Hunter Mahan Has Too Much Money

July 31, 2013

 

mahan--hunter-031111-640x360

 

This is Hunter Mahan, who was leading the Canadian Open after 2 rounds this past weekend. The winner of the tournament gets $1,008,000.

He withdrew from the tournament to be with his expectant wife. (If he’d withdrawn 9 months earlier, he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. Hey-oh!) Mrs. Mahan, we gratuitously mention, used to cheer for the Dallas Cowboys before advancing to the next occupation in the hierarchy, full-time adornment. Also, her name is Kandi. Not “Candy”, or even “Candi”, but “Kandi”. To be with her, Mahan had to fly from Toronto to Dallas-Fort Worth and then, presumably, heroically run through the hospital lobby to the maternity ward while a stern woman behind the information desk yells at him to remove his cleats because he’s destroying the linoleum.

Mahan is not an obstetrician, a nurse, a midwife, nor even a doula. But unlike those licensed professionals (and dubiously accredited charlatans, as the list progresses), Mahan does have an incredible talent for earning gigantic chunks of money in very concentrated periods. He was halfway to doing that this weekend, when contractions won out over contracts.

Again, $1,008,000. Not that leading after 2 rounds means he was necessarily going to win, but unless he were to suffer a Jean van de Velde-level meltdown, Mahan would be walking away with at least a few hundred thousand dollars. Instead he just up and quit, which did win him the non-monetary approbation of moonstruck women everywhere.

There have been previous instances of athletes taking inopportune days off to be with their pregnant wives. 20 years ago an NFL player missed a regular-season game and had to forgo $111,111 in salary. The culture has since softened considerably, and prioritizing the family’s paycheck now seems less-than-chivalrous. And increasingly uncommon.

That aside, the difference between Mahan and team-sport athletes is that the former isn’t on salary. Mahan can sit out all the tournaments he wants, or withdraw halfway through, without affecting any teammates or compromising anybody’s won-lost record. As long as he didn’t plan on winning, that is.

Let’s assume Mahan would have fought off the field and indeed won the Canadian Open. His wife would then have had to give birth with only trained medical staff and maybe her mother (if she’s sufficiently meddlesome) by her side. We’ll concede that Mahan might have provided some psychological benefit to his wife by being in the delivery room. And no, you can’t put a price on love.

Except you can, or at least on this particular manifestation of it. Again, $1,008,000. Instead of calling Mahan a selfless hero and the greatest husband ever, let’s assess this objectively. Is he really?

Go to your local community hospital and find one of the mamacitas ready to drop an anchor baby tonight. Oh, what the hell, you can even talk to an upwardly mobile U.S. citizen who’s about to give birth. Find one whose husband is standing around acting nervously while trying not to look useless as he awaits his escort into the delivery room. Then, offer the couple $1,008,000 on the stipulation that the husband leave the hospital and not return for 2 days.

Anyone who wouldn’t take the money is a prevaricator at best. Not just anyone of normal means, but literally anyone. Even Rupert Murdoch, who for some reason fathered his 6th child at 72 a decade ago, would have gone home and taken the money.

Is Hunter Mahan that rich? He’s not Murdoch-level rich, but he’s doing more than pretty well for a 31-year-old. His career earnings are $24 million, and with this year’s tour half over has won $2.3 million. Could have been $3.3 million, but what’s done is done.

Granted, a $1 million windfall means slightly less to a man who’s earned $24 million in his short life than it does to most of us. But that’s beside the point. Denying yourself money because of a relatively unimportant* non-monetary urgency shows a gross misunderstanding of what that money can do. It’s not as if Mahan had to pay a $1,008,000 ransom to get Kandi back from Sri Lankan terrorists. That would at least make sense. But refusing a 7-digit payday to fulfill some loosely unwritten social contract is bad parenting and bad husbanding to boot.

How much is it worth to show up in the delivery room and hold your wife’s hand when someone else can do it? Is it worth $1,008,000? Think about what the Mahans could have done with the money.

Everyone loves to acknowledge that a) there’s nothing more important than a college education and b) it can be a challenge to pay for one, right? What if by missing the birth of his child, Mahan had thus eliminated 4 years of tuition and boarding concerns, 18 years down the road? With tons of money left over, no less? Mahan could have bought an ostentatious house for…well, somebody, if not his wife and new kid. Instead, tournament winner Brandt Snedeker will get to make that decision instead.

If money accosts you on the street and says “Put me in your pocket” – or, less figuratively, requires you to spend your weekend protecting a 2-stroke lead – you’ve forfeited the right to ever complain about your financial situation again. Again, this wasn’t 100. This was 100 cubed. Part of the blame here lies with Kandi, who has now become so acclimated to luxury without concern that she didn’t say, “Hey! What are you doing? Get your butt back to Ontario and make us some money!”

Mahan’s hat sponsor Ping had nothing but accolades for Mahan. But we’re willing to bet that CEO John Solheim is secretly seething at seeing the Bridgestone logo atop Snedeker’s head as he hoisted the trophy Sunday afternoon.

 

*Yeah, we said it. He didn’t need to be there. 

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Capitalism, Making Smart Choices Tagged With: , ,

iTunes is a Ripoff

July 5, 2013
LPs, the format of choice for people who hate leaving their living rooms

LPs, the format of choice for people who hate leaving their living rooms

 

For our younger devotees – and everyone knows there’s nothing a 17-year-old would rather do than read about personal finance – it might be hard to comprehend how primitive music retailing was just a few years ago. You had to physically walk into a store, then pay the equivalent of about $20 in 2013 currency to purchase an album with maybe 45 minutes’ worth of music. Most of which you hadn’t heard before, because the only outlets that existed for sampling music were your local radio stations, and they weren’t about to play more than a track or two (if that) from a typical album. Which means that if you wanted to hear something from any artist less popular than Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston, you were likely buying that artist’s music sound unheard.

So if you were a legitimate lover of a particular genre or artist, as opposed to someone who just had to get that Dave Matthews Band song your friend played at her wedding, ingesting music wasn’t a cheap pursuit. Say you wanted a B-side or a bonus track by one of your favorite artists, from a Japanese or European edition of an album that North Americans received only a diminished version of. You could find an “import” store, or the import section of a megastore, and in some cases end up paying $25 (again, 2013 equivalents) for what was essentially a single song. Nor was everything released on CD, which meant that your choice of format was sometimes between the Scylla of an easily scratchable vinyl LP and the Charybdis of a medium-fidelity cassette. Both of which would lose clarity with repeated listenings. Come to think of it, it’s something of a miracle that the recorded music industry even existed and that we didn’t just sing and whistle to ourselves instead.

Fast-forward to CDs becoming the default format for music, and fast-forward beyond that to the realization that if music can be digitally transferred to polycarbonate plastic, it can be saved as a transferable digital signal and copied infinitely. From there to Napster and its competitors, and ultimately iTunes, the world’s largest music store. Earlier this year iTunes celebrated its 25 billionth music download, this on a planet with only 7 billion people, most of whom don’t exactly have regular and fast online access.

iTunes sells most tracks for 99¢, occasional tracks for 69¢, and “premium” tracks (e.g. each one off Kanye West’s new album, which debuted at #1 on Billboard last week) for $1.29. Buy Kanye’s entire 10-track album on iTunes and you’ll pay a dollar less than if you’d bought each track individually.

You can do better. We recently discovered Russian (we think) sites Iomoio (pronounced ?) and Megaboon, whose catalogs dwarf iTunes’ and whose prices look like misprints.

That Kanye West album? 80¢ on Megaboon. That’s not a typo. Eighty American cents. It’s recorded at 336 kbps, which is considerably greater than iTunes’ 256 kbps default. You can even buy lossless files, which sell for the staggering sum of 30¢ apiece on Megaboon and will eat up much more of your storage.

How do they do it? We have our notions, but this is not our concern. There’s a Cuban joint down the street that sells the greatest empanadas we’ve ever tasted, thousands of miles from Cuba, and for astonishingly low prices, but it would take monstrous chutzpah on our part to ask the waitress why the prices were so low. We’re pretty sure that no Gabonese miners were injured nor Chinese factory workers driven to defenestration while procuring the mp3 files of Dwight Yoakam’s latest album, and that’s where our moral obligation ends. You people who look askance at the factors that enter into a good price can keep your world-weary concern to yourselves. We’re trying to spend less money than we otherwise would.

Iomoio certainly isn’t as slick nor as corporate as iTunes. The former’s onscreen copy is written in fractured but still understandable English. (You know, like most of our Carnival of Wealth submissions.) Songs download as fast as they do on iTunes, and while the Russian sites might not load as quickly, the benefits grossly outweigh the costs.

Are the services legitimate? The music downloaded fine, complete with artwork and metadata, and there are no digital rights management issues. Once they had our credit card information, they did nothing nefarious with it. We had one minor customer service issue – a ZIP file that wouldn’t unzip – reported it, and they got back to us within a day to say they’d fixed the problem. Which they had.

You have to give them a credit card deposit of at least $30. For that you get $40 worth of music, so these downloads really cost more like 6¢ apiece; even less if you leave a larger deposit. Iomoio and Megaboon are so cheap that we can’t understand why iTunes retains its dominant market position.

Actually, who are we kidding? Were Iomoio and Megaboon to get too big, Apple would press on the United States government to flex its muscle. Much in the same way that the movie industry’s trade association complained to the White House about illegal downloading, and within weeks the FBI was flying to the other side of the world to capture an innocent Kim Dotcom, freeze his assets, throw him in jail, and do it all with the implicit backing of a foreign government. Until Iomoio and Megaboon get that large and that notorious, happy downloading.

Filed Under: Capitalism, Newsflash Tagged With: , , ,

Control Your Cash Mailbag!

June 26, 2013
Financial freedom for the price of a stamp

Financial freedom for the price of a stamp

Real letters from real readers. Send yours to info @ ControlYourCash . com.

Dear CYC:

My fiancé and I are getting married! We know that destination weddings can get expensive, so we’re going to do it close to home. The problem is that he and I can’t come to an agreement on some of the most basic parts of the wedding. Like the venue. I want to hold the reception at the ballroom in a local 5-star hotel ($12,000), while he wants to do it at his father’s yacht club ($13,000, but my fiancé claims the view of the lake is awesome and there might be a party boat involved.) Which do you think is better?

Sincerely, Melinda in Broken Arrow

 

Dear Melinda:

None of the above. Either is a giant and needless expense.

Here’s how you do a wedding, assuming you’re not a trust-fund punk. First, go to the county clerk and get a marriage license for $60 or however much it costs. Then pay your priest/minister/rabbi whatever his going rate is, which is probably not that much. Finally, hold the reception at one of your parents’ houses. If your mother and mother-in-law want to help they can go to Costco and buy those giant packs of hors d’oeuvres.

One more thing. It’s probably too late for this, but don’t register anywhere. Find a tactful way to say “cash gifts only” to your invitees. One way to handle that is to just say nothing, and when they realize you aren’t registered they’ll probably take it upon themselves to discreetly hand you an envelope at some point during the evening. You might even end up making a profit on the deal. But yeah, do it on the cheap. This is one place where frugality makes tremendous sense.

 

Dear CYC:

My fiancée is driving me crazy. She’s already made a non-refundable $6000 deposit on a ballroom for our wedding, and let’s not forget the $5000 I spent on an engagement ring. I make $40,000 a year. And now we’re – I wouldn’t say arguing, but heatedly discussing such details as the wedding invitations. Did you know engraved vellum paper goes for $1.50 per invite? Multiply that by 200 and you can see what just one of our problems is. Beef medallions on the dinner menu vs. chicken for $1 a plate cheaper, it never ends. What do I do?

Sincerely, Brian in Broken Arrow

 

Dear Brian:

$11,000 in sunk costs already? Man. Another $7 won’t kill you, so you should buy our book and figure out how to build wealth instead of destroying it.

Also, it’s 2013. Why are you sending invites via any medium other than email? You know how much an email invitation costs, right?

Are you going to be one of those couples who never talk about money until it’s too late? It’s cool if you are, just know that you’re already well on the path to sitting across from each other at the kitchen table a couple years from now, she furrowing her brow and you staring at the readout on a Casio printing calculator, wondering why you’re so broke and whether you’ll have to move into a studio apartment once the baby arrives.

 

Dear CYC:

Well, your advice is certainly condescending. And unrealistic. You seriously expect me to have a discount wedding? Should I get my dress from Goodwill while I’m at it? Maybe you don’t understand how important this is and how deep our love for each other is. My wedding is going to be THE most important day of my life, and the idea of it being no more ceremonial than a Super Bowl party is offensive to me. I asked you a simple question about one venue vs. another and instead you start pontificating. Thanks for nothing, ass.

Sincerely, Go to Hell

 

Dear Melinda:

Why did you ask for advice if you didn’t want advice?

Let’s do this Socratically. Would you say that most people a) worry about money, or 2) live with the freedom of knowing that they have sufficient cash flow and a big enough nest egg to see them through anything – financial independence, to coin a phrase?

This part of our conversation is unilateral, but we’ll answer for you. Obviously the answer is a). We’d guess that they outnumber the people in the other category at least 9 to 1. Now…would you believe, or at least be open to believing, that there might be a correlation between the plurality of people who have traditional weddings, and those who end up in the first category?

This is the ultimate in short-term thinking. Your wedding day. DAY. Singular. One of maybe 25,000 you have ahead of you. Why on earth would you focus all your attention, and undue money, on a single day when doing so means hampering your ability to build wealth over the remaining 24,999?

If your answer is “Because every girl dreams about her wedding day and I’ve been fantasizing about this since I was playing with Barbies,” then you’re a moron. It’s a non-repealable law of the universe that you can’t have it all. Everyone has to make choices. Even the biggest individual expenditures are done with respect to other possible outlays. Carl Icahn just borrowed $5.2 billion to attempt to take over Dell Inc. He didn’t go for Lenovo, or Acer, or even a company that does something other than manufacture computers. Icahn thinks that’s the way to get the best return for his (or his lenders’) money, so he acts accordingly.

We know what your objections are before you make them. How can we compare something as cold and utilitarian as a business deal to the magic and emotion of a wedding day? Because whether you choose to accept it or not, when you indebt and/or impoverish yourself to get married, there’s still a transaction. Multiple transactions. And as far as the people on the other side of them are concerned, business is business. The wedding planner, the hall, the florist, the caterer, the DJ etc. all get paid. In money. By you. And your heirs, if you let your bills sit long enough.

Also, the math doesn’t work out. You’ve got at least a 40% chance, conservatively speaking, of getting divorced. Yeah, we know. You two are different. (Also, we don’t know why the Centers for Disease Control with its $11.3 billion annual budget, an agency originally created for the narrow purpose of fighting malaria in the Southern United States, ended up being the nation’s official recordkeeper of marriage and divorce statistics.) An average wedding costs around $26,000. Even the most degenerate gambler in the world wouldn’t place a $26,000 bet on a game where there was a 40% chance of losing it all and a 60% chance of…well, still losing it all.

It is astonishing how many adults we meet who insist on handicapping themselves at the onset regarding money. Everyone with even a passing interest in personal finance will tell you how important it is to save early for retirement – why, if you just sock away an extra $10 a month starting when you’re 21 instead of waiting until you’re 40 you’ll have a billion more when you turn 65, or something. Yet none of these people will advocate something more obvious and even more impactful: Not blowing $26,000, and forgoing the assets that that could buy.

Still, most people aren’t going to listen to this. For a completely unrelated reason, most people aren’t wealthy.

Filed Under: Bad Examples, Capitalism, Making Smart Choices Tagged With: , , ,
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