It was just about a year ago that I wrote about our two-day vacation trip and the lodging expenses incurred therein. Since the Wife, daughter, and I just returned from this summer's Two-Day Getaway, I figure it's worth sitting down to see how the money flows came out this year.Quicken and Excel tell the story like so:This Summer 2008 trip took us from our home base in Norman, Oklahoma, up northeast to Tulsa via I-44. We left Saturday (noonish), and returned Monday at around 5pm. Lodging consisted of two nights in a Holiday Inn Express. Activities included visiting the Philbrook ... (more)

Over on the right sidebar of this blog, you'll see a little graph showing my progress toward a couple of financial goals. As of today, it looks like this:The debt you see there is what's remaining on our 3.95% auto loan on our '06 Accord. My goal is to have that loan gone, and thus be debt free (except for the mortgage) again, by December of this year at the latest. If I can accomplish this, I will have paid off the five-year note in just under three years.In reality, though, I'm shooting for a Debt-Free October. Or sooner.I'm pretty ... (more)

NORTH POLE (Staff) — Locals who said the housing downturn couldn't reach this far north were partially correct: Property values in the icy northernmost reaches have been relatively stable for decades. But analysts now believe that outside investments undertaken by the two most-popular North Pole residents have come back to haunt the couple."They [the Clauses] weren't going to get rich from their primary residence, that's for sure," said Tom Dewmar, owner of Frozen Tundra Assets, a property-management and marketing firm based in Ontario. Dewmar, who is also the editor of the Great White North Properties Newsletter, says he's ... (more)

As is dictated by widely-held Man Laws, I enjoy sports. But usually I don't find much at ESPN.com that stokes my financial interest. This column by Rick Reilly, though, is fun:ESPN.com: How to Be a Broke NBA PlayerWell, as "fun" as financial meltdown can be, I guess. As Reilly tells us:Filing for bankruptcy is a long-standing tradition for NBA players, 60% of whom, according to the Toronto Star, are broke five years after they retire.I did a minimum of research and discovered that what makes this "60% go broke" stat so particularly nifty is that, according to InsideHoops, the NBA's ... (more)

Yesterday evening I was perusing a message-board discussion of Starbucks' recent plans to close hundreds of stores. Amidst the penetrating, insightful analysis I found this gem:Starbucks has surpassed MCDs as the world's favorite public restroom. They should get subsidies from governments around the world for their efficient building and maintaining of these needed facilities.Emdeplam, message board posterYep. For whatever reason, that one earned an LOL from me.Odd to think, ain't it, that $6 cups of coffee might not generate Glorious Unending Growth in a world doing its best to digest $4 gallons of gas. Go figure. ... (more)

No, I don't mean "How long does it take for you to fill your car's tank?"I mean, "How many hours do you have to work to fill your car's tank?"There's a calculator at CNN/Money that's supposed to answer this question. But it seems a bit too optimistic — it doesn't appear to factor for taxes, for one thing. Or any other paycheck deductions. Those are pretty serious items to leave out, methinks. (Heck, it told me I only had to work 1.3 hours to fill up our Accord's tank. No way can that be correct.)So I built my own Excel ... (more)

This is a simple "public service linkage" post — as good as any for a Saturday, I suppose. Allrecipes.com is a site from which my wife (an exceptional cook in her own right) seems to get great use. A few days ago she forwarded me a link to their "Cooking on a Budget" section, and it seemed appropriate to mention it here. Who among us isn't at least a little more budget-conscious when it comes to food these days? Allrecipes.com: Cooking on a Budget ... (more)

Traders, talking over the Morgan meeting, failed to remember any previous occasion on which a stock market conference had been called while a trading session was still in progress. They did recall, however, that in 1907, with call money at 125%, Secretary of the Treasury Cortelyou conferred with J. P. Morgan, put $25,000,000 of Government funds into Manhattan banks, halted the Panic. They remembered too the Northern Pacific crash of 1901 when, after Northern Pacific stock had gone overnight from $150 to $1,000 a share, the House of Morgan, representing the late great James J. Hill and the House of ... (more)

Thanks to CR at Calculated Risk for finding this video. Which, it seems to me, displays Amerititlement (that's "American entitlement") at its finest:It occurs to me that upon watching that guy (nice wristbands, by the way) trash what is now, for all intents and purposes, the bank's house ... well, it seems that some folks simply are not mature enough to be homeowners.Let alone be three-home-owners.My daughter's five years old, and she's thrown her share of "I want it!" tantrums. But they typically last five or ten minutes, tops. After that she comes to grips with reality and goes ... (more)

Here's a question for the readers: You're at fault in a small fender-bender in your family's sedan. The damage to your car, though, is purely cosmetic. Say, a moderately mushed left front fender. Quality repairs will cost between $600 and $800.Do you spend the money to fix your car? At what level of savings, if any, does full repair become a viable option? ... (more)

Because I'm a complete spreadsheet dork:Excel Spreadsheet: Pain at the PumpThis one allows for a little more detail than my previous version.Have fun watching the numbers change. ... (more)

Not too long ago I posted about gas price stress. Even if your TV viewing is as sporadic as mine, fuel prices are still a topic that no doubt grace your local evening news EVERY SINGLE STINKIN' NIGHT. For my part, I touched on some of the expected home- and workplace effects of $3-per-gallon gas, and calculated that gas at around $3.50 per gallon might cost an average family about $125 more per month than would $2-per-gallon fuel.Well, now that our national average cost-per-gallon of fuel has reached four bucks, I wanted to revisit the topic just a bit. And ... (more)

Just testing my feed. Thanks. ... (more)

A friend emailed me a link this evening. This happens to me all the time, of course, as I'm sure it does to you. We know people, you and I. And those people send us links.But do they send links which ask us to read brand spankin' new speeches by Federal Reserve officials? Typically, no.So this link seemed different. Yes. Right off the bat. I read it.I heartily suggest you read it also.Richard Fisher, President, Dallas Fed: Storms on the HorizonOh my. ... (more)

Recently a new reader emailed me, asking for an Excel (or OpenOffice) spreadsheet that could tell him what payment would be required in order to retire a loan within a certain time period. I figure I can help him out and present a very basic Excel tutorial, all in one shot. So here goes!Calculating a Payment in ExcelExcel just so happens to have a function to calculate the payment of any loan that has (1) a constant payment, and (2) a constant interest rate. This blessed function is called PMT. In Excel, function PMT returns a loan's payment (principal and ... (more)

I know, I know. You guys are out there thinking, How can Michael let that story of the foreclosed Congresswoman go by without comment? Surely he's got something to say about this?Yeah, I do. And that something is:Friends, our taxpayer dollars are in serious, serious trouble.For the uninformed out there, here's the latest newslink I can find: L.A. Times: Richardson Says Foreclosure of Her Home Was 'Improper'I'll tell you what's "improper." Improper is witnessing pathetic-ness like this in an elected official.Perhaps my wife summed it up best: It could very well be that our elected officials are more "representative" of ... (more)

Excellently readable (and dare I say entertaining) article from the New York Times:NY Times: "Times Are Tough, Except in the Repo Biz"Just between you and I, you know, being a Repo Man is not something I'd want to do. Whilst there'd definitely be something soul-satisfying about repossessing a yacht named "Bally Hoo," the threat of violence and/or gunfire from Downtrodden Dave and Misunderstood Mary as I absconded with their stuff — the bank's collateral — well, it just doesn't suit my personality. The guys who do this gig — and I've run into a few of 'em over the years ... (more)

A dose of linkage for anyone interested in H.R. 5830: FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008...OpenCongress.org: HR 5830: Homeownership Retention Act of 2008MapLight.org: HR 5830: Homeownership Retention Act of 2008I find it mostly insane that in order for my wife and I to have qualified for assistance via this bill, we'd have had to have bought (by my nebulous calculations) a home somewhere in the $400k range. Which, by extension, would mean that we'd be carrying a payment of at least $2,400 per month (principal & interest only). Would such a payment cause us "financial hardship?"Uh ... ... (more)

To all the proud guys who read this blog: You only thought you had accomplished something in life. Well, it now appears that you and I have been one-upped. By a 13-year-old kid.Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father's existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing "Halo" on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.Yeah, that's right. Wipe the coffee off your computer screen and keep reading. I couldn't make this stuff up.Money.co.uk: 13yo Steals ... (more)

Turns out Casey Serin had a soulmate:Reuters: California Man Losing Nine HomesActually, if he sheds the home his family's living in, then by my math it's ten homes. But these days, who's counting?A California man who has defaulted on nine homes and expects banks to foreclose on all of them, forcing him into bankruptcy, says he now considers it a mistake to have invested in the real estate market.Lemme guess: At least several of these homes were signed for as "owner-occupied," too, right?[Investor Shawn] Forgaard bought a house in Santa Cruz, about 60 miles (100 km) south of San Francisco, ... (more)

I haven't spent much time talking about gas prices on this blog, mostly because I'm fairly tired of hearing about them 24/7. But Tuesday I came across an article on which I'd like to comment:UPI: "Gas price stress lowers work productivity"Some quick points:Wayne Hochwarter of the Florida State University's College of Business surveyed more than 800 full-time employees this spring when gas prices hovered at about $3.50 per gallon and found employees are simply unable to detach themselves from the stress caused by escalating gas prices.The people surveyed work in a wide range of occupations, primarily in the southeastern United ... (more)

In case anyone's interested, I'm offering a second budgeting spreadsheet over at the main site:IYM: SimpleBudget SpreadsheetThis one's (hopefully) a simpler alternative to my Spending Plan spreadsheet. ... (more)

As a general rule, only the very smartest people can make truly catastrophic mistakes.— Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar MeltdownWell well well ... look at the fine mess we've created.I picked up Charles R. Morris' 2008 book The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash a few weeks ago not because I think our entire financial system is on the brink of implosion (though I wouldn't automatically discount anything at this point). Rather, I simply wanted to learn more about our current economic situation. Let's face it: As good a book as Naked Economics ... (more)

A couple of years ago I first mentioned that my state of Oklahoma was considering implementing financial education into the public-school curriculum.Last year, our governor signed into law the Passport to Financial Literacy Act (related PDF), which I'm quite happy to see. Topics to be covered include: Understanding interest, credit card debt, and online commerce; Rights and responsibilities of renting or buying a home; Savings and investing; Planning for retirement; Bankruptcy; Banking and financial services; Balancing a checkbook; Understanding loans and borrowing money, including predatory lending and payday loans; Understanding insurance; Identity fraud and theft; Charitable giving; Understanding the financial ... (more)

Those of you with an interest in history — and in particular, the Great Depression — may be interested in viewing these Powerpoint slides compiled at the Oklahoma Council on Economic Education's website:OCEE: Oklahoma HoovervillesIf you're like me, you'll find that the 48 slides of Hooverville families do wonders for renewing your appreciation of our current economic landscape ... recession or no. And there are a few more related slideshows on this OCEE Teacher Resource page.(NOTE: Microsoft makes available a free Powerpoint viewer for folks who don't have Powerpoint or the Office suite.) ... (more)