get a copy of The Prosperous Peasant out to me for review.

My first impressions of The Prosperous Peasant were that it’s written in very much the same manner as The Richest Man in Babylon, just set in Samurai-era Japan and with slightly different lessons. The story follows two friends, Jiro and Gonsuke, as they seek to find enlightenment from the renowned Samurai, Hideyoshi.

JD gives a great review of the details of the book, explaining the five secrets, so I’ll pass in that department and share only my opinion of the book as a whole. I really enjoyed it because it told a colorful story while weaving in important principles everyone would do well to understand. JD complains about the book starting slowly, which I agree that it does, and gets a little confusing with all the Japanese terms, which I also agree that it does, but I feel all of those help establish the environment in which the story will be told.

I have yet to ask my wife to take a look at this book but I suspect those who are a fan of fiction would find this book far more appealing than any book written by a personal finance expert. Those books, while perfect for people who want hard numbers, analysis, and pretty graphs; turn most “regular” people off because they’re boring and dry. I feel that this book, and the Richest Man in Babylon, try to marry the entertaining fiction and the valuable prosperity lessons into a book that will appeal to a different class of reader.

Lastly, I believe this style of writing is the only way to convey some of the softer lessons in life in a way that’s engaging and interesting. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with numbers to back up a lesson like “Gratitude attracts luck,” but you can tell a story that does so. It would be difficult to prove, and it would be completely boring to read, how “Conceivable means achievable,” but a fictional narrative handles it quite well.

So, if you’re a number cruncher type, you’ll want to pass on this book. If you’re more into a fictional narrative, you may find this book right up your alley.

Cut out the morning coffee at Starbucks!

Bring a bag lunch!

Stop drinking alcoholic beverages!

If you’ve been trying to find areas to cut back on your budget, those are likely one of the first three things you’ll hear suggested, right? The Latte Factor! It’s horrible that you’re wasting money on coffee you can brew at home! It’s a travesty! Okay, except you don’t have a coffee maker at home, have hardly any time in the morning to brew it, and if you don’t have it… oh boy, your office better watch out because you’ll be one cranky man/woman/beast. And bag lunch? Forget it, you don’t have time to make the lunch, let alone lug it to work, stuff it in the fridge and then eat it alone at your desk later! Alcoholic beverages? That’s the high point in the day, you can’t take that away! Plus, people who go to happy hours earn more… and you want to make more money right? Of course!

Of course, all that was tongue in cheek but the “excuses” are legitimate. It’s difficult to restructure large parts of your day just to save a few dollars but sometimes it’s important to do so. So, rather than make wholesale changes that you’re likely going to abandon within a few weeks, if you can even get started, try doing it incrementally.

Brew your own coffee on Friday. Friday is usually the laxest of all days and many people come in later than their usual start time. Take advantage of this by brewing your own coffee. If you don’t have a coffeemaker, you can buy one for around $20 and a hundred pack of filters for around $4. Then, all it takes is some coffee and you’re on your way to brewing your own coffee. If you really want to be efficient, set it all up the night before and set it to brew before you wake up. You can wake up to the wonderful smell of brewing coffee just like in the commercials! So just brew it on Fridays and you can hit Seattle’s Best Coffee the other four days. If you can save yourself the $3 on Friday coffee habit, that’s $150 a year in savings a year.

Resolve to bring in lunch on Monday. You have all weekend to pack, and cook it if you need to, yourself a nice meal so you can’t complain you have no time at night because you’ll have all day. Monday is also the busiest of work days as everyone catches up from the weekend so you can take advantage by eating at your desk and getting more work done. By cutting out one day of $7 lunches and replacing them with $2 lunches, you can save yourself close to $250 a year. You can get something really nice for $250 a year (or save it!) just by eating lunch on Mondays.

Bag lunch on Monday, brew coffee on Friday - get $400 a year that you can use for whatever you want. As for cutting out alcohol, sorry but you’re on your own on that one.

(Photo by Amy March)

This promotion has ended.

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The current promotion they’re running is a bonus of $25 if you open an account by May 15th, then you can start referring people (as I am doing so now) and you earn $10 for each person you refer. The only rub I have with RevolutionMoneyExchange is that they require a social security number and they may even deny you an account based on that (though it doesn’t appear they run any credit checks, so I’m not sure what they’re checking and why the need to social), but if you’re cool with that (I was) then the $25 is almost as good as yours.

Signup takes about five minutes. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Our home recently lost Internet access because our Verizon FiOS cable modem/router died (after only a couple months!) and my wife sauntered over to the library next door to prepare her taxes while I was at class Monday night. As you can imagine, when she told me this, after she’d prepared her taxes, I got nervous that she had put all that sensitive information through one of the publicly accessible computers at the library. Fortunately I was wrong, she was merely using her own computer connected to their network and thus safe in this regard.

I segregate the world of “personal/private information” into sensitive and routine information. Sensitive information covers all financial and personally identifying information such as bank and brokerage accounts, business assets, and anything account that would cause considerably harm if compromised. Routine information covers everything else including email. Loss of a routine information account wouldn’t cause too much harm (I’d be furious though) and wouldn’t compromise sensitive accounts. This means that sensitive and routine accounts never share the same password, this is a crucial step.

Why do I do this? Publicly accessible computers, such as terminals at libraries and hotels, aren’t within your control and so you never know what’s been done to them. At worst, they have keyloggers installed, either software or hardware, that log your every keystroke. Those keystrokes can be replayed back at a later time for someone to gain access to your accounts.

Also, I can’t trust myself to clear the cache, cookies, and other information every single time (on Firefox, it’s easy, go to Tools -> Clear Private Data or hit CTRL-SHIFT-DEL). What if I’m lax and click “Remember Me?” and leave myself logged in? What if I tell Firefox to save the password out of habit? What if I simply don’t log out and the next person on gets access to my information? Security breaches aren’t always the cause of a malicious act, sometimes they’re caused by user error or mistake meeting an ethically-gray opportunist.

Chances of theft are low. I recognize that the chances of someone installing a keylogger on a hotel computer or the chances of me leaving myself logged in and the next person being an ethically-gray opportunist is slim, but I see it as not being worth it. 99.99% of the time, I won’t ever need to log into a brokerage or bank account at the hotel so why bother?

One of the interesting discussions that came out of the Personal Finance Blogger’s Conference in San Francisco was a discussion of how people budget and some of the budgeting styles. While we didn’t explicitly go over some of the more common budgeting systems, I felt it would be useful if I hit on a few to see where their benefits and drawbacks are.

Personally, I did the Track to the Penny system for a few months until I got a good handle on my monthly expenditures, then I essentially did the Reverse Budgeting/Nothing strategy. In between the two systems, I reviewed my expenditures to see where my spending was going and whether I could make some improvements. I saw that I was eating out far too often, a detriment to both my wallet and my health, so I took steps to start buying more groceries and preparing lunch more often.

Envelope Budgeting

The appeal of envelope budgeting is in its simplicity, though there are plenty of tools out there that will gladly make it more complicated for you if you’d like. The system relies on a series of envelopes, hence its name, to budget and each envelope contains a fixed amount of money for that expense. An example would be an envelope for groceries, where all grocery expenditures would come from that envelope. If an envelope is depleted, the funds must come from another envelope in the system.
Benefits: Simple to use, intuitive, and fixes your expenditures at a certain amount. In monthly reviews, you can see which envelopes are consistently non-zero and use that to adjust your budget.
Drawbacks: Cannot handle large emergencies, as a big emergency could break the bank. Limits the number of categories you can track, unless you have a million envelopes, and is less flexible in our credit-happy age.

Reverse Budgeting

Reverse budgeting is the idea that you save first, then spend the rest. This system is a back-ended system in which you force the savings, thus guaranteeing it, and then let the chips fall where they may on expenditures. By auto-drafting these savings out of an account, you essentially guarantee you won’t “accidentally” spend them away. An example of this would be if you set your 401(k) contributions ahead of time to draft from your paycheck and then let your spending go where it goes.
Benefits: Simplest process of them all, simply save and then you can spend from one big envelope.
Drawbacks: Lacks visibility into expense types for expenditure improvement, doesn’t force you to have the “budget discussion.”

Tracking to the Penny

With “Track to the Penny” budgeting, you track every single expenditure you make into a giant spreadsheet as you make it or in batches at the end of the day. You can then use this information to make future decisions about spending and this helps you identify “budget leaks,” or those small expenditures you don’t think about but end up costing you a lot each month.
Benefits: Total visibility into your spending, tremendous amount of information, a statistician’s wet dream.
Drawbacks: Most labor intensive, may give too much visibility, easiest to discard because of time requirements, relies on your ability to correctly categorize spending. This also doesn’t force a “budget discussion” but does provide good information for the budget discussion later on.

Tracking to the Dollar

Similar to Track to the Penny, Track to the Dollar just means you can round up or down each expenditure to the nearest dollar with the belief that it will all average out.
Benefits: A little less visibility compared to “Tracking to the Penny” but still a statistician’s wet dream.
Drawbacks: Still requires a lot of labor to keep track of incremental expenses, but less so than Tracking to the Penny.

Nothing

Not budgeting is a budgeting system but it requires that you have an income that comfortably exceeds your expenses and probably not a good place to start. In our discussions, SVB mentioned a “black box,” referring to the budget, where she said that once you get a good handle on your budget you really don’t need to track it anymore. JD then said that budgeting is most valuable when your income and expense lines are very close… it’s less valuable once your income exceeds your expenses.
Benefits: It’s the easiest “system” because you do nothing!
Drawbacks: You get no visibility into your expenditures because you’re not tracking anything!

How do you budget? Do you have a good system in place that you want to share?

(Photo by Keen)

It’s been over a year since my last Monthly Review and I believe it’s time to bring them back. While other bloggers have continued their monthly income statements and balance sheets, I stopped a year ago because I felt it had become counter-productive. The reality is that the numbers themselves are irrelevant because they don’t apply to anyone else and they don’t help people make better decisions or learn from my mistakes. In fact, I felt that the numbers may be a distraction from the ultimate purpose of my monthly reviews, which was the explain both the good choices I’ve made as well as the bad choices.

So, in this return of monthly reviews, I’m going to simply outline the good, the bad, and the ugly of the decisions thus far. From here we’ll see how the month to months go.

Good

• Marriage: Since my wife and I got married this year, our tax situation for 2007 was unchanged. We are, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, are one of the many couples affected by the “marriage penalty” created by uneven tax brackets (married filing jointly brackets are not double the single brackets). Additionally, since the house and mortgage are both in my name, I was itemizing while she was claiming the standard deduction. Next year, we will be hit with the marriage penalty plus the loss of a standard deduction… considering its something we didn’t have much of a choice about it (hush those anti-marriage folks in the crowd!) we’ll just roll with it.
• Going with Accounting Pro: I’m now working with an accountant to handle some of my business taxes and help me become legit with the online enterprises. There comes a time when you just have to pay a professional and it’s now time for me to pay (rather than to be the professional/consultant!). It’s not cheap but it forces a rigor that is far superior than the record-keeping I had been doing before.

Bad

• Capital Gains: I made a mistake last year in selling some funds for capital gains but then not offsetting them with some capital losses that we should’ve taken, that was a big mistake. We took on about $5,000 in short term capital gains without offsetting it, whoops. That was entirely my fault.
• Stupid Fees: In all the marriage madness and my own ignorance, we took five months of $3 fees for having less than $300 in our savings account at Bank of America, despite having more than enough in our checking account. Dumb dumb dumb. We got $15 back, for three months, but they said they couldn’t go back farther. I was going to push for the other $6 but they wouldn’t budge and, honestly, I don’t blame them. One month I can understand, five? Hmmm… I screwed up.

Ugly

• Stock Market Suckage: This is ugly not because we made any bad decisions but only because it’s happened. In our taxable brokerage account, we’ve had about an 11% in loss on the holdings stretching back into Q4 of last year. That’s pretty gnarly, but nothing we can do, and we’re just going to set it in forget it.
• Honeymoon: Honeymoon is expensive and one of my vices is splurging on vacations. You only get married once right?

The Future

• Rolling Over 401(k)s: We need to investigate the rolling over of all of our legacy 401(k)s to our Vanguard, each of us has one legacy 401(k) to move. It’s not a difficult process, we just need to hammer out the specifics of doing the trustee-to-trustee rollover process for each account. Don’t want to take a disbursement… that’d be ugly (and foolish).
• Consolidating Accounts: We also need to start consolidating all those excess accounts so we can simplify our finances. The process is made much more difficult as my wife is changing her name so we’ll have to wait for those to shake out before we can finalize all of these. I personally have too many accounts to keep track of so it would be good to start cleaning these up.

I hope this satisfies the voyeurs out there, at least for now, but look for more updates starting in May.

Some of my friends put a rubber band around their wrist if they’re supposed to remember something, like getting milk on the way home. Some of my friends send themselves email or schedule events in Outlook. Some of my friends draw treasure maps and hide them behind paintings in their attics (okay no they don’t, that was from Goonies). The point is, we all have little hacks we use to remind us about things we are supposed or not supposed to do in the future.

Here’s a hack: Write on your credit cards. If you’re saving for a new television, write “New Television” on your credit cards. If you’re saving for your kid’s 529 plan, write “College Education” on the front of your credit cards. If you are $10,000 in credit card debt and devoted to busting that monkey on your back, write down $10,000 on the front of your credit cards. This simple act alone has the potential to change your behavior for the better and, if nothing else, help you achieve your cash flow-related goals much sooner.

It’s a reminder. Every time you go to pull out that credit card to buy something, you are reminded about your goals. You are reminded you are saving towards a television, your child’s education, or cutting down that monster of a debt to Uncle Citi (or Uncle Discover, or Uncle American Express…). Do you really need what you’re about the buy? Do you really need it more than the television/education/debt? You may decide you do need it more, but at least you’ll have made a conscious decision.

Other people will see it (but not truly know!). When I recommend that you write $10,000 on your card because you owe that much, I don’t mean to embarrass you in front of others. That $10,000 could mean anything, however it will mean $10,000 in credit card a debt to you and that’s all it needs to mean. You merely need to remember how long and hard you’ll have to work to pay off that debt and decide whether that purchase is worth it.

It’s also a conversation starter that might net you some positive benefits. For example, did you know that the cashiers at Bed Bath & Beyond have a little binder of bar codes for competitor coupons? If you mention that you’re saving towards your kid’s education or paying off debt (or ask nicely, which my wife did once), maybe you get a discount on your purchase. (for those curious about the binder, cashiers scan a particular code to indicate a customer brought in a competitor’s 10% or 20% off coupon or something, I believe it’s a matter of convenience and tracking since they can’t actually scan the other store’s coupon)

Indicates its importance to you. By virtue of it appearing, in Sharpie, on your credit cards, you’re essentially declaring that to be the single most important cash flow-related financial goal that you have. It also forces you to think about what you will write down and in what order. Is the television more important than the $10,000 debt? If so, why? If not, why not? Is saving for a Roth IRA important enough to put down on your credit card? Why or why not? These are all questions you are forced to ask if you’re willing to take this simple step of writing down your goals on the one thing you are likely to see each day.

Nearly two years ago my then beautiful girlfriend, now my gorgeous wife, quit her job and moved to Maryland. Over the next month, she faced an adversity some are now facing, the seemingly endless futility of searching for a new job. She was jobless for quite a while, sending out dozens of resumes and cover letters a day, and falling deeper into the pit of futility with each passing day. While she didn’t feel actual financial pain, she was feeling the pressure of not earning money but still spending it, on rent, groceries, etc. It was that pressure and her ingenuity that resulted in these three morale boosting tips we discussed over dinner the other night.

The key behind each of these tips is that they’re designed with a single aim in mind: boosting your morale. Sometimes it’ll feel like finding a job is a numbers game, where you send out hundreds of resumes in return for a handful of callbacks and an even fewer number of actual interviews. That’s because it is a numbers game and it is just as important to keep your chin up as it is to keep sending out your resume.

Aside: On Being Fired

Let me briefly tackle an aside for a moment. If you were let go from a company, don’t feel bad. Despite what the numbers may indicate or what the pundits may say, we’re in an economic slowdown that has companies letting people go. If you were fired in a time of prosperity, perhaps you might feel bad about yourself. However, given the economic climate today, it’s just as likely mismanagement on the part of your company (in planning, projecting, etc) has as much to do with your departure as you do. Either way, being fired is not the worst thing in the world and to think that is counter-productive. Perhaps this is the opportunity you’ve always wanted, a chance to look inside yourself and figure out what it is you actually want to do. Don’t squander it by going down a dead-end path for the sake of money.

Onto the three morale-boosting tips…

Track Your Progress

The first step in her job search was to build a spreadsheet of all the companies she was interested in. The next step was the track what she did with each of those companies, whether it’s calling them up, visiting their offices, or sending a cover letter and resume. This lets you accurately track your progress and builds structure into your work.You have zero control over whether the company responds but you have control over your level of effort. You alone control how many resumes, cover letters, and emails you send out. If you don’t track your own progress, all you’ll focus on is the fact that no one has responded and it will disenchant you.

Hand in hand with tracking your progress is setting achievable goals for yourself such as number of resumes sent, or number of companies contacted, or number of companies identified to contact in the future. You have to feel success in the things you can control, effort, because you can’t control anything else.

Do Something Else

You can only job search for so long before you start feeling burned out, so do something else. If you have a choice, pick up something that gives you a sense of accomplishment or improves your skills. If you’re a software developer, perhaps you can use this time to brush up on your programming skills by building side projects. If the prospect of something that close to your real work is discouraging, pick up an entirely different hobby like gardening or running.

What you want to do is get that feeling of accomplishment and success because it’ll give you a strong moral boost. You want to be able to look back on your day and say: “I sent out five resumes and I planted a bed of roses, that’s a pretty good day.” or “I set up my company tracking spreadsheet, hit the gym for an hour, and cooked up a nice little dinner.” Honestly, those two examples are probably more productive than most people are in 8 hours at work.

Read What Color Is Your Parachute

I haven’t personally read this book but my wife said it was great when she was looking for a job. What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles has been lauded in many places and I would take a trip to the library to check it out. My wife said that the most poignant part of the book, for her, was the section that explained how this should be an exciting time in your life. It’s one of the few times that you can honestly give yourself an assessment and decide what you really want to do with your life.

If you left or were laid off from a job in the financial services industry, now is a great chance for your see if you want to try something else entirely. Maybe you went into a career for the money but not because you loved it, now is your chance to try something you truly enjoy. I’m sure there is more to the book than that concept but that’s certainly a good point.