Moneyball...

Michael M. Lewis wrote the 2003 book of the same title about the Oakland Athletics, who used close analysis of statistics to help itself assemble competitive teams despite a financial disadvantage.

While that may be a very tiny niche - no one I know personally needs to assemble a professional baseball team, let alone do it on a "budget" - but the idea speaks to the general population. Most citizens of the US are not Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. We have to do a lot on a little. And it would, probably, serve us well if we used researched facts to do it.

Lewis is back with another money-focused book. An excerpt of it is published in this month's issue of Vanity Fair. It's incredibly long - eight web pages - but the story he tells of Mike Burry is fascinating. Burry is one of the few men in America, and possibly the world, who saw the sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent economic collapse coming. And due to a market wrinkle he invented, he made a lot of people rich.

The stock market is a funny creature. Some might call it a terrible beast when it doesn't go their way, but it seems to me, in all my limited knowledge of it, that you can really do something if you have the guts to ride it out.

Grace Groner sat on an $180 investment made in 1935 and turned it into a $7 million gift to her alma mater on her death. A survivor of the original Great Depression, Groner lived frugally her entire life. According to the Chicago Tribune, when she died at 100, Groner left a tiny house with a few pieces of furniture and a fortune nearly no one knew she had. She had made a small bequest to her college and had funded anonymous charitable gifts in the past, but the president of Lake Forest College was stunned when he received word of the donation.

Perhaps it is the Midwest monetary restraint that served Groner and another world famous investor well. Warren Buffett has made billions by being a value investor - something touched on in the first story of this post - and buying up stocks from incredibly undervalued companies while those stocks are cheap. Once the company "makes it," Buffett's portfolio shows an often significant bump. A lot of people have tried to imitate him, but no one has ever really succeeded. Nevertheless, Yahoo! has posted five rules that Buffett uses to guide his own investing. While I have no idea how I would use them, they do seem to make a great deal of sense.

Age ain't nuthin' but a number...

My roommate got "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" from Netflix the other day. I read the original story on Project Gutenberg, and the premise of a man aging backwards intrigued me. It does seem a little unfair that the simplest and sometimes easiest parts of life are when you're too young to appreciate them, and when you've finally earned the right to relax, you have health problems and other issues that aren't fun. 

Thankfully, today's stories all refuse to conform to that standard.

The New York Daily News posted a story on Marty Alvey, a 90 year-old great-great grandfather, who suddenly got his sight back after being declared legally blind for many years. Doctors are at a loss to explain what happened, but Alvey is treasuring the chance to look at photos of his family and say hi to friends and neighbors. I love his quote at the very end of the story - so dear. 

Alvey's overwhelming appreciation for getting his sight back and all the little things that come with that is certainly an example of this next article. Studies released by the American Psychological Association has shown that happiness and mental health improve with time. According to a US News article, older adults are better able to limit negative influences and are less likely to let negative comments affect them, thus limiting stressful situations. 

South Carolinian Solomon Jackson, Jr. will likely not have to worry about negativity. The 63 year-old retired state employee recently won a $260M Powerball jackpot, according to Yahoo! News. Beating the odds of 1 in 195 million, Jackson has won the largest jackpot won by a ticket bought in South Carolina. Despite now being very, very, very rich, Jackson seems to fit right in with the spirit of the previous two articles - happy, healthy, humble and enjoying his life. 

(Photo courtesy of Yahoo!)

There's no place like home...

I moved yesterday for the eighth time in nine years. 

Just let that sink in for a second. 

And with any luck, next summer I will move for the ninth time in 10 years. In fact, as I watched my furniture enter my newest apartment, I mentally inventoried what would not be coming with me next year. It was comforting.

Our place still looks like a bomb went off, even after two days of organizing. Granted, now it looks more like it was a poorly constructed homemade bomb rather than one of the atomic variety, but still, more chaos than I'm totally comfortable with.

However, karma came down on me like an anvil this morning (the timing!). I remembered I should be grateful for having a roof over my head when I found two stories about homeless individuals. Oddly enough they both involved those people having more personal wealth than I will probably see in a lifetime. 

Zee News reported on the donation of $100,000 to Hebrew University in Jerusalem from the estate of a homeless woman in Manhattan. The woman, a Holocaust survivor, died two years ago at the age of 92 and requested her donation be used for scholarships for medical research students. Her last known job was for a New Yorker who paid her in room and board for moving his car around to avoid parking tickets. 

In the other story, a homeless man named Richard Walters left an unexpected $4 million in gifts to charities in Phoenix, Ariz. Walters, also deceased in 2007, was a retired engineer and apparently renounced worldly goods when he left the working world. According to a friend at the Catholic Mission, he slept on the mission's grounds, used its telephone and ate in its cafeteria. Among his few possessions was a radio; he enjoyed NPR's programming and included the station in his will, according to the NPR website. 

(Photo courtesy of wetcircuit.com)

Messages in celluloid...

I have a cousin who is much younger than me; when he was little, his proclivity for running around the house in his underwear earned him the nickname "SpongeBob No-Pants." Predictably, he hated it and often proclaimed his disgust for the show.

SpongeBob SquarePants debuted 10 years ago this spring. If you were to tell me that 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it out of hand. I was still babysitting then and well-versed in kids shows. I'd seen SBSQ and thought it was stupid, bordering on occasionally gross. But James Parker wrote an article in the June issue of "The Atlantic" that made me re-examine the show more closely for meaning I had not previously attributed to SpongeBob. 

That article pushed me toward re-thinking other cartoons and looking for lessons hidden in the technicolor. Sneaky adults, trying to sandwich morality between mythical blue creatures wearing white mushroom-shaped hats and multi-colored bears with magical powers in their tummies...

Yahoo! News had an article this morning on a movie remake of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" that is in the works. Studios are trying to ride the rodent wave begun with "Ratatouille" and continued by "The Tale of Desperaux" and "G-Force." I have to confess, when I read the Newbery medal-winning book years ago, I had a hard time with it. The feeling of having to slog through it comes back to me. I think I struggled to keep all the rats straight. However, as the article pointed out, refreshing my memory, the story - Mrs. Frisby needing the help of former lab rats to move her sick son and escape from imminent death-by-farmer's plow - does have a distinct parable regarding evolution and community about  in it. 

I wish the subject of my last story had been around when I was younger. The New York Times previewed a new web-based (the things they come up with these days...) cartoon-series that will "air" on the AOL website and feature an animated version of super-investor Warren Buffet. The series, called "The Secret Millionaires Club," aims to teach 6-11 year-olds how to be responsible with money and avoid pitfalls like credit cards and impatient investing. While I had no credit cards and no concept of the stock market when I was younger, kids do these days, and it's a smart move to arm them with information now, while they are still adaptable enough to absorb it. 

(Image courtesy of the New York Times)