Welcome to My World

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.”

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.

Two nights ago I had an opportunity to explore the realm of Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” bullshit — their soft and friendly name for their *fucking draconian anti-piracy authentication and validation suite*. It seems like almost every month (sometimes even more frequently) the company ships yet another update (in case you’re wondering, Windows only runs on bare metal now on one machine of mine full-time — an older Acer laptop that I used to run Linux on until I loaned it to a friend; it got re-imaged back to XP for her use, and since it came back I haven’t had time to put Linux back on it) to the veritable “prove you haven’t stolen from us, bastard!” toolkit.

Here’s the amusing part. A few weeks ago, some friends handed me an older laptop that was seemingly permanently broken, to see if I could resurrect it. It really *was* permanently broken, with no resurrection possible. Crud. Wasn’t a bad notebook, either I could have thrown it into the World Community Grid pile of machines I have.

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.

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.

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).

The RIAA and MPAA both want us all to believe the following “truths” about who they are and what they do:

• All file-sharing is illegal
• Piracy is destroying the music and movie industries
• Their lawsuits against American citizens are intended to punish hardened criminals and protect the artists that produce the music and movies being “pirated”
• Colleges are the root of all that evil

Now, let’s look at the reality:

• File-sharing is most certainly not illegal in a wide variety of situations
  • Buying a music CD, ripping it to MP3 (or FLAC, etc.), and distributing it to others on the internet is a violation of Copyright law (that the RIAA and MPAA purchased in the form of the DMCA back when Clinton was president), and so is just downloading a movie, CD, or even a single song. It is not, however, “theft,” as the content cartel is so keen to claim
• Piracy is barely a blip on the radar — declining quality and increasing alternate “entertainment” options are what’s killing the industries, although “killing” is the wrong word since both the music and movie industries are in the black, just seeing smaller profit increases in recent years (yes, all this bitching and whining is about a decrease in the rate of growth of profit)
• They’re suing children, grandmothers, and single-parent households, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars just for “pirating” a handful of songs
• They’ve admitted they exaggerated their claims that college students are responsible for most piracy

Today I received an absolutely hilarious “offer” in the mail for a credit card. The average credit card offer is silly enough (for the “average” consumer) — “pay us 10% APR to borrow money from us, and we’ll nickel-and-dime you to death on the fees as you go,” but this one takes the cake. This is the kind of thing that people receive when they’re just starting out — newly-minted adults (18 years old, freshly allowed to sign legal contracts) who don’t know any better. Still, I wanted to make sure First PREMIERE Bank (spelling and capitalization theirs — I’m eager to ensure Google catches this opinion piece about them) gets all the attention and ridicule it deserves for actually trying to pull this shit on people.

What makes me sick is thinking some people actually fall for this. This kind of trickery is exactly why the banks these days are discovering fewer and fewer of their customers can actually pay their debts. It’s a sickening kind of money grab, and we’re all beginning to turn into turnips.

All the Wal-mart haters out there, rejoice; I probably just cost them a few cents more than normal on this gas transaction. Hehehe! (You should probably view the full-size version of this one. It’s worth it.)

In redeeming some points I’ve earned on an unrelated site over the past couple of months, I turned in four sets of 1,500 “points” for four $10 gift cards at Wal-mart (yup, I shop there; feel free to hate me for it ). In true bureaucratic style, instead of just mailing me a single card worth $40, they really did just send me four cards worth $10 each.

Nothing says “pain in the ass” like busting out four gift cards just to buy $40 in groceries, so I decided to save a cashier having to waste time with it, and have some fun at a self-service gas pump at the gas station in Wal-mart’s parking lot.

It’s run by “Murphy USA,” and offer remarkably competitive prices on gas, and they also accept Wal-mart gift cards. As an added bonus, they yank $0.03 off the per-gallon price for using a gift card, and, in what must be an absolute gaming of the “system,” you can buy gift cards in the store with a credit card (which means you can use a PayPal card, which isn’t actually credit, but debit, and get an extra 1.5% cash back on the purchase).

At a quick stop at a store with a friend of mine this afternoon I happened to glance at a Consumer Reports magazine sitting on a magazine rack; one of the smaller little blurbs on the cover read “It Pays to Bundle Web, TV, and Phone!” I started thinking — is it really worth it?

It seemed like a good time to sit down and actually figure out what I spend every month on those separate “utilities” to see if I’m getting fleeced or if I’m getting a bargain.

At the risk of sounding like I’m just gunning to prove Consumer Reports wrong, let me point out, right up front, that I’m not: I used to subscribe to the magazine, and though I let my subscription lapse because I found some of their reporting biased, I do generally respect their opinions and research.

Also, I should point out that in doing my little bit of digging here, I only researched pricing for my area (Central Florida), not national averages. I don’t have any legitimate reason to believe pricing is significantly different anywhere else in the country; anywhere you can get broadband, it’s priced about the same.