A Brash Cash Stash

Do you remember the Super Bowl ad with the baby talking about how easy it was to use E-Trade, and then spitting up? For me, that was the most powerful moment in television history. It convinced me to go blow $200 without having a clue what I was doing.

I've always been tempted by the stock market. Corporate America makes zillions of dollars off everyday schmucks like me. Maybe, if I play my cards right, I can own a piece of corporate America.

The problem is, I have no idea what my cards mean. They have funny acronyms on them, like “DJIA,” “NASDAQ,” and “SELL.” Who knows what on earth any of those things stand for?

But I refuse to let The Man keep me down. Instead, I'll do some research for a few minutes and pass along my findings.

Then you and I can be The Man, keeping other people down. It's the American Way.

Let's start with the basics. The “stock market” is a place where you can buy “shares” of certain corporations. In other words, you could own a tiny fraction of Sears, for example.

Keep that in mind the next time you visit Sears, if one of their employees – sorry, one of YOUR employees -- looks askance at you for swiping a knob off a washing machine, just stride up to that person and ask indignantly if they even know who you are.

“I could have you fired” should be the words you use to greet anyone who looks like they might try to sell you a lawnmower.

Anyway, financial advisors will tell you that the stock market is the most risky place to put your money, but it's also the only way to make any serious coin over the long haul.

If you're a baby-boomer and you would rather not risk losing your entire retirement savings right now, you could consider bonds.

Much is made of the the gigantic national debt, but few people realize that some of that debt is owed to ordinary Americans. Growing up in the '80s, I remember seeing those cheesy commercials for U. S. Savings Bonds. Little did I realize that my government was basically jonesing for a fix.

“Come on, man. I'll pay you back, you know I will.”

You can also get corporate bonds, which financial experts consider a bit less secure because corporations, unlike governments, can sometimes go belly-up.

I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.

Personally, I have a lot of my money in mutual funds. Here's how it works: You and a bunch of other hopeless drooling losers contribute a bunch of money to a giant “fund” that is carefully managed and invested by some jerk with a red BMW and a hands-free cell phone.

Because a true professional is deciding how to invest your money, your returns should be larger, perhaps even big enough to pay the fees charged by the true professional.

That's all I've figured out so far, but hopefully I've inspired you to take control of your finances, study the inner workings of capitalism, and then maybe spit up like that kid on TV.

When Mite Makes Fright

“Do you realize you’re breathing this in?” The salesman showed me a picture of a dust mite blown up to 10,000 times its normal size. It turns out dust mites look like evil alien spiders.

“Dust mites feed off dead skin cells,” he explained. “And because they eat, I don’t have to tell you what they leave behind.”

At this exact moment I almost caved and bought the $1700 vacuum cleaner, unable to bear the thought of my family breathing in millions of tiny insects and particles of insect poop and insect toilet paper.

We had invited this man, named Chuck (why do all the sleazy people have to be named Chuck?), into our home to clean our carpet for free. Once we went over it with our plain-old $80 Eureka, he lifted about 71 pounds of dirt out of the floor with his NASA-type industrial monster sucking machine.

Then he used it on the bed. Eeeew. It made me want to start sleeping upright.

Fortunately, I realized that both my wife and I had grown up breathing insect poop, as did our parents and grandparents, with no ill impact on our health. Breathing insect poop is, and always has been, the American Way. If a cheap, $80 vacuum was good enough for Abe Lincoln, it’s good enough for us.

Besides, the main source of filth in our house is not dead skin cells, it’s dog hair. Our dogs shed pounds of fur at random moments throughout the year, as if their bodies anticipate spring every time the furnace kicks on.

Our current vacuum does a marvelous job picking up dog hair, even when we don’t use it directly on the dogs. It also does fine with the other primary sources of filth in our house: glitter, bits of food, chewed-up diapers, and the television (ba-dum-CHING).

When I pointed all this out to Chuck, and told him that I would be happy continuing to pretend that dust mites do not exist, he knew I had beaten him. He needed a way to link bug excrement with AIDS or syphilis or giant cancerous goiters, and he did not have one.

I said, thanks for stopping by to remove dirt from our carpet and from the earth under our house, but no sale. We just want our floors to look clean, and we can achieve that with our current vacuum.

How silly of me to think I could get rid of a salesman that easily. Over the next 90 minutes I tried a myriad of other lines, including:

- We need the money to pay for my emergency armpit gland surgery.

- Oh my God, the house is on fire!

- My new anti-gravity invention will soon make floors obsolete.

- We don’t have the money.

We eventually got him to leave by pointing out the house across the street, which is about four times the size of ours. Their SUV has more carpeting than our entire living room.

We waved goodbye to Chuck. Except for the mornings when I wake up with that icky taste in my mouth, I haven’t thought about dust mites since.