Lazy Man and Money

Murphy-Goode’s Smart Marketing with New Media

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Murphy-Goode Winery has an interesting job opportunity that you may or may not have heard of… a 6-month contract to be a “Lifestyle Correspondent” for Murphy-Goode Wine. It pays $10,000 a month – a fairly impressive salary considering that you get free rent on top of it. Oh you also get to learn how make wine.

What does the job entail? It’s simply marketing the lifestyle of wine country via the Internet. You’d be expected to connect with Facebook and Twitter users, create videos of your experience on YouTube.

What makes this such a fabulous idea? A couple of things:

  • The Publicity of the Job Itself – What’s it worth getting news coverage for this job? Hell, in a tiny, tiny way I’m contributing to the value that Murphy-Goode is getting by writing this post. I’d bet they received more than $60,000 worth of free advertising before they even choose the Lifestyle Correspondent.
  • Getting the Brand Spread Consistently – Part of me can’t imagine people will follow the correspondent. However, I can imagine the correspondent will have a lot of Twitter followers and a lot of Facebook friends. This is surely a quality asset for Murphy. They’ll increase their mind share, especially if they can keep it going with promotions it’s followers.

I work with a company that employs a social media consultant. I don’t have any firm statistics, but I’m fairly sure that the company doesn’t get the same value for it’s dollar as Murphy-Goode is going to. Then again, the product isn’t quite as sexy. It’s not very obvious to me how they could extend a similar type of promotion.

For a little while, I thought of applying for this position. I ended up skipping it because I’m not very good with the video camera. Also, it would be about 3 hours away from my wife and puppy. While they may be able to come with me, I’m sure my wife wouldn’t appreciate that commute. However, it’s not too late for you. If you hurry, there’s still time to apply for the job. It ends on midnight Friday night.

Emptying the Recycle Bin of My Mind

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been collecting some links and thoughts. It’s time to finally clear up some Firefox tabs and put them out there.

  • I can’t decide what is better, having Monday off or the quick week that follows it.
  • I can’t decide what I find more depressing… the title of Social Security healthier than your 401(k) or the information inside the article that assets will be exhausted when I turn 61 (2037).
  • I’ve been loving CNET’s Cheapskate. If you love technology, the site is either evil or a godsend. It’s evil if you are trying to control your spending. It’s a godsend if you are already spending a lot on technology and want to save some money. With $60 GPS systems and $133 Blu-Ray players, I almost buy something every day.
  • The next 8 days are going to pass really slowly. The Palm Pre can’t get here fast enough. I’m readying the iPod tombstone. Then again, I often exaggerate rumors of death
  • I find Madonna’s $10,000 a month water habit amazing. The water itself is $5 a bottle. I wonder how much the shipping is. If it was free, she’d go through more than 66 bottles of water a day. Even if the shipping is $5 a bottle, that’s over 16033 bottles of water a day. There’s a limit to drinking water to lose weight (not that she needs it).
  • Watching television yesteday, I shed some man-tears for Tony Rakoczy. Today we found out that it was his ex-wife, Bonnie Sweeten, that abducted their daughter. I can’t imagine how you could go through more extreme emotions in 24 hours than he did. It’s been rumored that financial problems might have been behind the abduction. File that as reason 57,932 why to have your financial house in order…
  • … but be careful not to go overboard with that financial house. I suppose that “overboard” is relative to where you live. For instance, a little domestic violence is acceptable for spendthrift wives.
  • When I hear that song, it gives my ears hell. Truth be told I’ll miss it when it’s replaced with another top 40 hit. Truth be told I’m lying. :-)

Spring Cleaning of My Financial Mind

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I’ve had a lot of small quick thoughts on my head lately. Time to clear them out…

  • How Much Does it Cost to Drive a Car – Watching the Today this morning… Christie Hyde from AAA says it costs 42 to 68 cents a mile to drive your car. Going from a small to medium sedan will raise your price from 42 cents to 54 cents. That seems like a big jump to me. She mentioned that one of the things people forget to factor with cars is depreciation. One of the suggestions to save money was to save money on gas, but they didn’t suggest buying a used car to cut on that depreciation.
  • California 9% Sales Tax – I don’t think it’s a 9% sales tax for every county, but it’s been raised up to 9% for me in Silicon Valley. A 10.25% sales tax has been proposed for nearby Oakland. I realize the money comes from different pots (Federal, State, County, City, etc…), but it’s strange to me that last year the government was creating a stimulus package to encourage spending. Now they are raising sales tax which encourages me not spend. Maybe I should advocate that everyone play the lottery a lot more so my taxes will go down… It’s almost crazy enough to work.
  • Hawaiian Airlines Rocks – This is no surprise to me or my wife but Hawaiian airlines were top rated. We flew them from Hawaii to Australia last year and it was an amazing flight. They had free beer and wine open bar, multiple meals (that were very, very good), and I’m not joking, but snack break with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. We always take the lowest-cost flight, so we weren’t expecting much, but it was incredible.
  • The Boston Globe May Be Closing? – Not long ago, this was completely unfathomable to me. The Boston Globe is central to the city – far more wide-read than the Boston Herald. It’s no secret that Boston and New York have a little rivalry going on (heard of the Red Sox and Yankees?), so can I start the conspiracy theory that the New York Times bought the Boston Globe, just so it could shut it down 15+ years later? I’m joking of course.
  • Hannah Montana Movie – I chuckle about the statement of “tired of living a double life” in the upcoming previews. Lazy Man hears what she’s saying.

Problems With American Airlines Credit Card

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This post is going to be bit of rant, due to very poor customer service. Many people probably don’t like reading rants, but in extreme cases (like this one), I find it necessary to document the case for those interested. Maybe it just makes me feel better that someone from the company may see it and offer to fix their service.

On Saturday, my wife was looking at her American Airlines Credit Card bill. We are going to a convention in March and she purchased the American Airlines tickets with the card. As you might imagine, this is one of the ways of earning more miles. The statement had an obvious problem – no miles earned from travel purchases. “How can this be?” she asked me. I told her it clearly looks like an error.

Having a little extra time on Saturday, she decided to call the credit card and get to the bottom of it. I thought this was destined to go poorly. Credit cards seem to be getting squeezed nowadays and I didn’t have high hopes that they were putting money into having the best customer service representatives available on a Saturday. I thought she was lucky to get anyone on the line to be honest.

That’s where the problems started. I may be wrong on some of the details, because I simply may have lost track after awhile. The first credit card person couldn’t answer my wife’s question, so she transferred her to another credit card person. After my wife explained the story again, the person said that she needs to talk to American Airlines about it. (I thought this was a bovine excrement excuse because the statement clearly says the purchase was from American Airlines.) So my wife got transferred to American Airlines and explained the problem once again. This customer service person, probably more used to hearing people looking to book flights than field calls about credit cards, sent my wife to the only place that made sense to her – the American Airlines card membership application program. Of course they are not set up to help someone who already has an AA credit card. So this is a dead-end.

She starts over with the credit card company and the chain of calls repeats itself. This time they transfer her faster before she can explain that she’s been through this. Starting off the conversation with “this is the 6th time I’ve been transferred, so please don’t transfer me to [fill in the last place she was at] doesn’t seem to help.” At this point, I decided to give her advice. Standard stuff like, “Make sure the call is recorded in the call log and get a reference number. This way so if you get disconnected or transferred you can come back to where you were in the chain.”

It really was a perfect blame game situation. The credit card company can blame the airline for not coding the purchase right. The airline can claim that they don’t know what’s going on at the credit card company. I suggest that she try to conference them all, but of course neither party will accept that solution – even if we are using our own phone to conference. It becomes clear to me that this is one of those fun customer service situations where you caught in the middle of two sides that won’t talk to each other. By this time, my wife is nearly in tears. Though the situation is annoying enough to warrant tears, I’m starting to wonder if it’s compounded by thoughts of how my wife is occasionally caught in the middle of a communication battle with her two divorced parents.

I’m getting ready to intervene and offer to try to get it resolved myself, when she tries one last call to the credit card company. This last call says that the statement appears to be in error and she deserves those miles. The statement is supposed to be fixed as I’m writing this. If it’s not, I’m going to have to suggest the “We’ve had this credit card for years and are a frequent customer of yours. What are you going to do to make me happy?” response. We’ll see how that goes if it comes to it.

What if History Doesn’t Repeat Itself?

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Back in 2006, I had a revelation. I was a software engineer and I made decent money. However, there was a lot of talk about off-shoring all kinds of software projects. I looked into it and with companies like Elance, I realized that there could be a major shift coming sooner than I thought. I looked at into my heart and it didn’t take long to realize that software engineering didn’t interest me enough to motivate me to be the expert I would have to become to justify my salary. That’s why I started this site. I needed to find other ways to supplement my income for the day when I would transition out of software engineering. That day happened in October, 2007 and I haven’t looked back. If I could talk to my old manager again, I’d give him a great big hug, say thanks, and ask if he’d do one more impression of the old child molester on Family Guy or sing a Kelly Clarkson song.

What does this have to do with history? The world is changing – extremely fast. Detroit used to be a thriving hotbed of wealth. Now it needs bailouts just to keep afloat for another few months. At last 2007’s American Pharmacists Association, a distinguished speaker said that companies were exploring outsourcing clinical pharmacy studies oversea. Shoot the data over the Internet, have a pharmacist there analyze it and shoot the results back. It’s that simple and a lot cheaper. At some level, either Americans have to start providing more value (how?) or one of two things is going to happen: American wages will drop or other countries’ wages will rise. I imagine it will meet somewhere in the middle.

This has me thinking… for years financial advisers and Money magazine have repeated the 8-10% historic rate of return on stocks. Can we trust this history? What were the factors that contributed to that history? When I was growing up, I remember seeing things that said, Made in USA. I don’t know if I’ve read that phrase in the last ten years. Might that impact the historical rate of return of US stocks? I think it might.

I often read the historical rates of return on real estate. It’s had a big run and it seemed that around 2004 everyone was living by the “it always it goes up” credo. Well today we’ve learned that it’s not entirely true. Perhaps the reason real estate jumped up over the 30 years is due to women getting more lucrative jobs and families finding themselves with more money. If people have more money, they can bid up the price of homes. If that theory is right, the blast of extra income was a one-time event. In the end, real estate prices have to track wages or people will be forced to stop buying.

What I take from this is that you should believe the popular mutual fund disclosure: past performance is no guarantee of future results. I’d take it a step further and say that past performance might not even be a good indicator of future results. Does that mean you should stop investing? I think you should look for opportunities in this changing world. If you think that television is going to go Internet via sites like Hulu and YouTube, perhaps a investing in Internet infrastructure is a good move (Cisco comes to mind). If you think that we are going to be slow to adopt solar technology, perhaps you should invest in oil. If you think that solar technology is going to be big in ten years (a point I wouldn’t argue), perhaps you could invest in Claymore/MAC Global Solar Index or Market Vectors Solar Energy.

Does this mean that everyone in the United States is doomed? No. Now is the time to be proactive and think about the future of your field and your career. It’s time to take a few minutes and not think about what’s for dinner tonight, but what your long term plan is (unless you are already nearing retirement. In that case just carry on :-).

A final thought, this month’s Money magazine points out that Japan has been in a bear market for 19 years – very much a whole generation. I wonder what the Japanese version of Money magazine says about historic rates of return.