I have a favorite, although rather obscure, Monty Python sketch. An older housewife type (a "pepperpot") sits on a park bench. Another approaches dragging a car engine on a cart, saying she’s been shopping.
"Did you buy anything?" asks the first.
"A piston engine!"
"What d’you buy that for?"
"Oooh! It was a bargain."
It’s not their most memorable bit. But it deftly sums up a way in which we can short circuit our own thinking when we shop.
As I’ve written here several times, when we shop we are not creatures of cold calculation. We can’t be. There are just too many choices at the mall and not enough time to find the one optimal allocation of our money over everything we could buy. Instead, we operate on a set of learned behaviors that approximate the optimal outcome. One of those is bargain hunting.
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I don’t see why West Coast playoff games can’t start at a reasonable East Coast time. Sure, a start at, say 4pm LA time would reduce productivity out 
there in the late afternoon, but all of New England are zombies today and there is another game tonight starting at 9:30.
So no post, just a few thoughts from my sleep deprived brain.
Obama Wins What?
It took a long time for me to process the news of the morning. I kept blinking and trying to focus on the screen better, because obviously I was still not fully awake.
I’ll be the first to admit I can’t think of anybody else who deserves a prize for peace this year. But seriously, Obama? For giving us hope? And bravely taking a stand in favor or nuclear disarmament? For real? To their credit, the folks in the White House are obviously just as head-scratchingly stunned as the rest of us.
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It seems to me I have already cleverly mocked the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report blog. I think I said something about how the author doesn’t actually talk to wealthy people so much as talk to people who talk to wealthy 
people, or at least talk to those who claim to talk to wealthy people. Then again, maybe that was the Times’ Wealth Matters blog. It’s all a blur to me now.
The latest installment of the Wealth Report doesn’t merely talk to people who claim to talk to rich people, it rehashes an article on Reuters whose author talked to people who claim to talk to rich people.
The post, a little confusingly entitled "Do Millionaire Investors Get Better Deals?", is about how financial firms are now more interested in the investment business of sub-millionaires. This is a change from a few years ago when, we are told, they concentrated their efforts on bigger game.
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There’s a good post today at Wise Bread making the argument that going to college just for the learning doesn’t make sense. In a nutshell, the post makes the case that, with only some peculiar exceptions, a person can learn 
stuff just as well and a lot more cost effectively on their own. I couldn’t agree more.
Of course, a person should probably go to college anyway. It’s just that learning things is not, per se, reason enough to spend four years and a modest fortune in tuition. There are good dollars and cents motivations for college and keeping a clear head about them is important.
(I haven’t researched this, but I write this blog under the assumption that my readership amongst high schoolers is zero. So to a certain extent this discussion is, you will pardon the expression, academic. Perhaps there are parents of high schoolers reading.)
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Sometimes topics crop up in the PF blogosphere, seemingly out of nowhere, and rattle around from blog to blog for a while. Dollar cost averaging is a recent example. The Digerati Life brought it up on September 23, Lazy Man and Money responded the next day, and The Sun’s Financial Diary shared its 
thoughts on the 28th. There are probably several other mentions out there I missed.
Before I add my voice to the echo chamber, I’ll define the term. Dollar cost averaging refers to buying an investment, usually a stock or stock fund, over time in installments of equal dollar value.
It is often confused with the laudable and similar idea of regularly saving. Setting aside a certain amount of your pay every week or month may look like dollar cost averaging, but it’s not exactly the same thing. Implicit in the question "is dollar cost averaging a good idea" is the premise that there is an alternative, that you could have invested it all at once rather than slowly as you earned it.
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Frugality, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
October 13, 2009 11:59 am | 
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