They Want To Take Your Tunes

House Bill 2228

Is a ban on carrying children under 6 years of age on a bicycle or in a bicycle trailer. Doing so costs $90.

Yep, you read right. An Oregon Representative named Mitch Greenlick (D-Portland) is introducing some legislation that would keep parents from riding to school and grocery stores with their kids towed in bike trailers or tag-alongs.

House Bill 2602

Will prohibit cyclists from riding while wearing a “listening device that is capable of receiving telephonic communication, radio broadcasts or recorded sounds.”

If you listen to music while you ride, you’d get a $90 ticket. This winner is introduced by Representative Mike Schaufler (D-Happy Valley).

Clearly these guys have way too much time on their hands. Neither has evidence that support theories that bike trailers are unsafe or that listening to music while riding a bike is unsafe.

Getting Dollar Coins into Circulation

US Dollar Coins

Gabe (Flickr)

I’m looking to change the US currency system. I’m one of those folks that is looking to abolish the penny and now I want to get rid of paper dollars. With the penny, I just think we should stop using the one-cent piece and round everything to the nearest five cents. With the dollar, I want to switch to dollar coins.

They’re very durable and have a much greater life span than paper currency. Some stats report that a paper dollar lasts about two years in circulation and a dollar coin lasts about 30 years. The cost per month for the coin is lower thus we’d save money by thinking long-term. Of course, we would have to get used to using coins more often…

I was at Tampa International Airport a couple of weeks ago and was getting a beverage costing $2.67. I hand over the $3 in dollar coins and the cashier is very confused. She asks a co-worker if they can accept this. We both respond, “yes”. She hesitates a bit more and I ask for my change and then she responds with “How much is this?”.

Is Your Wealth Determined By Your Home?

The image above is part of an interesting info-graphic I stumbled upon over at mint.com. The message is pretty clear: Most Americans put a huge portion of their money into their house. This has a big impact on an individual’s overall net worth in that they likely don’t have much left over to buy into stocks. And when the housing market tumbles, they take a huge hit.

The first line chart to the right is the S&P 500 (500 biggest companies). You can clearly see where the recession occurred and the market dropped in a big way. But, do you see how the S&P is already back to about 85% of it’s pre-recession value? The second line chart is Apple Computer for the past five years. If your money was in Apple computer before the recession then you’d have doubled your money DURING A RECESSION.

The other cool observation we can make from this is that if most of your net pay wasn’t going to the mortgage holder, you could have bought into Apple during the recession and tripled your money in just two years.

What does all of this really mean? You need to know how much of your money is tied up into one major asset, your house. You also need to know what the opportunity cost is. The wealthy 10% only spend a tiny fraction on their homes and are able to diversify into other investments like Apple, Amazon, and Akamai (there are interesting stocks out there that don’t begin with the letter A). When a recession does hit, that wealthy 10% can buy into companies/investments that have a real shot at gaining big value in just a few years while home prices will take much longer to recover.

• Spend less than 25% of your income on housing. If that means renting instead of buying, great. There’s a lot logic to going that route.
• Diversify your assets. If you feel like you have to think of your house as an investment, then at least make it one of the dozen or so investments in your portfolio.
• Give yourself options. Free up income by getting rid of debt. That way, when real opportunities arise you’ve got the funds to take advantage.