There have been many movies made about money. One of the more interesting — at least from a spending perspective — was Brewster’s Millions. The movie was based on a novel written in 1902, and is one of 10 films based on that novel.

The main plot point of the movie is that Brewster has to spend $30 million in 30 days in order to get an inheritance of $300 million. Of course, he does have the option to accept $1 million up front and avoid trying to spend all that money. If he takes the $1 million, the rest goes to charity (minus a fee for the law firm executing the will).

Personally, I’d take the $1 million. I can’t even think about what I’d do with $30 million, much less $300 million. Plus, I’d feel great about the money going to charity. But that would ruin the point of the movie, and, of course, a thought experiment for the rest of us. The 30-day challenge comes with the following rules:

• You can only donate 5% to charity.
• You can only gamble away 5%.
• You have to get value for services you receive (no extravagant tipping just to spend money).
• You can’t own any assets already not yours at the beginning of the challenge.
• You can’t tell anyone what you’re doing.

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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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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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When Redfin first launched, I thought it was going to change the way real estate would be bought and sold forever. In the years since its introduction, I was surprised that not much had changed. Redfin’s system is pretty straightforward – you do the searching, you schedule visits with a showing agent, you make offers with a second agent who only does offers, and then you get a refund of the buyer’s agent commission if you get the house. For someone who likes to do everything themselves, it seems like a great deal because you get half of the agent commission back. The reality is that very few sales are this straight forward and easy. There’s always some negotiation, some unforeseen problem, and rarely is it smooth sailing into the close.

My friend shared his experience working with a Redfin agent and it went well. He didn’t encounter any problems whatsoever, the home was relatively new, there was no competition, and it didn’t matter that he was his own advocate. He got the strong feeling that if there had been problems, he’d be entirely on his own. And that’s a fair position to be in because you are getting paid half the agent’s commission. You can’t expect the same level of service for half the price, that’s just unreasonable. Even he knew that he lucked out and saved money as a result.

In our case, we opted to go with a full service expert realtor, Christina Elliott of Keller Williams Realty Baltimore (we bought our first house with her on our side), for a few reasons unique to her. We love our first house and she did great then as a rookie (it was her first transaction). She’s had several years under her belt and she’s helped all our friends with positive results.

This post is a bit of a monster but that’s how the home buying process is (check out some of my posts from the first homebuying experience!) … a seemingly never ending string of fires to put out.

Here are the main reasons why you might want a buyer’s agent (and why I was glad I had one):

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ON June 6th, we’ll be holding our first Tweetchat on the subject of Investing Strategies for New Graduates with our special guest Jeff Rose of Good Financial Cents.

Jeff is gracious enough to join us in tackling this very important subject and he is extremely qualified to dispense advice. He is a certified financial professional, a prolific blogger (and videographer!), and I promise it’ll be a great time.

The Tweetchat will start at 4 PM Eastern, 1 PM Pacific with the hashtag #pfchat and moderated by @bargaineeringTM (please follow!). You can join us with your favorite twitter client.

We hope you’ll join us!