Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist - The F.S.A.

HT: Pharyngula

God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time innumerable millions, to make them miserable forever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation-delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existance- though but an atom, a molecule organique in the universe- are my religion.

[John Adams, in a letter to Jefferson, Sept. 14, 1813, from "Christianity and the Constitution: The Founding faith of our Fathers" John Eidsmoe ISBN: 0-8010-3444-2]


Tags: religion atheism

Sporadic posting this week. Life is interrupting with blogging. Work is picking up and I have other responsibilities. Just keep checking pfblogs.org for my new posts. Thanks.

I've talked about how I love getting comments because they are insightful and the like, here is an example that doesn't quite fit that criteria:

You better hope there is a god to look over you if you can't figure out how to handle withholding and a $6,000 refund is just stupid. Not to be harsh but go to HR or the tax department and read the form.

So to summarize: hope that there is a god that doesn't exist, and read the form...stupid.

What insight. What clarity. How truly helpful that comment was.
I really doubt that the reason that so many people get a refund every year is that they fail to read a form. Perhaps I am mistaken, the IRS does put some forms that make it difficult to decipher after all.

For those of us who wanted something more useful, there is a withholding calculator that is a tad bit more helpful than Billy Boy's comments.
Here's the link.

Nick over at Funny Munny has a hilarious post up about how to get audited by the IRS. Great stuff, you gotta check it out.

Tags: taxes humor

We received our tax refund today via electronic deposit. We had a $6,000 refund which allowed us to put a major dent into our outstanding credit card debt. This is fantastic, and my wife and I are thrilled.

The only problem I have with the refund is that it shouldn't be so high, you know, the whole interest-free-loan to the government. Part of the reason our refund was high is because I was a college student for half of the year and as a result my year-end bonus was artificially low making my total income for the year artificially low. Hence, we were still able to do our taxes online for free with H&R Block.

We also qualified for a child tax credit which added around $2000 to our refund.

I really thought that our refund was going to be lower this year though, especially after it looked like I had one too many Federal Allowances on my W-4 (according to the online tool). So I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to give the government an interest-free-loan, but I'm not sure if I can/should increase my withholdings? This calls for more research into the convoluted mess that is our tax system.

Dear readers, any advice? (Besides consult with your tax advisor :P)

Tags: tax refund taxes personal finance

I know I've been pretty tough on gambling before, specifically the lottery (see guide). Rightfully so due to the negative expected values, but there are ways to make money from gambling that are not illegal.

The problem is that these methods are not easy. They require hard work and skill, much like anything else worth doing in life. One of the most sure-fire ways to have a positive expected value when gambling is card counting in black-jack.

Now to be clear, card counting is not illegal. Casinos have taken card-counters to court before and the courts decided that since the player was not altering the fundamentals of the game, that what they were doing is not illegal. All a card-counter does is keep track of the cards in their head as they are played and then alters their bets once it becomes more favorable to do so.

However, casinos are in the business of making money, so anyone suspected of card counting will be asked to stop and/or leave.

That is the subject of the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich. It's the story of 6 MIT kids who take Vegas for millions! Wow, sounds exciting doesn't it, and the book does a great job of giving the reader that excitement. You follow the shy, geeky Kevin Lewis as he plays Vegas and amass more money than he knows how to handle.

The book details how the MIT students worked in teams to increase their odds substantially. It was a really fun book to read filled with strippers, NBA players and various other colorful characters.

What struck me, however, was that the techniques described in the book required a large amount of dedication, skill, and coordination. But my one main complaint with the book is that the difficulty of card counting can be lost on the reader as they get caught up in the excitement and the robin-hood-esque steal from the big corporation and give...to myself. There is a lot of that in the book. Mezrich does a good job of making us feel sympathetic for the card-counters when they are being kicked out of casinos even after they try to disguise themselves. Not that we shouldn't feel some sympathy, but we should realize that what they were doing entitled risks, especially since the card-counters were using several fake IDs to hide their true identities.

Overall, a fun book, not too long so it's a quick read. Keep those precautions in mind and don't try to do this at home (or Vegas for that matter).

Tags: bringing down the house gambling

I love getting comments. It's another way to see that people are actually out there reading your blog. Page views are one thing, but having someone take time out of their busy day to leave a comment is the highest form of flattery.

I even like the comments that disagree with me (you know who you are)! But in all seriousness, I do appreciate the comments.

So leave comments :)

I figure since I've had a bevy of new visitors that I'd make a guide to my blog.

First, an introduction. Hi, I'm Frank the FSA. I'm a 22-year old atheist father of two (soon to be three) that is obsessed with personal finance. Yes, I know my profile says I'm 23, that's because my bday is later this year, as far as I'm concerned, I'm still 22 :) (I'm talking to you Uberkuh).

You might remember me from such blog carnivals as: The Carnival of the Godless, God or Not, The Carnival of Personal Finance, and most recently The Carnival of Investing.

I started this blog soley to speak about atheism inspired by I AM over at The Evangelical Atheist, but once I discovered 2million's blog, I knew I wanted to blog about personal finances as well. So at the start of the year, I revamped the blog and started talking about personal finance.

Here are some of what I consider to be my best posts:

I don't think atheism is a religion. There are many reasons why I think god doesn't exists, here's one, and here is another one provided by Michael Reynolds over at the mighty middle.

I've wondered how I'd talk to my kids about atheism when they get older and why we don't go to church while their classmates do. Oh, and being an atheist doesn't take as much faith as being a theist.

When I first began blogging about personal finance, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Jim over at Bargaineering.

Here's why playing the lottery is a bad idea. And here's why again, and one last time.

If you want to know how much my wife and I spent eating out over several months, well, here you go. It might surprise you, I know it surprised me.

I have many many financial goals and here's why I have that specific net worth target.

I like doing spreadsheets and here is one showing how much money you make on 0% balance transfers.

You've probabyly been hearing a lot about prosper.com the new person-to-person lending site, well there are risks associated with the site and I was delighted to know that someone from prosper read my blogbut it also made me realize that I was blogging about prosper too much.

To round things off, this is why I hate Jesse Jackson and here's my take on the tax cuts.

Whew, thanks for taking a look at my guide. I leave you with my favorite quote:

The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden fight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tags: personal finance atheism atheist prosper

I've been linked to by The Raving Atheist in this post! This is one of the biggest atheist blogs in the blogosphere and one of the first that I started reading (hence the addition on my blogroll). It's like Tom Cruise publicly acknowledging your existence. You know what that makes me? It makes me the Flavor Flav of the blog world, albeit temporarily.

Wow, TRA. Thanks so much for the mention. As gratitude, I will be giving you a small 10% finders fee from the adsense money that I've made as a result. Please let me know where to mail your $0.10 check. Alternatively, I could donate said $0.10 to a charity of your choosing. Let me know what you decide, thanks buddy.

I'm trying to talk some co-workers out of wasting $15 on the $365 million powerball. Unfortunately, no such luck so far. These are people that know that they are wasting their money (i.e. negative expected value), but still insist "Somebody's gotta win".

Oh well, I will keep trying.


Tags: personal finance powerball

...been busy at work, go fig :)

I just ran across this interesting article in the economist about the origin of life . It mentions the famous Miller experiment and some of the latest hypotheses of how life came to be on a primordial earth. Fascinating.

Tags: origin of life science economist interesting article

Jonathan from www.mymoneyblog.com left a comment about my post on the fake prosper.com arbitrage: (link:)

Umm... it's a bit hard to arbitrage when you are borrowing at higher rates than you are lending, isn't it? ;)

Exactly right Jonathan. But if you recall, the "fake arbitrage" came from my near-sighted-ness. I took a look at how much money I'd have after 3 years under two scenarios:

- scenario 1: put $15,000 in Emigrant Direct for 3 years @ 4.25% and after 3 years $16,995.

- scenario 2: lend $15,000 on prosper.com @ 7% and after 3 years you have $16,674.

So seemingly I had an arbitrage opportunity, possibly due to the differences in quoting interest rates. However, let me be clear, this is the COMPLETELY WRONG type of analysis. There is NO ARBITRAGE, and I realize that, I just wanted to point out the error of my thinking, plus I thought it would be funny.

The devil is in the details. The total amount of interest in year 1 from Emigrant Direct is $638, while the total amount of interest in year 1 from your prosper loan is $902. The timing of the interest payments plays a crucial role in determining how much money you make overall.

Not only that, but once you receive that interest payment from your prosper loan, you could either bank it, or lend it out again, thereby making it even more profitable for you than just Emigrant Direct. So you know what that means, it's time for another spreadsheet!

To explain what's going on here:
1.) You lend out $10,000 @ a rate of 10%.
2.) After getting your monthly payment, you immediately deposit the money in the bank to get your 4.25% APY.
3.) After a total of three years, assuming no prepayments and no defaults, you end up with a total of $12,352 .

So there is a (more) proper analysis of lending money on prosper.com.

Tags: personal finance prosper investment opportunity

Wow, that's when you know you've been blogging about one topic too much. Here is the quote in all it's glory:

Hi guys,

Andrew from Prosper here - there is definitely an opportunity for arbitrage on the marketplace, but you should realize that if you can't cover your losses because you've loaned your money to high-risk borrowers who default, it will be your credit score that gets smacked down (along with the high-risk borrowers' score, of course). And with a lower credit score, the arbitrage won't be quite as lucrative.

Anyway, it sounds like you guys understand the implications, but I wanted to make sure everyone reading this blog realizes it, too. (Cue NBC "The more you know..." shooting star...)

Andrew, thanks for checking out the blog, appreciate it. One question I have for you guys is this: are you going to be releasing data to lenders about the historical performance of your loans? Not only defaults and recoveries from default, but also some measure of prepayments like a CPR (link: http://www.cbtworldwide.com/glossary.htm#C)? I'd be really curious to know.

I contend that while defaults are important, prepayments can be just as important in terms of trying to figure out your expected duration/maturity of the loan as well as how much interest you should expect to make. You have a measure of default risk already, but currently no measure of prepayment risk (other than the Borrower telling you about it).

Cool, a great way to start the day.

Tags: personal finance prosper prosper.com

I've got money on the brain. Doesn't everyone. In many ways I am fortunate when it comes to money. My annual salary puts me in the top quartile in the USA (according to www.ntu.org for the year 2003). That means (roughly speaking) that I make more than 75% of the United States straight out of college. I would say that I am extremely fortunate.

Couple that with the fact that I work in an industry (finance) that is known to pay well, and the future looks bright.

However, I worry about money all the time. My wife is not currently working, and we just recently found out that she's pregnant with our third child (due in September), so she won't be working anytime soon! We're excited, we hope it's a girl this time. At the same time it means that I'm going to be the only one working for a while.

All this increases the amount of time I worry about money. Why? Even though I make a great income, and my wife and I are frugal and getting better with our money, I still worry about being able to provide the best for my children. Like most parents I want to make sure my kids have everything that I didn't growing up. I think I'm off to a good start so far, they have a relationship with their father, which is more than I had at that their age.

It all seems so overwhelming at times. Juggling the balance between work and family, planning for the future financially, planning for retirement, planning for the kids college, it can overwhelm and make one despondent.

That's how I feel sometimes. When I get home tonight, I plan on talking with my wife about it and she'll make me feel better. We'll talk and plan some more and try to make sure we stop and smell the roses before it gets too late. What more can a simple guy ask for in life.

Tags: personal finance money

Ok, so my post about prosper.com arbitrage last time wasn't really arbitrage, but there is an (obvious) arbitrage opportunity here. You can just arb your credit score. That's what this guy is doing (partially).

You would borrow at your pristine AA grade and then lend to people with lower credit grades, like this guy.

This isn't true arbitrage as there is a degree of risk involved, but if done correctly, could be profitable.

So there you go.
Tags: personal finance arbitrage prosper prosper.com investment opportunity

I have www.prosper.com on the brain for some reason. I was playing around in Excel, and I was trying to see if I could arb my good credit score. Follow me on my roller-coaster ride from arbitrage-ridden riches back to reality.

Say I take out a $15,000 loan on prosper at 7% for 3 years. My monthly payment is $463/month. After three years, the total amount of payments made will be $16,673.63.

If I take that $15,000 and invest it in my Emigrant Direct account current APY 4.25%, I will have a total of $16,995.

That's a difference of more than $300. My immediate thought was arbitrage. Actually, it was more like HOLY F*CKING SH*T I'M GOING TO BE RICH. (cough cough).

However, arbitrage is rarely that easy, so I opened up my trusty 0% balance transfer excel spreadsheet, and after a few modifications came up with the following:

*sigh*, I knew it was too good to be true.

Oh well, back to the drawing board :)

"Neither a borrower, nor a lender be."
— W. Shakespeare, Hamlet

HT to Money Musings for the highly appropriate quote from Shakespeare.

For those who haven't heard yet, www.prosper.com is a person-to-person lending website that connects borrowers and lenders. Jeff over at pfadvice has a really good introduction to the site here . Right now there are more than 70 people looking to borrow money for a variety of reasons.

It's a really interesting idea, and I'm all for it. The idea is to take banks out of the middle and let people give loans to each other. Borrowers would be able to get better rates and lenders could get a better return for their money. Prosper sits in the middle taking 1% from the Borrower and .5% from the Lender thereby following Shakespeare's advice. All this sounds great...but what are some of the risks to lenders who try this out. I'll be discussing two types of risks that Lenders are exposed to: default risk and prepayment risk.

The easiest risk to understand and tackle is default risk. This is the risk that the Borrower won't pay you back at all. The site makes this pretty easy to handle, first they have a credit grade for the Borrower which corresponds to their credit score. When lending, they give you a historical default probability to help with pricing your loan. You set how comfortable you are lending money to people with a variety of credit scores. They also give you their debt-to-income ratio on a monthly basis. Not only that, but you can diversify by lending to many different borrowers. As a last resort, you can turn to a professional collection agency to help with bad borrowers. All this should help provide adequate measures to help Lenders mitigate default risks.

Prepayment risk however, is much more difficult to mitigate. This is the risk that the Borrower will pay some or all of the loan off early. Why is this a risk? For a couple of reasons. One, it reduces the yield and maturity that you were expecting for the loan. If you lent someone $10,000 @ 9% for three years, you're expecting to make $1447.89 in interest payments over the entire 3 years of the loan. If that person decides to make double the monthly payments every month, you now only make $680.75 in interest payments for 17 months. Now, you're going to have to reinvest those proceeds earlier than you expected. Two, when you do reinvest, you might have to do so in unappealing circumstances, meaning at a lower interest rate for a given level of risk. So in the end, you make less money.

In addition to that type of prepayment, there is also the chance that the Borrower will refinance. Suppose that a Borrower with a 'D' credit grade uses Prosper to consolidate their outstanding high-interest credit cards at 14%. After a year of making payments on time and being wise with their credit, they now have a credit grade of 'B'. They could now refinance their outstanding prosper loan, using prosper again, at 8%. ALternatively, they might even be able to take out a 0% balance transfer. You have now gone from a terrific Borrower who made timely monthly payments at 14% to a terrific Borrower who will make timely payments at 8%, or even not making payments at all. On top of that now that they're in a better credit grade, there will be more Lenders (potentially) vying for their loan and pushing the interest rate lower. That leaves you making less than the 16% you anticipated.

Plus I would argue that right now prosper is not very efficient. You can get great rates on pretty high quality Borrowers. Once more people are involved, it could puch rates lower and make it less profitable for Lenders. This could also affect prepayments/refinancing because previous Borrowers will be aware that rates have gone down and will refinance in the ensuing competitive environment.

Quantifying prepayment risk can be done, but with a lack of data on prosper Borrowers, that will remain a difficult risk to quantify for some time.

These are the two main risks (financially speaking) that I forsee with prosper.com. I would add that other risks on the horizon are potential security risks from identity thefts. Extension risk, the risk that what was once a three year loan now becomes a 5 year loan. Not sure if that would be possible in the current state of the site. Another risk is whether there will be enough Borrowers to provide adequate diversification for Lenders.

It's an interesting idea that I'll be watching for potential investment opportunities. What are people's thoughts on any other risks that I've missed?

2 things for sale:
- $25 GC to Eddie Bauer
- $100 Lowes Gift Card

Don't want to have to put it on Ebay unless I have to, email me if interested frankyj009 at yahoo. Thanks.

You may now return to your normally scheduled program :)

Atheist have heard (or will hear) this retort several times: "Being an atheist takes as much faith as someone who believes in god". While I haven't had to deal with this specific retort yet, my reply would simply be why? Why does atheism take as much faith as being a theist? Lest we forget, faith is believing something that does not rely on logic or evidence. It does not rely on any kind of material, tangible , real "thing".

A theist says I believe in God, which requires faith. An atheist says god doesn't exists, since you can't prove a negative, we're done, and the need for faith is non-existent. There is nothing required for a non-belief. Do you have "faith" that there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or tiny aliens living in your body causing all sorts of illnesses? Or do you simply know these things to be true?

What most of these people actually mean can just be boiled down to Pascal's Wager. I would suspect that the common answer to my "why does my atheist position require faith" would be, well, if you're wrong, you're going to burn in hell, so therefore, your atheist position takes a lot of faith. At this point the conversation is almost certainly lost as stating that you don't believe in hell, or turning it back on them and asking them what if their wrong and Jesus was just a guy, will generally not lead you anywhere.

Let's review: atheism does not require as much faith as theism. To live your life rationally, and to be skeptical of those who make extraordinary claims whether they be theists, psychics, or quacks by demanding evidence does not require faith. It most certainly makes life more difficult, as to quote Penn Jillette:

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

So maybe I am mistaken, because it seems that in order to be an atheist, you really do have to have faith...in your fellow human beings.

Earlier this year, I received a slight shock when my monthly mortgage payment increased. At first I thought that it was an error (and actually, it did turn out to be an error) but it turned out that my property taxes had increased for the year.

Why does the mortgage company care if you pay your taxes? Simply because the town you live in has first lien on the property. That's right, if you don't pay your taxes, you are out of there and the mortgage company is left with little recourse. The mortgage company recognizes that they are at risk if you don't pay your taxes, so they force you to pay every month to mitigate their risk.

I was under the erroneous impression that the escrow was something temporary and then my wife and I would be on our own, but I was mistaken. For the life of my loan, we will always have to make the escrow payment. I asked if I could do a self-escrow, but they said that option is only for people with 15-year mortgages. The main reason I wanted to self-escrow is that in calculating the required monthly payment increase, they took the actual increase that my taxes went up plus a "cushion" of 16%. Now I realize that I will get that money back at the end of the year plus (minimal) interest. That being said, I thought I'd pass this little tidbit on to others who might have to deal with this later on in life. Be aware of it when planning your monthly expenditure for buying a house.

The Yield Curve inverted some more today. The 30 year rate is now lower than the 3 month rate. The yield curve has been inverted for some time now, but it hasn't been fully inverted until yesterday/today. What does this mean? It means that we are headed into a recession...maybe. At the very least a slow-down. People consider the yield curve to be a leading indicator for the state of the economy. In the last 6 out of 10 (or 7 out of 10) times that the curve inverted, we've had a recession in the economy. So go fig.

The normal yield curve is upward sloping, which make sense. If I tell you that I need to borrow money for 3 months, you'll give me a better rate (all else being equal) than if I told you that I needed to borrow money for 30 years. With more time, you have more risks, so you expect to be compensated for that risk.

We'll see how this yield curve plays out later.


Here's a graph of the current yield curve.

Now I know why people are Republican, because taxes suck. Filing taxes suck. Paying taxes suck. Having your company mess up up your taxes requiring you to do more work than is necessary to get money that was yours in the first place really, really sucks.

Things were so bad that last night when my son woke up at 2:00 AM crying, I initially thought that he was crying because the US tax system was so complicated*. After shaking the cobwebs from my mind, I realized that taxes suck even more and went to try and figure out what was wrong with him (he's fine, you know how 1 year olds are).

Everyone repeat after me: the US tax system makes quantum physics look easy, the US tax system makes quantum physics look easy, the US tax system makes quantum physics look easy,the US tax system makes quantum physics look easy...

Alright, end rant now.

*This happens to me sometimes at night when I'm groggy and my kids wake me up crying. One time I thought that they were crying because they couldn't figure out a cash-flow number for a company. Yep, I do project things on my kids :)

Boondocks vs Al Sharpton
Al Sharpton (yes, that moron again) is demanding an apology from Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder’s and Cartoon Network for an episode that aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim depicting MLK Jr saying the 'n' word. Article Link here.

I saw the episode in question and thought it was very well done. The premise of the episode is that MLK Jr has been in a coma for 30 years and has rewoken in the post 9/11 world. He comes back to find himself considered a terrorist sympathizer because he advises us to "turn the other cheek" when dealing with terrorist. After viewing modern television (i.e. BET) and it's depictions of black americans, he finds himself disheartened. With the help of the main character, MLK Jr attempts to rally blacks to once again become involved in the world around them. MLK becomes incessed when he sees what has become of modern black culture (namely, the elements of hiphop, rap and etc). In one scene King shouts, "Will you ignorant n***as please shut the hell up?!" What follows is a well-written diatribe as King verbally lambasts black americans for forgetting those who have died before them and failing to live up to "the" dream. For me, it was a moving and poigant part of the episode.

Sharpton is gravely mistaken to be demanding an apology. If he could forget about the use of the 'n' word for one minute and listen to the underlying message, he could see that he actually agrees with what Aaron McGruder is trying to saw about the modern black american. Unfortunately, Sharpton joins the ranks of the same people who would ban Mark Twain's Huck Finn for copious amounts of the 'n' word and spreading hatred.

Shifting gears a little bit, I found this thoughtful and personal post on school vouchers from Michael Reynolds over at the Mighty Middle entitled "Drug 'Em, or Dump 'Em". I highly recommend that post, as well as the blog itself.

I have a boy and a girl. The boy is our biological son, the result of mingling my wife's DNA and mine, poor kid. He has a genius level IQ and the social skills of . . . well, me. My daughter was adopted from China at age three. She'd been abandoned at age eight months, probably because of a medical condition that required major surgery. My son's first three years of life were spent being drenched in nutrition and stimuli and all the good stuff the modern parent inflicts on a child. My daughter's first three years were spent losing a mother and father, spending some quality time in a rural hospital, then sitting ignored in one of China's less admirable orphanages while all the little girls without dramatic surgical scars were adopted out.

Read more. It's well worth it.

It's Monday, time for some carnivals:
- Carnival of the Godless #33 is up at Superlicious
- The Carnival of Personal Finance #34 is up at Financial Reference

I have post that are featured in both, but I especially liked Financial Reference's way of contrasting my post with this post from Don't Mess with Taxes. This line was particularly funny:

If you haven’t convinced yourself that lotterys are a bad deal, check out Frank the Atheist’s reason why he has no faith — in the lottery.

Fantastic. Enjoy.

This month saw our net worth fall precipitously to $400. This is primarily due to more credit card debt as we finish up our home remodeling (so long december bonus). I have set our year-end net worth goal to $10,000. About $2,000 of that will come from our 401(k) which we will start funding in the middle of the year.

On a more positive note, I'm moving up in the ecosystem! I'm now a Crunchy Crustacean. A little bit of bad and a little bit of good.

Everyone needs to sign up for this ASAP. They are a legitimate survey site that gets rave reviews all the time. I just signed up and I hope that I'm chosen. Here is the link I used
http://www.internetpaidsurveys.com/survey/pinecone1.htm

Here is some more information about it from another blog:
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/archives/2005/10/bored_money_pin.html

They pay like $2 for 15-20 minutes surveys, best of luck!

Disclaimer: no, I don't get any money for referring people.

This is sobering to say the least:
From Sept until now, based on our Visa statement, we spent $790 on dining out! Thats around $160/month! We only spent $423 on groceries! We've spent almost twice as much money eating out as we did on groceries! My apologies to my more religious readers, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ what the hell are we doing!

Ok, the first step is to realize that you have a problem. So here's the game plan:
1. No eating out for 3 weeks. No McDonalds, no Dunkin Donuts, no oh so good and tempting Chinese Buffett.
2. After that 3 week period, we reward ourselves by taking the family out to a nice seafood restaurant where we were able to get a $25 gift certificate.
3. Track expenses in MS Money. Really need to do a better job with this, anyone know if this can be automated?
3. Rinse and Repeat every month.

Google never ceases to amaze me, here is an adwords ad that ironically, kind of combines what my blog is about: personal finance and atheism.


Well, at least that is one way of doing it.