If you ask an Olympian, the answer is that the medal is priceless.

If you ask the governments of countries, the answer is in the millions.

If you ask someone who is interested only in the precious metals in the medals, the answer is a little more pedestrian.

While the gold, silver, and bronze medals of each Olympiad are unique in their design, the IOC has minimum standards for medal composition. The Beijing medals are 70mm in diameter and 6mm in thickness, which is 10mm wider and 3mm thicker than IOC requirements. The IOC requires that the gold medal be made of pure silver and gilded with at least 6 grams of gold. They also have a fair amount of jade integrated into the design. Since there are no reports as to the actual composition of the medal, with respect to jade versus the precious medals, for simplicity I’ll assume the medals are 700mm x 6mm of 92.5% silver and six grams of gold (for gold, and 100% silver for silver). It’s a bit inaccurate but I think we can make do!

Six grams of gold is worth approximately $160 at average prices today and the other 92.5% of the silver is worth at about $60, again assuming average prices. A total price for the gold at $220 puts it higher than previous years in sheer previous metal values.

Or we could cheat and read reports on China spending $1.24M on the six thousand medals, making them an average of $206.66 each. Telegraph.co.uk priced the cost of a gold medal at $393 though this probably includes design, manufacturing and shipping. Compare this to Athens in 2000 when each medal cost $155 and you see how much of an impact gold prices have been.

So pretty!

Medals of Beijing Olympic Games unveiled (with detailed photos of the medals) [Beijing 2008]

One of the great pleasures of writing a blog is being able to interact with everyone who takes time out of their day to read what I publish. I am also very thankful for everyone who contributes to the success of this site when they leave comments on the articles (thanks for correcting all of my mistakes!).

One of those kind individuals was Gary Bonner (profile). Those of you who have been reading for a while may recognize his name from prior guest posts he’s written. I first “met” him when he left a comment on the Don’t Pay Your Dues post in early May. Here’s an excerpt of what he said:

Truer words have never been spoken. There is no one who lies on their death bed and says “I wish I had spent more time at the office”. I “paid my dues” for 35 years and one of the world’s largest corporations had a “reduction in force” RIF vs. RIP recently. Almost all the participants in a Defined Benefit Pension Plan that closed enrollment a decade ago were shown the door, including me. [read the whole comment]

I asked if Gary would be interested in writing a guest post on that one quote: There is no one who lies on their death bed and says “I wish I had spent more time at the office”. That post became Making a Living? Or, Making a Life?, a post about how the important things in life aren’t necessarily what you think they are.

I’ve asked Gary to become a regular contributor to this site in guest posts, approximately twice a month (more depending on how prolific he feels) because he brings a perspective I cannot. Having 35 years of experience in the corporate world, he’s at a phase of his life that I cannot accurate relate to (I can pretend, but let’s be honest, I’m 28, no kids, just married… I can’t bring to the table what he can) and it’s a perspective I feel would bring a richness to the site that it currently lacks.

My wife’s uncle once said about this site, and I’m paraphrasing, “He sure talks a lot about money.” I didn’t get the quote in context, just what my wife relayed, but I think what he meant was that there’s a lot more to personal finance than the finance. The personal aspect, the part that is enabled by proper finances, is far more important and certainly appropriate subject matter for a pfblog. With Gary, I think that we can get more of that and put a lot of our personal finance issues within a broader context.

Lastly, as I said before, I’m only 28. I can understand how Roth IRAs work and how to calculate APY from APR, but I can’t accurately talk about having kids or how to retire because I simply haven’t experienced it yet. I couldn’t talk about buying a home until I actually bought a home, a subject that dominated the posts of this blog for at least a month. Now I hope that we can bring more to the table with Gary’s writing.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading this long introduction, I feel very honored to have Gary contribute because it’s like having a mentor. On Wednesday there will be a pair of very poignant posts that I think everyone should read it (it started as a personal email and Gary agreed to share it with the world).

If you want to learn more about Gary, here’s Gary’s profile page. Please give him a hearty welcome!

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

Randy Pausch taught Building Virtual Worlds, a class that started sometime in my sophmore or junior year, at Carnegie Mellon University and was a force on campus even before his famous Last Lecture. I always wanted to take Building Virtual Worlds but demand for the class was tremendous those first few years. I wasn’t going to get in the first few years it was offered but I’m upset I didn’t try harder. The class was well known around campus and it’s not surprising he was able to turn that into the ETC.

In listening to his Last Lecture, I understood where all his passion and his energy came from. He was following every dream he had and is an inspiration. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it, you’ll be inspired.

(click here to continue reading…)

I wanted to take the time to announce some small additional site features I’ve added in the last few weeks. Hopefully they make for a better user experience and I invite you to leave me feedback, either in comments or email, on the changes. I think they’re useful but you might not, please let me know what you think. Also, if there are changes you think would improve your experience here, also please let me know.

No Ads on Homepage

Most of the folks who hit the homepage are regular readers who either haven’t signed up for the free RSS subscription or don’t have access to it at the moment. Research has shown that it’s the search engine visitors who are more likely to respond to ads since they’ll be searching for something specific, rather than just grazing at the awesomeness that is my thoughts. So, to improve your experience I’ve pulled the left sidebar of ads to give you all more reading room. It’s a little loss in advertising revenue but that’s okay, without all you folks reading and leaving comments, I wouldn’t have a blog in the first place.

Print & Email Posts

At the bottom of each post, in the blue box, are a few new options. I added links to a print version of the article, which is devoid of anything except the content of the post, as well as an email feature. The email feature will email the content of the post to the email address of your choosing. I’ve had it running for about two weeks and already 60+ emails have been sent so I’m pretty excited it’s been well received.

Gravatars

Gravatars are graphical avatars and they’re little images above your name in the comments. I find that putting a face to a name helps people remember whose who and hopefully we can have more conversations in the comments sections. You can set your gravatar here once you create an account and it’ll automatically appear here (and any site that uses gravatars) based on the email you type in.

There were some other graphical changes but those three are the big ones. Please let me know what you think, I appreciate it!

We’ll be spending this weekend enjoying the wonders of grilled meats!

(Photo by Mr. Magoo ICU)

Madame X emailed me the other day to tell me about a clever idea she had – to offer up personal ads so that readers would be able to meet one another (here’s how to participate) and perhaps make a love connection. Or they could just meet up, have some coffee, and make a friend connection. Either way, it’s a fun way to meet some new people on the internet that doesn’t require a credit card.

Her series is called Money Match and so far there have been two people profiled. As you’ll soon find out, while Madame X is a New Yorker, participants don’t have to be.

The first participant is someone Madame X dubbed SuperCop and he’s been a state police officer since 2004.

The second participant, including photo, is a frugal lady named “IM” from Chicago. “Im a frugal girl at heart who loves nice stuff but loves her bank balance a little more. Im 28 and already own two properties, one investment and one condo. All of that was only possible by saving and not falling prey to crazy consumerism.”

It’s a cool idea, I hope it takes off!

Big props to NCN (I guess he’s okay with people knowing his first name is Jason!) on being profiled by CNN Money! For those who don’t know who NCN is, he’s the mind behind No Credit Needed. He’s also the first person I think of when you talk about people overcoming debt, especially credit card debt (despite what the article says, it was more like $7-$8k of credit card debt). He’s a nice guy to boot.

I personally don’t agree with his approach towards credit cards, he never ever uses them, but that’s the beauty of personal finance and blogging. Personal finance is an area where there is no right answer, there’s just a right for you answer. I don’t buy junk food like BBQ potato chips because I know I will eat the whole freaking bag in a day, he doesn’t have credit cards because he doesn’t want to surrender all he’s gained – that I can understand and respect.

Either way, it’s a great accomplishment to have overcome such a debt and being profiled is icing on the cake!

The other night I mentioned to my fiancée that we could sign up for Stamps.com’s free 4 week trial and get $25 in postage, a digital scale, and $5 in supplies (the paper the stamps get printed on). $25 means we can send out over sixty letters absolutely free, but the only thing she cared about was whether those stamps would have the ugly bar code on it (yes it would, but I don’t think that barcode is ugly). I acquiesced, because $25 isn’t really worth the hassle and I already have a free scale from when I took advantage of this offer back in college, but that got me thinking about the USPS’s recent push of PhotoStamps at the post offices I’ve been to.

If the bar codes aren’t worth getting 60 letters for free, does putting a picture next to it make it worth paying $XXXX on top of the postage? So far, of the five or six invitations/save the date’s we’ve received, only one has used PhotoStamps and I honestly didn’t think anything of the stamps (I mean they were obviously a nice touch, but I’m someone who wouldn’t mind bar codes… a stamp is a stamp is a stamp).

What do you all think of PhotoStamps? Cute and worth the cost? A sign of minor excess?

• NCN hates credit cards, learn about how he lives without one.
• Read about how FMF almost saved $100k on a home.
• MightyBargainHunter has found a helluva bargain if you’re a fan of arcades, try buying your tokens somewhere other than the arcade!
• JLP talks to us about Black Monday 20 years ago. Scary retrospective.
• JD wants to know who you think is the best brick and mortar bank?
• Nickel signed up for Amazon Prime, Amazon’s $79/yr service where you can get free two day shipping with no purchase minimum. I think it’s a bit excessive, not because of the $79 fee but because it’s excessive to have someone ship you a batter when you can drive to the store to pick it up. I guess it’s a tradeoff between your gas and a truck/plane’s gas, the cardboard packaging, and all that crap inside.
• Become a portfolio manager and earn nearly half a mil for your time… just for being average.
• Jeremy asks readers, if you’re investing, how do you know you’re doing well?
• Quit your job and you can win $50,000 – read Money Smart Life to find out how!
• Lazy Man talks about brewing your own beer, it’s something I’ve been doing off and on every since college.
• SVB is terrible at taking vacations and talks about why.
• Sun wants to know if you’re a rate chaser… so, are you?
• Golbguru is glad oil prices are at record highs. I’m glad but for a totally different reason, environmental reasons.
• Have you read reviews of your homeowner’s insurance provider? Comparing some things on price alone is fair, but with insurance companies, when you’ll be dealing with them at the worst of times, it’s important to consider other factors as well.
• The weather’s been great so I’ve been grilling a lot, especially with the new Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker, and picked up a good tip: keep a secondary grill ready!
• Facing foreclosure? The climate is great for trying to negotiate a loan modification instead of going under. The numbers are looking bad for lenders so they’ll be looking to make more deals than normally.
• Check out these 9 dumb retirement moves.