I was talking with friends over the weekend when one of them asked me a question I’d, surprisingly, never saw before (I would also later see it on Reddit). My friend received a letter in the mail from his credit card company that “congratulated” him on his good credit behavior. It also increased his credit limit by about 25%. Nominally, it wasn’t a huge increase but it was a large enough number that my friend thought about it.

A little bit of background (self-reported, I only asked because I told him I was going to write a post about it) – he has no credit card debt, has pretty good credit, has a car loan and a mortgage. The letter he received wasn’t written in a way that asked him if he wanted the increase, it simply told him that it was increased. (in theory, he could call them and ask to have it reduced but the default was acceptance).

So should he accept it?

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I love all of Forbes’ sports related money/valuation/richest lists. Every year I take a peek at the World’s Highest Paid list and I’m not terribly surprised that the names that dot the top.

So who makes up the top five? Tiger Woods, Roger Rederer, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Drew Brees. Total take? $322.3 million. If you add the second half of the top ten, total earnings is $552.50 million. In fact, if the top ten were a country, it would be 189th on the GDP list according to the United Nations.

How are the sports represented?
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Next Tuesday (at 2pm ET), I’m participating in #AllyBRChat, a joint tweetchat with Ally Bank and Bankrate, and the subject of the chat is teaching new college graduates about the real world, so I thought I’d get myself ready by trying to come up with a few tips I’d give the parents of new graduates. Some of these are actually from our own Tweetchat last week with Jeff Rose, which was investing strategies for new graduates (the many wrinkles of personal finance!), so if you were part of that a few of these may be familiar.

Here were our tips:

1. Get your child a consultation with a financial adviser. This is an idea shared during the tweetchat (Thanks Fatwallet!) and I thought it was brilliant. Why not schedule a consultation where the adviser can help your child get their finances in order? Their situation shouldn’t be complicated and it gives them a leg up.
2. Help, but don’t support. When you first go out on your own, there are a lot of up front costs. If you had an apartment, the first month’s rent and a security deposit was a big deal. I remember my first month’s rent was a share of $1200. Security deposit was something like $500-800. Give your child a hand but don’t support them for too long.
3. Teach them the value of networking. This isn’t directly financial but teaching your child how to network and helping them expand their network is crucial. Whether it’s trying to find a good mechanic for their car or finding their next job, your personal network is invaluable. It can save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

Do you have any suggestions for parents of new graduates?

Last Thursday, Jeff Rose joined us in our inaugural Tweetchat to discuss Investing Strategies for New Graduates. It was our first #pfchat Tweetchat and I think it went very well for our first time out. Thank you to everyone who participated, especially our friends at Wise Bread and to Jeff.

Below, you can find a recap of the entire chat:
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A few weeks ago, as Warren Buffett has done every year for now its 14th year, was the eBay auction of lunch with Warren Buffett and seven of your closest friends at Smith & Wollensky in New York. The proceeds go to the GLIDE in San Francisco, a charity that fights poverty, and an issue close to Buffett’s heart. We’ve followed the auction every year because I find it to be exciting with 2010 and 2011 being the most interesting. Those two years the winner was initially anonymous. We would later learn it was Ted Weschler both times and he would later be hired as part of the succession plan for when Buffett retires. You can read more about his hiring here (and how his stellar performance would make the cost of those lunches look paltry).

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The Top Money Guru poll closed yesterday and while we compile the results, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the responses from the personal finance blogger community. We did the same exact poll except we asked personal finance bloggers just to see if their results were any different than yours.

My initial guess was that the results probably wouldn’t be that much different. Most personal finance bloggers are like me – we aren’t experts. We aren’t CFPs, we didn’t study finance in college, and we generally don’t work in the financial services industry. In fact, very few do because of the compliance requirements. The only two exceptions, of the bloggers I’m close to, I can think of are Jeff Rose and Neal Frankle.

Here were the winners of each category:
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Last month, you probably read about Lauryn Hill being sentenced to prison for three months after she failed to pay federal income taxes for three years. After three months in prison, she’ll have three months of home confinement followed by a year of supervised probation. That’s on top of penalties and taxes she owes plus a $60,000 fine. She’s the latest in a long line of celebrities who have mishandled their taxes and gone to jail for it, the most recent spectacular example has to be Wesley Snipes. He didn’t file tax returns for three years and didn’t pay $7 million in taxes on the basis that he didn’t legally have to pay taxes. He was wrong. He spent 3 years in jail for it.

So the big question is, what if you mess up your taxes or fail to file returns… will you get time in prison? Or is this just a case of judges wanting to set examples?

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My friend Scott (you may remember him from those times I mentioned his charity bar tour Ghent Bar Tours) sent me this story about how the stock market game is a bad bad game… and I agree.

The stock market game, if you’ve never played it as a kid, was a national competition where teams were given $100,000 in play money to “invest” in companies. The goal is to help teach students how to invest, how to research companies, etc.

The real end result is that you learn how Wall Street really works… in order to get the greatest gains in 10 weeks (or however long), you need to find good companies that explode in value. These companies are probably going to be tiny, penny stock types, and you go all in on the hopes they double or triple on a whim.

I like the idea of these games but I agree with Chuck Jaffe, the lessons you actually learn are the wrong ones.

Did you ever play this game? What did you think about it?

(photo: sathellite)