Apparently one of the most highly-coveted “status symbols” among wealthy Americans isn’t a car, an airplane, a building, a gadget, a golf course, or some other kind of realty. Instead, it’s just a black credit card with an American Express logo emblazoned on it. It used to be “offered” on an individual basis, by invitation only. How “exclusive.” Now that the American economy is essentially tanking, the think tank at Amex has decided to throw open the gates to their most coveted of plastic trinkets to anyone who qualifies — I guess they’re hoping more wealthy folks will decide “yeah, I’ve totally gotta have that thing before I can really claim I’m wealthy.”

Accordingly, here are helpful guidelines to qualify for the American Express Black Card. The article itself is obviously astroturf or an ad (or at least it reads like one, with such copy as “enjoy the privilege that Black Card offers you”) and presents useful information if you really do care about getting your paws on one. In a nutshell — to “earn” a Black Card, you need to not actually need it. Minimum income of $250k per year, immaculate credit, and a $5k “initiation” fee. We can only assume there’s one hell of an annual fee to go along with it.

The “benefits” of possessing such a miraculous piece of plastic? American Express always claims that their cards have no preset limits (which is bullocks since the one I had a few years back had a very firm limit clearly printed on my monthly statements), but apparently the Black Card actually doesn’t have one, or if it does, it’s really, really high. Black Card holders are assigned a personal concierge, who seems to handle all account inquiries, issues, and billing (so you don’t call a phone bank, you call a single person). It’s claimed that your personal AmEx butler can get you in at all the trendy restaurants and shows (even the overbooked ones — I guess next time you try to watch a show and can’t get tickets, it’s because big companies like AmEx have bought all the tickets to resell to their Black Card holders) and even send someone to “help you shop” when you need it.

One of the more amusing tidbits from the article though is the one that prompted me to start this entry:

You might have won the lottery and landed with a lot of cash, but if you have a terrible credit history; you might want to rethink about dreaming of an American Express Black Card.

This makes me laugh my ass off. Nobody sane (with any kind of legitimate financial sense, anyway) actually “dreams” of credit cards (either at night or when they’re awake).

I can assure you if I ever win the lottery (or experience some other kind of windfall), I will retain (in advance, in cash) the services of an attorney, an accountant, and a financial planner, all at different firms, in that order. The absolute last thing on my mind will be “gosh, I wonder how much money I can borrow now?” Given that I don’t play the lottery, I’ll actually have to go work for my windfall (dammit ).

If you’ve won the lottery, you already have plenty of cash — you don’t need the assistance of a big corporation to get into the “good” shows, as you’ll have plenty of invitations from everyone who wants your cash already. Once your net worth hits the seven digit range, your credit rating becomes a smaller part of the “bigger” financial picture for you, and as the net worth grows, the importance of your individual credit score diminishes even more until it doesn’t matter at all anymore. Think about it — once you reach a point where you can quite literally pay cash for almost anything you can imagine, why bother borrowing money unless it can eventually make (or save) you money?

If you’re not at a point where you can actually qualify for a Black Card, being driven by an intense desire to have one falls squarely in the category of “you’re doing it wrong.”

Technorati Tags: Frugal Living Money

Ah, tax day. That most hair-pulling, gut-wrenching day of the year when you’re forcibly reminded just how much of your daily toiling at the grindstone goes to (supposedly) the “greater good” of society.

I’ve only ever had a sizable tax bill like this once before in my entire life, and that was back in 2000 when my ex-wife and I hatched a plan to buy ourselves a house in Colorado — the theory went something like this:

• Claim 6 exemptions instead of 2 on my W-2 form to reduce the total taxes taken out of each paycheck, so that when we actually buy the house, all the interest we pay will be deductible and it’ll all balance out.

While that idea actually does work (remembering though that the reduced withholding increases what you’ll owe at year’s end, and the interest only reduces the taxable income you get taxed on) if you follow through, it sets you up for hilarious failure when you don’t actually buy a house. Whoops. Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Money Politics Rants

I’m not generally fond of publicly talking about my finances. As I skim through the Google Reader some evenings and come across the various Personal Finance blogs on pfblogs.org I’m sometimes stunned with how open some people are about their money problems (or successes).

It always struck me as something that’s better kept private — if you reveal to the world that you’re wealthy (or that you’ve got a nest egg of any decent size), someone will do their damnedest to beg, borrow, or steal as much of it from you as they can. If you tell the whole world you’re broke, an entirely different class of scumbag will crawl out of the woodwork to try to take advantage of you when you’re weak.

I’m going to make a small exception today to my normal rule of “don’t talk about your financial situation” to describe something my new(ish) credit union set up for me this past week that’s really got me chuckling. I’m not chuckling at them, because they’re not losing money in this endeavor. I’m not chuckling at the other bank involved, because they’re undoubtedly making money on the deposit as well. I’m certainly not laughing at myself, since even I am not losing money in this. What makes me laugh, then? Unless I’m missing something subtle (or obvious — it’s happened before), this is one of those rare situations where everyone involved actually wins. Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Happy Money

The Internet has handed all sorts of really useful and impressive things to the people who use it. These days you can do everything from banking and investing to shopping, communicating, organizing protests and rallies, and conducting research all from the comfort of your own home.

One of the single most empowering things about the Internet is that it lets individuals (even lowly scumbags like me ) do all their financial juggling electronically — because of the reduced overhead of not running any “brick and mortar” branches, online banks can offer savings accounts with (much) higher interest rates (even in this craptacular economy, FNBO Direct’s online savings accounts make 3.25% instead of the paltry 1.05% I see offered at local credit unions (who generally pay at least a little better than commercial banks)). Because electronic debits can be done quickly and easily, I save $2.05 a month just by paying five bills electronically (instead of by mail — that savings is on the postage). Finally, because investment firms and banks want my business (i.e. they want my money), they advertise all their best offerings online for me to see at my leisure, while forums and websites review and advise on how these companies really treat their customers. Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Geeky Internet Money

About a year and a half ago, a client of mine sent me an unexpected gift in the form of five books: Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card, and Titan, Wizard, and Demon by John Varley. The three Varley books were a trilogy, and I actually really enjoyed it. The two books by Card are the first in their respective series of books set in the Ender’s Game universe … I’ll let you guess which one started the whole thing

It’s important to note I didn’t pay for the books. They were shipped to me straight from Amazon, so it’s clear they were brand new, but money didn’t leave my pockets to cause those books to land in my possession.

I actually read the Titan trilogy first — when I realized how big the Ender’s Game series was, I decided to tackle a smaller pile of books first. When I finally got to Ender’s Game, I absolutely loved it, and immediately set about acquiring the rest of the books in both Ender’s Game series and the Ender’s Shadow series. To do this, I went to half.com … no point in paying retail for six books when I could snag them all for under $20 (including shipping). Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Content Cartel Frugal Living Money Politics Rants

I absolutely love stumbling across sites like these, pissing and moaning about things like “bandwidth theft” and social sites failing to “obey” robots.txt “law,” and completely missing the fucking point of the concept of the Internet.

To those idiots out there who think the world wide web is solely your domain for simple monetization, and getting pissed when those dollars don’t instantly start rolling in, I’ve put together a little list of hints for you. Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Internet Money Stupid People

I guess in a way, I was actually out and about, participating in the whole “Black Friday” thing, except that I was only out to show a really nifty store to a friend of mine (and buy a few rolls of their really yummy cookies while I was there), and we weren’t hunting for any Black Friday-related deals.

The store in question was Ikea, which has just recently opened in Orlando, and continues the tradition of Swedish ass kicking the store chain is so well known for.

So what happens when you combine the company of a good friend and a chance to spend a few hours strolling through the coolest home furnishings store on Earth with the insanity of Black Friday and the general asshattery of the average human being? Well, you get lots of good with lots of bad. Fortunately, Ikea didn’t bother kicking in with any bad stuff. Read the full story...

Well, it’s been awhile since anybody’s sued me for calling their bullshit what it is, so I figured I’d trot out this ridiculously overpriced 128MB SD card with a pretty “sporting goods” brand label on it (they want $20 for this thing!). The site even helpfully offers this “advice” about your new technological acquisition:

To avoid missing any trophy shots it is helpful to have two SD cards. Once you are ready to check your pictures, simply replace the full card with a blank card; you can rest easy knowing you are not missing any pictures while you check your photos.

You’ll need this advice with any reasonably-modern camera with this $20 128MB SD card in it — with my new camera shooting pictures that, on the “highest compression high resolution” option, chew up 800KB a piece on average, you’ll only get about 150 pictures or so on a card before it’s full.

Or you could just take that same $20 and buy a 2 gigabyte card — holding 2,560 images at the same settings on the same form-factor card, for the same money. Read the full story...

I’m officially amused now with Apple’s latest move to tighten the noose around its iPhone-loving customers. Want to buy one? Fantastic! Paying cash? Get the fuck out of the store. Only plastic-wielders can buy an iPhone now. That’ll learn ‘ya.

Now in order to purchase one of these stupid things, you have to walk in with a credit card, and you had better only want just one or two. That last part amuses me — the company claims it’s doing this to stop resellers (because crushing all that “doctrine of first sale” bullshit is vital to a vendor-locked economy) who have the nerve to buy these phones (at Apple’s desired price … those miserable reselling bastards, actually paying Apple what it says those iPhones are worth), unlock them so that people who don’t want to use AT&T can still use the phone, and sell them to those people. Read the full story...

If you browse to http://grokster.com/, you’ll get an amusingly stern warning about piracy:

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blockquote>
The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files
using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is
prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies.
This service is not one of them.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS [insert your IP address here] AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous. Read the full story...