Early April, a man turned in a bag of loot that had fallen off a Brink’s truck (yeah, that really does happen!) worth $140,000 to the police station… and he got $2,000 for his trouble. Now, chances are that Eli Estrada would never have been able to keep the money had he actually kept it. Banks have that stuff on lockdown and they know the bill numbers and all that jazz. However, it’s still tempting to keep $140,000 in unmarked bills sitting in $20k stacks conveniently placed on the side of a road (I wonder if it had big dollar signs on it like in the cartoons).

My question for you, and you can answer anonymously if you prefer, is… what would you have done? Would you have kept it? What if you could totally get away with it?

My first reaction would be to take the cash. $140,000 is a pretty large sum of money and I think you’d be hard pressed not to at least imagine what you could do with it. In fact, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here when I say that most people’s first reaction would be to keep it. However, I think that after a few moments of imagining what I could do with it, I’d come to my senses and get it back to the rightful owner. That money belongs to someone else, so by keeping it, even if you can get away with it, you’re still stealing and there’s no justification for that. (sorry if that biases your answer, but you can still remain anonymous!)

Plus, karma’s a bitch and she’ll always finds you.

(Cool photo by TW Collins)

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?

When I was younger (starting around 2nd grade), my mom said that for every 100% I got on a weekly spelling test, I’d get a dollar as my reward. The spelling tests started all the way back in the first grade but really got going in second and third grades, but I’d routinely get a hundred in part because I was brilliant and in part because they told us the set of words ahead of time (my mom knew this). There would be maybe fifty words and then ten or twenty would appear on the test, it was a cinch to get a hundred and anyone who didn’t simply didn’t try or didn’t care. Anyway, as I grew older, the 100s were harder and the prize was made larger until I was in high school when it would be $10 per 100. By high school, though, I didn’t get 100s unless it was something trivial like a health test or something meaningless, so I never went to collect. Anyway, I ended up being a decent student, in part because of the incentive my mom provided, but this is a issue that’s a hot button topic for many parents. Should they “bribe” (or “reward,” as the proponents would say) their children for performance?

My opinion is that you can and should bribe or reward them for performance because that’s how the world works. You get a good SAT score, you are rewarded with admittance into a good college or university. If you get good grades in college, you’re rewarded with a good job. If you perform well at your job, you’re rewarded with more money (maybe!). Giving children incentives for strong academic performance isn’t going to ruin them for the world because the world rewards strong performance with money as well.

What prompted this Your Take post was an article from the New York Times where students were being paid to perform well academically.

What’s your take on this?

I’ve been working full time for five years now and have used TurboTax for the last four (I did it by hand the first year, I have no idea why!). I’ve never walked into a tax preparation store like an H&R Block or a Jackson Hewitt but my friends have and walked away with experiences that hardly warranted the $300 fees they paid. On one hand, my tax situation had been fairly simple for the last four years. Single income (one year I had two W-2s but that’s hardly rare), standard deduction, twenty minutes in TurboTax and I was done. I went to an itemized deduction two years ago because of the mortgage interest but that hardly registered. Two years ago I even added on a Schedule C for income generated from side ventures, again that wasn’t much of a curveball for TurboTax. I don’t have a complicated situation… why would I pay $300 for someone to ask the same questions a box would ask?

What’s your take on tax preparation? Worth it? Not worth it?

Check out the latest super-anti-counterfeit bill to hit the streets, it’s none other than the fiver and it debuted today with much fanfare over its added security feature and that humongous purple FIVE located on the back (picture below). Many of the added security features come from higher denominated bills (such as more watermarks and a security strip) and I was surprised that they would revamp a $5 with these security features, but what do I know. Here’s the back of the bill.

I’m a fan of the increased use of microprinting, where small, difficult to reproduce, text is repeated in numerous places. On the front, Five Dollars” is written inside the left and right borders. E Pluribus Unum (”Out of Many, One.” in Latin) is printed at the top of the shield in the Great Seal. USA is printed between the columns of the shield. Finally, on the back, USA FIVE is printed on the edge of the purple 5.

One cool thing I didn’t know was that the little yellow “05″s are arranged in a EURion constellation. Many color photocopiers will refuse to copy a document if it detects a EURion constellation pattern. Here I thought the “05″s were just randomly scattered. Many currencies use this EURion constellation pattern.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of the big purple 5 but it’s said that it is designed that way for the visually impaired, what do you think about that purple 5? Ugly? Pretty?

(Images from Wikipedia)

Reading this brief post on Alpha Consumer on money etiquette brought on a thought about a weekend several weeks ago with a bunch of friends. I spent part of Saturday afternoon at a local Baltimore bar called Lime drinking some margaritas with some of my friends, BS’ing about the week, and drinking some more margaritas. (That place has this thing called a Birdbath, three margaritas in one huge cup/bowl for $13… can’t beat it) Anyway, several hours later we go to split up the check and somehow the bill is short. Short by a lot. We eventually figured out that it was just that someone had left and misjudged their part of the bill and everything was settled later on, but it got me thinking about how splitting checks always seems to end badly 9 out of 10 times.

I’m a fan of splitting checks evenly as long as it’s reasonably equitable. If one person gets a rack of lamb and a bottle wine while another person gets a grilled cheese sandwich, then splitting the check evenly just isn’t going to be fair. However, in cases where it’s hard to gauge who got what (like at bars, which are exasperated by a larger crowd), I think splitting it evenly just makes it easier to take care of. Ultimately, if the difference is a few bucks, I would argue that most people are okay with overpaying a few dollars.

However, you almost never have the case where the inequity is so apparent. If there are two people and one person gets lamb and another gets a grilled cheese, I would hope the person with the rack of lamb wouldn’t be so obtuse that they would ask to split the check 50-50 (if they are, I recommend never eating with them because they obviously suck). It’s always something a little grayer, like 10 people and everyone is about the same and 1 person got there late (or something like that). In those cases, I think it’s fair for that one person to pipe up and say “Hey guys, I got here later and I only had one margarita, I think that should run me only about $x.xx.” Hopefully no one is looking for a free ride, it’s just a matter of simplicity.

What’s your take on this sticky wicket? Is the onus on the person who should pay less or on the person who obviously got the more expensive drink or meal? A little of both? I realize it’s one of those gray area type questions with no real answer but I’m curious what all of you think.

(Photo by tiny goat)

A few weeks ago we booked our tickets to Hawaii, where we will be spending our honeymoon, and we had a quick little $60 decision to make. On the way back, we have the option of two flights:

• $390: Departure at 11:50pm, arrive at 6:30pm, or,
• $330: Departure at 10:50pm, arrive at 7:30pm.

The two flights were similar otherwise (the first had one extra stop, but you never deplaned and second flight had a longer layover) so the difference was in just the flight time and departure times. The first flight was $60 more expensive but we were able to stay in Hawaii an additional hour and we arrived at home an hour earlier. So, which flight did we choose?

We chose the more expensive flight. This was probably one of the first times in which I’ve chosen convenience over cost when the two choices were so similar. In this particular case, there were reasons to pick the more expensive flight outside of the characteristics:

• Landing at 6:30pm: We will be tired from our trip and having an extra hour of “home” time before going back to work the next day will probably help tremendously.
• Fewer hours total: This was the only real trade off, paying $30 an hour to save that travel time really cuts down on fatigue.
• Later departure: By leaving at around midnight Hawaii time, it lets us enjoy the full final day in Hawaii. It also let us have a nice leisurely dinner prior to our departure. If we were to leave at 10:50pm, we’d feel compelled to arrive at the airport by at lets 9:30pm, which means we’d have to leave our dinner by 9 (depending on how far away it was). If we plan on having a nice dinner, that means we have to eat by 7… so for a little extra we can take our time and have more breathing room.

How do you go about deciding whether to take the cheaper option or the more convenient option?

There’s talk of an economic stimulus package that may involve some funds going back to low and middle income Americans in the hopes that they’ll spend it, boost the economy, and make everyone who watches stock tickers sleep a little easier at night. Matt Lauer interviewed Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, on the Today show and discussed the potential stimulus package and brought up a very good point. He brought up a quote in the Wall Street Journal about how the last time this tactic was tried, back in 2001, many low and middle income Americans saved their check from the government and didn’t spend it. (wsj blog article discussing this idea)

That’s what people do, they spend in times of prosperity and save in times of crisis. With the stock market taking a pounding, with the billions in bank write offs, with the sub-prime news, and all the talk of a recession - whether we’re actually in a time of economic crisis or not, people think we’re in a time of economic crisis so I’m inclined to believe they’ll save any money the government decides to dole out.

(As an aside, I love how we’re always going back to Reaganomics and supply-side economics, which was really the last time we truly battle a long period of economic slowdowns, in that case it was stagflation caused in part by oil prices. Tax cuts plus deficit spending… how much longer can we be ripping the golden eggs out of the golden goose before the poor thing dies and China stops buying T-bills?)

So my question to you is, if you got money as a result of the stimulus package, would you spend it or save it?