JoeTaxpayer

Let’s start with one list I couldn’t overlook, 50 Best Finance-Related Movie Quotes of All Time. I’ll share my favorite one:
(From) The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Martin Frohm: “What would you say if man walked in here with no shirt, and I hired him?”
Christopher Gardner: “He must have had on some really nice pants.”

Next, are you getting overwhelmed? If so, BSimple has the Cure for the Financially Overwhelmed. Steps that you can take to simplify your finances and reduce your stress in this department.

I enjoyed the article Money Matters, But Money Isn’t Everything. This is one of the recurring questions and discussions bloggers enjoy. In the end, the issues are not so simple, it’s not a matter of “would $100000/yr make you happy?” even though 99% of the world appears to live on less than this. Part of it is relative, if you make less than your friends and neighbors, you may not be as happy regardless of the absolute amount. I often wonder how one can measure happiness, people are so complex, can they even report their own feelings accurately for such studies?

Next Neal Frankle tells us What to do when your wallet has been lost of stolen.One bit of advice I’d add myself, before you lose it or have your wallet stolen – photocopy everything in it. (Well, maybe not the cash, but everything else, front and back.) It will help you know who to call and what account to cancel.

Craig Ford at Money Help for Christians post a list (I told you, I am a sucker for lists) 31 Signs that it is Time to Start Budgeting. The bar is set pretty low here, if you identify with just 3 items on the list you should consider a formal budget. Me, I am off scott-free. I am guilty of one sign (5) You try to tell your kid “no”, and [she] looks at you like you just swore in front of her. I am still learning to say no more often.

My friend Jeff at Deliver Away Debt asks himself Am I a Poser Now? You see, he started hacking away at his debt with pizza deliveries, and for a number of us, provided some very entertaining tweets regarding his customers and how they tipped. Now his day job has him working a lot of overtime, so no time for deliveries. Poser? No, Jeff, you are still an inspiration to those who think there’s no way out.

And last this week, Len Penzo’s A Little Fun with My Dog and Some Peanut Butter. I read this post, and I’m thinking you had to be there to find it funny. I’ll trust Len on this one.

One bit of news out this week was that China is now the world’s second largest economy, ahead of Japan, and second to the US.

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Now that it’s behind us, I’ve been thinking about this. There was criticism over its cost, especially in these tough economic times. But let’s take a look (thanks to ABC News) at the expenses of the Clinton wedding.

Reception Space: $125,000 to $200,000
Catering: $750,000
Flowers: $250,000
Music: $40,000
Wedding Dress: $15,000
Photography: $35,000
Video: $25,000
Lighting: $75,000 to $100,000
Hair and Makeup: $20,000
Invitations: $40,000 to $50,000
Party Planner: $175,000
Rehearsal Dinner: $250,000
Security: $30,000
Miscellaneous: $50,000

Wow, over $2 million. On the other hand, when you look at these expenses, a great portion is labor. With 500 guests, I don’t imagine the food cost is actually $1500 per person. Regardless of the individual items, you can review them one by one as easily as I can, all in all, there are many people involved in this wedding. The way I look at this, the economy doesn’t benefit by everyone sitting on their money. Spending is the life blood of the economy, and in the big picture, affairs like this play a part in getting us out of the recession.
What do you think? Would we be better off if this money weren’t spent, if the newly married couple just eloped?
Joe

The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, is the sequel to Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, which I discussed in June.

I have to say, I enjoyed Dan’s first book enough that I had pretty high hopes for the sequel, and I was not disappointed. Similar to Predictably Irrational, we are walked through a series of experiments that offer a view as to how we approach certain decisions and how we are motivated.

One experiment we are offered is to try to understand the connection between payment and performance. The assumption of “pay for performance” may be more theory than reality it would seem, as one experiment which upped the ante on some simple tasks to a level of three weeks pay for only an hour’s work showed that the pressure of higher potential earnings actually decreased performance. As budgets for academic studies of this nature tend to be limited, this experiment was conducted in India, where the wages were lower than in the US.

In another example, we are introduced to the demotivation that follows work that’s discarded. For the experiment, people are paid to assemble a lego structure, one after the next. The demotivation came as for one group of builders, their structure was taken apart right in front of them. For those who saw their creation kept in tact, they worked longer and were happier doing so. This may seem ridiculous, but I’ve witnessed real life examples. Engineers whose designs were completed, on time, under budget, fully functional, yet, for whatever reason, found their project canceled. Such engineers don’t last long at companies that don’t value their work.

These two examples I offered are also discussed in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel in his interview with Dan Ariely, Exploring The ‘Upside Of Irrationality‘. You can listen to the interview or read the transcript, as you wish.

I’d also like to mention that Dan Ariely has a blog in which he stays pretty active, conducts experiments, and offers links to his videos. A great site to explore the topics introduced by these books.

FTC disclaimer – I borrowed this book from my library and was not compensated for this article.

Joe