Financial Fruition

What a hoot! Let’s regulate corporate financial reporting by upping the time required to file your company’s Annual Report. Hey Mr. (or Ms.) Government, do you really think you are going to have so called, BETTER numbers by reporting them 2 weeks earlier?

To be honest (it was March 31st, then March 15th for last year, now the end of February for 2006), it really kind of ticks me off that our government imposes rules like these because it’s completely backasswards. So that we can regulate companies better, we will just have them report numbers on a quicker basis, without consideration to what effect it may have on someone who is responsible for completetion of the Annual Report. Might it not cause undue stress, which could lead to errors?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am mostly for the regulations contained within Sarbanes Oxley (thank you Enron!). They do serve the consumer and general public, I won’t argue that. However, what about the people who put together a document such as the annual report? The bean counters and marketing people who actually DO the annual report. Our annual report used to be a normal project for me at the beginning of the year. This year, it is an enitre additional job! Now I have to still work on normal projects, while trying to work on the annual report at night. Ridiculous.

Needless to say, this is my reason for not posting that much, plus the fact that I had a death in the family in late January. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll be in a more jovial mode.

Well one thing I know for sure that I would not invest in is 1 of 12 General Motors Futureliners ever made. I’m not sure, but I really hope a museum invested in this monstrosity. This custom made bus from the early 1950s, was up at this year’s Barrett Jackson auction. Last year at this auction they had a concept car from the mid-1950s cross the block at $3 million. There are many better things I could think to do with this amount of money than spending it on some one-off vehicle that you can’t really drive.

The craze of investing in collector cars has become more mainstream in the past few years. BusinessWeek has a section with articles on Collecting Cars. Speed Channel devoted 30+ live hours to this years Barrett Jackson Arizona auction (I watched about two hours of it!).

From what I’ve read and heard, muscle car collecting is all the rage now. Most of the cars I saw cross the auction block were 60’s muscle cars: Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs, Road Runners, etc. This, reportedly, stems from the baby boomer generation, who grew up wanting these cars around the age they were legal to drive. What was then a dream, can now become reality as they have amassed their savings and want to spend it on accumulating one, or a few, of these cars they idolized.

What do you think? Is it crazy to spend $50,000-$100,000 on you dream collector car?

A Single Guy and his Money is a newer blog I’ve found. Billed as a 28 year old single professional male playing the money game, the author, Singleguymoney, has received a slew of comments regarding his most recent Networth update. Among these were some very detailed and intricate comments questioning his large bank balance and large credit card balance. Most people thought he should pay down his cc debt with the large bank balance. In response to these comments regarding his networth he outlined his fear of not having liquid money and a lot of readers continued to “bash” him for this belief. Well, he finally did it…at least part of the way, by paying a significant of the cc debt.

This series of posts and comments were a great read and I highly recommend taking a gander if you have time!

The Carnival of Personal Finance #26 and Carnival of Debt Reduction #13 are up! Also, the very first Festival of Frugality is up! Tons of great info to read, check them out when you have time!