How to Throw a Good Wedding

This is about money, but only in a tangential way. If you intend to get married and do not want to spend the current American average of $30,000 on your wedding, you need to do some careful planning. Cutting out all your expenses yet expecting your friends and relatives to spend lavishly on you is not a plan. If you don’t want to order a $500 wedding cake, that’s fine, but you still have to provide refreshments for all your guests and no, that does not mean a cash bar. A wedding reception is a party. The ones throwing the party have an obligation to to entertain their guests. Making it clear in advance what the parameters of your hospitality will be is a kindness to all you invite.

And please, invite out-of-town guests only if you intend to be a good host to those guests. If you don’t want to speak to Cousin Laura from Topeka, don’t invite her, and don’t solicit her in any way for a wedding present, either. If you do invite her, you need to make sure she has a lovely time at your wedding.

Yes, I get that you are young, you are urban, and you’d really like to just have a big party with all your same-age friends. You’re okay with distant and elderly relatives showing up that your mother thinks ought to be invited, but you don’t want to spend your time with them. Here’s how to satisfy everyone:

1. Ask yourself if Cousin Laura from Topeka will be comfortable at that funky little bar down the street where you’d like to hold the reception. No? Then either do not invite Cousin Laura, or don’t hold the formal reception at a bar. Hold a wedding pre-party for your close young urban buddies at the bar, and find a formal wedding venue for the actual reception, one where older people and very young people who cannot legally enter a bar will be comfortable.

You cannot reasonably invite an out-of-town guest to only one part of the wedding festivities, by the way. If you invite Cousin Laura to the wedding ceremony, you must invite her to the reception, too. If there is a general party before or after, she should be invited to that. She just spent $1,000 on airfare, hotel, and clothes to come see you get married. You must show some class by making sure she gets her fair share of the wedding entertainment.   

2. Find a reception venue that will allow you lots of freedom. You don’t want to pay a fee per guest, because then you can’t invite little Susie, somebody’s five-year-old, even though little kids are hilarious fun at receptions. You don’t want to have to triage guests: “Is Joe worth $150? Do I like Rosie enough to pay $100 to entertain her for four hours?” Venues that allow freedom do exist, but it takes work to find them. Here’s a hint: a suburban home usually has a pleasant back yard and it is cheap to rent a tent.   

3. Arrange reliable transportation for all out-of-town guests throughout the festivities. This means someone picks them up at the airport, drives them to the relative they’re bunking with or the hotel they’re staying at, and drives them to all the wedding events. It would be a kindness to arrange a free place for out-of-town guests to stay, but it’s not necessary. It’s essential that you arrange transportation in case they are too old to drive or would be lost trying to drive in your city.

4. Buy food, and lots of it. At all weddings, the guests descend on the food like locusts. The trick is to not pay a per-plate fee to a caterer or use table service. Instead, arrange for platters, large containers, etc. at a buffet. You’ll still have to pay someone to set up the food and keep it coming, but that costs far less than waiter service, and there is less wasted food. Think simple but bountiful when it comes to food. You’ve seen or participated in elaborate tasting rituals and considered very elaborate foods, but the truth is most guests would prefer food they recognize. Wedding guests are perfectly happy to eat quite ordinary food if there’s plenty of it. Your local grocery chain's bakery can turn out a creditable wedding cake that will please most cake-eaters.

You also need to remember to arrange meals for out-of-town guests or give them a program in advance so they know when food is available as part of the wedding and when they are on their own. Remember that when you hold a party—and that’s what a wedding is—you are responsible for offering refreshments to your guests. BYOB does not work at a wedding.

5. Provide seating. At the ceremony, make sure there are enough chairs for everyone. For the reception, rent or borrow enough chairs and tables for most if not all of your guests. Don’t worry about decorating the tables or creating seating arrangements. It’s enough to have a place to casually sit down to eat. Ideally, at a party people get up and mingle, or get up and dance.

6. Get some music. It’s an event, and it deserves music. It only costs a couple hundred dollars to hire an organist who can play conventional wedding tunes before, during, and after a church ceremony, because wedding ceremonies themselves are short. It costs nothing to get a friend to bring a boom box to the party venue, or to get a knowledgeable friend to bring a more elaborate system. Have it tested in advance, of course. Bottom line, you do not have to hire an expensive DJ who will play inappropriate music too loud for your guests to talk. You do not have to provide a dance floor. People who want to dance will dance anywhere, as long as you provide music.

7. Speak to every guest you invited. Yes, you’d prefer to hang with your friends, but you must greet Cousin Laura and thank her for coming all this way, and extend your hope that she’s enjoying herself, plus introduce her to your new relatives. This is part of being a good host or hostess, especially when a friend or relative travels a long distance to your wedding. It’s your job to show hospitality to your guests.

8. Provide much more food and drink than you think any reasonable crowd will consume. (Have I said this before? Yes? That’s because food and drink are a key part of any good party.) If you don’t want to pay for alcohol, provide some other liquid refreshments, and plenty of them. 

Finally, try not to be too selfish. Sure, it’s “your special day,” but the truth is it’s your family’s special event, and you are putting your friends and relatives to significant expense and often inconvenience to be there for you. So be kind, be present, smile at everyone, dance with the little kids, and have a good time.       

How to Deal with Medical Bills Update

Here’s something I wasn’t sure existed anymore: Hospitals that will forgive big bills incurred by people who have no money to pay them.

Someone I know recently got a letter announcing that the hospital that was owed over $45,000 has granted this person “charity status,” and quashed the bill. That’s right: 45,000 big ones.

This is a very interesting category of medical bill outcome, because it does not involve the IRS. The medical provider simply wipes out the bill, and the person who owed that money no longer owes it and does not have to pay income taxes on the forgiven amount.

Charity status is a very different situation from one in which a credit card bill has been written off. The credit card company will issue the person a 1099 showing the written off amount as income. The person who could not pay, say, $900 on a credit card, will now have to pay income taxes on that $900. Depending on how down-and-out the person is, that might end up being zero in taxes, but it might be as much as 30%, because for sure if the federal government considers it taxable, so will a state government.

So, it seems to me, given these two very different tax results, people who have medical bills they can’t pay (and know they never will be able to pay) should ask the medical provider to be granted charity status. Not a write-off.

Try it. It never hurts to ask. Apparently, there are still some good people left in this world.

Why Apple CAN Improve Chinese Labor Practices

This NY Times article, The Dilemma of Cheap Electronics, about Chinese factory labor versus prices on Apple products deserves a reply and here is mine:

The answer is simple because each new piece of electronics gets priced at whatever the manufacturer chooses, and there are many new pieces of electronics year after year.

Apple can easily say the iPad 3 will cost $100 more, and make sure that $100 is in the cost of the factory labor. Because a new technology is being introduced, people will buy it regardless of the price. Yes, undoubtedly there is market research telling Apple at what dollar figure American consumers are price resistant, but of all the companies, Apple is the least concerned with price. Apple sets the new standard of pricing with each new product.

Work from this premise and you realize that every American company with factory workers in China can raise their prices easily. And that approaching Apple, the least price-sensitive company, is the right tactic.

The next part of the problem is to shake down the Chinese factory owners who are making huge profits off the backs of their workers. That's harder to control. No doubt the owners will want the same percentage of profit as in the past. In other words, $99 out of every $1 price rise, or whatever the outrageous figure is. Making that profit and loss statement look different is a much harder trick to pull off, but the threat of going somewhere else is Apple's great leverage.

Bottom line, Apple has the power, and Apple ought to be pressed to make things better. Why not? Every Apple product we buy means a number of Americans who don't have factory jobs. Apple owes its customers some portion of peace of mind about the people it does employ in factories.

The Five Safest Places to Hide Big Cash

I had a lot of fun trolling the net reading people’s ideas about where to hide big money. Of them, the clear winner is the mason jar in the back yard. Unfortunately, according to most stories, it also usually ends in the money being lost because the person can’t remember where it is, or never tells anyone else.

We all would like to have some ways of keeping cash secure enough so a casual stranger won’t find it in five minutes of unsupervised snooping or outright burglary. Making the cash difficult to find is the aim. A safe bolted to the floor would outwit most short-time burglars, but here are some other ideas:

1. Books. Burglars do check bookcases if they have the time. They throw books on the floor to look behind them, and they will open some books looking for book safes. But if you own many, many books, chances are the burglar will give up the book-by-book search long before the money is found. Most burglars want to get in and out in five to ten minutes. Trouble is, a casual visitor to your home might pull out just the one book you’ve hidden the money in. Safe, or not so safe?

2. Clutter. Got clutter? Serious clutter? If you can’t find your valuable stuff, neither can a burglar. You’ve got bigger problems than burglary, though. Safe.

3. On your person, in a money belt or wallet. These are completely secure and invisible. Even if you are mugged, a mugger is not looking for big money, just whatever is in your regular wallet or purse. Very safe.

4. A bank account. It’s your money and they keep it for you. Simple. The down sides are: now the world knows you have this money, and possibly the account could be used by the bank to pay some other account or debt of yours or even frozen by some government entity. This can happen, but most people don’t have to worry about it. Very, very safe.

5. A bank vault. Unlike a bank account, the contents are not insured, not even by your home insurance policy. But you can put anything that fits into your bank safe deposit box and no one gets to know about it or have access. Choose a freestanding bank in a corner of a busy shopping center, or similar. With no contiguous building to tunnel from, and people always around, that vault is likely to stay safe. In a bank robbery, the bank employees would not have access to your box, so the robbers would have to blast. For various security reasons, they are unlikely to have the time to do so, or to rip through every safe deposit box, regardless of what you’ve seen in the movies. Safest of all, unless your bank is run by thieves who have duplicate keys.

If you truly do not trust banks and have significant money to hide, then the jar in the yard is your answer. Burglars who have unlimited time and aren’t just looking for $50 to $200 to fuel a drug habit will eventually find all your most cunning hiding places inside and around your home, but they don't usually arrive with metal detectors. You hope. On the other hand, are you really going to remember where you buried the jar? Of course using a mayonnaise jar with a plastic lid will make metal detecting useless, but then you still have the issue of remembering where the money is. Hmm...

Four Reasons to Toss Out Something Today

1. Possessions can weigh you down and eventually suffocate you. Lighten the load. You'll feel a huge sense of relief.

2. Your donations will help others. People are prowling thrift stores looking for inexpensive holiday gifts or basics they can't afford to buy new. You can affect the lives of others positively if you donate your unnecessary items in good condition.

3. Recycling is good for the planet. You are the person best qualified to recycle your possessions. Whether you put metal out at the curb for the roving metal guys, or you carefully sort and haul your recyclables to special centers, every item you keep from the landfill helps.

4. Trash should not be kept for sentimental reasons. We all have items that no longer work and cannot be fixed. Their usefulness is long gone, and they should be, too.

You will never wear bell bottoms again. You will never find the match to that one winter glove. You will never fix that radio, glue that broken mug, or repair that bicycle. Send them all to the next best place.

Five Reasons to Keep Some Cash in the House

1. If you are elderly, it is expected. Don’t buck the cliché.
2. You don’t have to go to the bank so often
3. It’s fun to open a drawer and find big denomination dollar bills.
4. Having cash you can see and touch makes you feel richer.
5. There are times when having up to $100 in cash in your home is a convenience.

A long, unexpected cab ride, for instance. Paying someone who plowed the snow off your driveway, for another. Forcing cash on a reluctant relative.

When I read that all older people hide cash in their homes, I was surprised. Then I remembered my mother told us she was hiding a little cash in her house, inside the flap of her hardcover copy of Dr. Zhivago. The dear doctor’s stash was used up long before her death. After she died, I found other hidden cash, under the dividers in her vanity table drawer, between the top and bottom of a cardboard box set inside another drawer, inside a sewing table, and more. They were never big dollar amounts by current standards. A five or a ten at most. Finding these little bits of cash was like finding Easter eggs. All good feelings.

Five Reasons to Sell Your Stocks

1. If you’ve lost money in the market and it bothers you a lot, you’re not cut out to own stocks. Sell.
2. If your stocks are not making you money, find an investment that will produce a profit. Sell.
3. If you need to preserve your principal, the stock market is not a safe place to keep it. Sell.
4. If you are being killed by brokers’ fees or fund management fees, find an investment where the money flows toward you. Sell.
5. If you don’t understand why you’re in a stock or fund, find an investment you do understand. Sell.

The stock market is not for everybody. If you want to keep a few stocks just to feel you're still in the game, fine. But if anything on this list rings a bell, get out of the stock market now. You'll sleep better at night.