A search of this site shows that in what is fast approaching 300 posts I have never discussed collectibles. Although it is true that there is relatively little bad money advice out there on this topic, just about everybody who mentions it, 
even in passing, says it is a poor place to invest, it is an area in which people often make money mistakes. So not writing at least one post on it is an oversight that needs correcting.
In particular, I want to talk about a scheme to make money that has, at the very least, occurred to all of us at one time or another. It is the buying, or merely not disposing of, the near-valueless non-collectible in the hope that it will one day become a valuable collectible.
The reason this has occurred to us all at some point is that the collecting world is full of examples of easy-money-in-hindsight. Just spend time on eBay. A quick scan this morning tells me that the first issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine (Autumn 1992) goes for $250. It was $3.95 on the newsstand. That’s an annualized gain of nearly 26% for 18 years. If only I’d thought to buy a thousand copies.
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Right on schedule, March went out like a lamb. The daffodils in my front yard are swaying in the breeze and that special occasion that marks the
cultural start of spring for many of us comes this Sunday. (It’s the start of the baseball season. What did you think I meant?)
In the frugalosphere, March was a time for both revisiting old ideas and exploring new ones. We had a follow-up from Provident Planning on Bambi the male “cow” being raised in a back yard for beef. It has an embedded 61 second video of the beast eating grass.
And one of my favorite frugal tips from last year made a sudden resurgence. It took a while, but apparently fonts chosen, and in some cases designed, to save printer ink are finally getting some traction. Not much mention of my suggestion to favor words that contain ink-saving letters, such as i and l, over such ink-hogs as e and w, but I am sure that the frugal world will get to that soon enough.
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Free Money Finance has a post this morning which is a riff on a quote from Dave Ramsey to the effect that the average college student graduates with 
$15,000 in debt, which is also about how much the average student spends by living off campus and not eating in the cafeteria.
The $15K figure is, at the very least, out of date. The quote was from Ramsey’s book, published in 2003, and he cites as his source a conversation he had “a couple of years ago.”
But it has a bigger flaw than that. This is one of those numbers where average should not be confused with typical. Strange but true, many college students graduate with no debt. Others graduate with many multiples of the average.
So I have a lot of trouble with the premise that there exists a big population of college students who would have graduated without any debt, had they not modestly improved their lifestyle by living off-campus. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the premise at face value. Assume that a college student has borrowed $15K solely to live a little more comfortably, that is, for pizza, beer, and the like. Is that a bad thing?
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It’s S&P Case-Shiller day again. This month’s update of the house price indexes, which are for January 2010, continue the recent trend of being
slightly down in absolute terms, –0.4% for the 20-city composite, but slightly up when seasonally adjusted, +0.3%.
I would characterize the numbers as being delightfully dull. Obviously, a sharp upswing in house prices would be better for homeowners, particularly the ones under water, but flat is a tremendous improvement over the death spiral that ran from the summer of ‘06 to the summer of ‘09. On a year-on-year basis the 20-city was down only –0.7% to January ‘10. With luck, that number will soon turn positive, something that has not happened since January ‘07.
With not much to report from the indexes, I thought I would take advantage of S&P C-S Day to mention two other house related things that have been bothering me lately.
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You know those blue EnergyStar labels you sometimes see on appliances in the store? Think hard. No, not the train that gets stuck in the Channel Tunnel 
when it gets cold. That’s EuroStar.
EnergyStar is a joint program of the EPA and the US Department of Energy to help Americans “save money and protect the environment through energy efficient products and practices.” Their elaborate and cheerful website goes on to claim that
Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2009 alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 30 million cars — all while saving nearly $17 billion on their utility bills.
That’s a savings of about $150 per household last year. And you are only vaguely aware of the program? Ungrateful wretch.
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even in passing, says it is a poor place to invest, it is an area in which people often make money mistakes. So not writing at least one post on it is an oversight that needs correcting.
Investing | Frank Curmudgeon | 
April 5, 2010 11:59 am | 
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