Just Say No...to Millions of Dollars??

This is quite a story, about a major league pitcher who walked away from millions of dollars because he didn't feel he deserved it.

Pitcher Spurns $12 Million, To Keep Self-Respect

The guaranteed contract is a fundamental principle of Major League Baseball, as
much a part of the game as balls, strikes and outs. No matter how a player
performs, or how his body holds up, he must be paid in full. Only in rare cases
— an injury sustained off the field, gross personal misconduct — does a player
forfeit his paycheck.

But the case of Gil Meche is rare for an entirely
different reason. Meche, a 32-year-old right-handed pitcher, had a contract that
called for a $12 million salary in 2011. Yet he will not report to Surprise,
Ariz., with the rest of the Kansas City Royals for spring training next month.
He will not have surgery to repair his chronically aching right shoulder. He
will not pitch in relief, which involves a lighter workload.

Meche
retired last week, which means he will not be paid at all.

“When I
signed my contract, my main goal was to earn it,” Meche said this week by phone
from Lafayette, La. “Once I started to realize I wasn’t earning my money, I felt
bad. I was making a crazy amount of money for not even pitching. Honestly, I
didn’t feel like I deserved it. I didn’t want to have those feelings again.”

I hope he makes a second career of giving speeches to corporate CEOs-- some of them could certainly stand to learn from his example!

My Money Weekend

I was out and about in Brooklyn this weekend, and that always provides fodder for thoughts about money.

On Sunday, I went out for brunch with Sweetie and Mortimer. Brunch is something I always have problems with-- I think it's a nice time to have a social meal with friends, and I always enjoy the food, but it pisses me off that it's so expensive! Brunch has to be the restaurant meal with the least value for the customer and the most profit for the restaurant.
We went to Sidecar, a great restaurant in Park Slope, where I paid $11 for "migas," which is scrambled eggs with guacamole, chilis, cheddar cheese, tomatoes and tortillas. It was absolutely delicious, but spending $11 for gussied up scrambled eggs just seems crazy!

After brunch, we went strolling through Park Slope for a while. At one point, we ducked into Ollie's cafe so I could use the bathroom. We didn't buy anything, but on the way out, I found a $5 bill on the floor. It wasn't obvious who it might belong to and I was tempted to keep it, but instead I stuck it in the tip jar.

Our next stop was the Brooklyn Flea, which has moved indoors for the winter, at the fabulous location of One Hanson Place. This is the old Williamsburg Savings Bank building, a striking landmark when you see it from the exterior, and even more fabulous within. The main lobby of the old bank seems to have been almost completely preserved and the flea market wares are spread out in front of and behind the old teller windows, and on thick glass counters that still have holes for inkwells, where people used to endorse their checks and fill out deposit slips. It's just a gorgeous space, with cathedral-like ceilings and elaborate windows. The rest of the building has been converted into condos, but I'm not sure what they do with the lobby space when the flea market isn't there.

Once you get past the architectural appreciation, the flea market is a blast. There are lots of great vendors with jewelry, vintage clothes, records, books, art, furniture and all sorts of random stuff. And "random stuff" is my favorite! I ended up spending $32 on a variety of old tobacco and medicine tins, which I collect. In a way, this seems just as crazy as spending $11 on scrambled eggs. I mean, what am I going to do with these tins? They'll just sit on my shelf with the rest of my collection, making it even more of a pain in the ass to dust. It's so purely materialistic to buy stuff that has absolutely no purpose... but I just love them. I love looking at them and wondering where they've been and who owned them, and I love the old-fashioned designs. In the larger scheme of things, $32 for a bit of decorative pleasure seems quite reasonable. Which makes $11 for the pleasure of eating a yummy brunch pretty easy to rationalize too!

Speaking of food, that's the other fun thing about the Flea-- there are quite a few food vendors. I don't know how Mortimer managed to be hungry again after his omelette, but he got a plate of pupusas. I found myself wishing I had room for a lobster roll, or some Greek pastry, but only managed to sample a bit of a pickle and some salted caramels, and Sweetie and I each had one mini chocolate-pistachio cupcake, which cost $1 each.

After the Flea, we walked along 4th Avenue to get home. I am always amazed at how much new construction there is along there-- over the last few years, it's changed enormously as they've knocked down some smaller tenement-style apartment buildings and replaced them with these massive high-rises. Every time I go by there, I feel like I notice something new that looks almost ready for people to move in... and I wonder how long it will take for all these buildings to fill up. I have no illusions about selling my apartment easily in the next few years-- hopefully I won't need to. I still think I could rent out my condo for a little more than it costs me each month, but seeing all these big empty buildings reminds me I'll have more and more competition, closer to Manhattan than I am.

The latter part of my Sunday, of course, was spent watching the SuperBowl. And for the first time, I wondered if any of the shots of the crowd would show some friends of mine, Richard and his partner. Are they big Saints or Colts fans? No, quite the opposite. They don't care about football at all, but one of their fabulously wealthy clients invited them to the game and even flew them down to Miami in a private jet. One of our other friends said Richard made over $2 million from his business last year, and I don't doubt it. It's kind of fun to observe the way he lives and the luxuries he enjoys, some paid for out of his own pocket and some by his clients. I'm happy for him, but sometimes it makes me smack myself and wonder why I don't have his life! I realized recently that I'm not jealous of his lifestyle per se-- I'm jealous of the fact that he is so successful precisely because he is doing exactly what he loves and is passionate about. That's what gives him his drive and makes him good at what he does. I think he would do it no matter how much he was paid. I am fairly content with my job, but I don't love it the way he loves his-- I wish I could find that perfect combination of satisfaction and financial success.

Whew-- all that squeezed into one Sunday! Now back to my Monday...

Captain Matthew Webb: Swimming for Money

Over the past few months, I've been slowly making my way through a book called Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, by Charles Sprawson. If you love swimming, you'll find it fascinating, as I have. It's a hard book to describe-- Sprawson traces the history of recreational and competitive swimming from its earliest days, to the Victorian era's fascination with sea bathing, to modern times. He explores the obsession with swimming that runs through literature, and visits famous waters that have beckoned to swimmers, sometimes luring them to their death. It's more of a meditation on the spirituality of swimming than a straightforward history.

Towards the beginning of the book, Sprawson tells the story of Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel. His swimming exploits made him a celebrity in the late 1800s, on a level probably far surpassing Michael Phelps's fame today. Not surprisingly, one of the things that drove Webb, aside from a love of adventure, was a need for money, as it seemed to slip through his fingers easily and he had a family to support. Eventually, he was desperate enough that he decided to attempt a swim through the rapids below Niagara Falls, hoping this extraordinary exploit would end his swimming career by earning him enough money to retire on. A friend warns him that the feat is impossibly dangerous:

We discussed Niagara. "Don't go," I said. "From what I hear, you will never come out alive." "Don't care," was the reply [from Webb], "I want money and I must have it." As we stood face to face, I compared the fine handsome sailor, who first spoke to me about swimming, with the broken-spirited and terribly altered appearance of the man who courted death in the whirlpool rapids. His object was not suicide, but money and imperishable fame.

Webb's last words before he entered the water were supposedly "If I die, they will do something for my wife." He did indeed die in the Niagara rapids that day. The book doesn't say whether anyone took care of his wife.

Rule #20: Don't Be Dumb

How's this for a nice simple rule?

• Don't Do Stupid Things

How much money do you spend because of plain old dumbness? Here are two small examples from my own recent life:

At my gym, there are half lockers, one above the other. I always use the top locker. When I go swimming, I usually take off my earrings and bracelets and leave them in the locker. A couple of weeks ago, when I was getting dressed after my shower, I went to pull something out of the locker and heard a little "plunk." It was one of my earrings, falling through a crack into the locker below mine-- which was locked. I peered through the crack and could see my earring, sitting right there, amidst some dust bunnies. I told the attendant it looked like the locker was abandoned, and in any case wasn't one allowed for overnight storage anyway, but she couldn't open it with a master key and she said she'd have to get permission to cut it off. I didn't have time to deal with that, so I just left-- the earring I'd lost was a favorite, but not at all valuable, so I figured I would just come back and try again to get into that locker after speaking to a manager.
But in the meantime, I felt naked! (Almost as bad as that day I forgot my underwear!) And I had a big meeting that day that I was dressed up for-- I felt like I couldn't go without earrings. So I stopped in a little store at lunch and bought the cheapest earrings I could tolerate, which were only $10.
The next day at the gym, I was still wearing those earrings, and took them off as usual when I went swimming. And later, when I was getting dressed, guess what? "Plunk." I did the same exact thing, dropping one of the new earrings in a different locked locker! Afterwards, I went to buy a pair of earrings again, this time super cheapo ones from Duane Reade for only $5-- but unfortunately they hurt my ears, so I only wore them once.
Bottom line, I always knew it was dumb to leave the earrings on the bottom of the locker where they could easily fall in that crack, but I did it anyway, even after losing them the first time. Ever since then, I've put my jewelry inside a shoe or even poked them through a sock to make sure they'd stay put! Fortunately, I only had to spend $15 on earrings as a result of this dumbness-- no great loss, and a reminder that it is probably a good thing that I don't own any expensive jewelry in the first place.

The other dumb thing happened last night. I went to see the Billie Jean King Cup at Madison Square Garden. I love watching tennis, especially the Williams sisters, so I was happy to go, even though $60 for a ticket to a sporting event is not usually my preferred way of spending money. It was actually Mortimer's idea, and he'd gotten a group together a while ago. Though Mortimer is a rabid sports fan, now that he's lost his job, I'm sure he'd rather have kept the cash too.

Before I got to my seat, I bought a beer-- this in itself is pretty dumb, when you consider that a beer costs $8.75 at MSG. One of my other friends bought a bottle of water and they don't let you keep the cap on the bottle-- apparently they're afraid you'll throw the cap at someone. Despite this, they put a lid on my cup of beer. We were talking about the likelihood of spillage and my friend was envying that I had a lid and asked if I wanted a straw, which I scornfully declined-- it just seems wrong to drink beer through a straw.
Back at my seat, I removed the lid and took a few sips of the beer. Then... I managed to spill it, partially on my bag but mostly on the back of a young man sitting in front of me. Of course I was mortified and apologizing profusely and trying to help him clean his jacket off with napkins. And he was a good sport about it, shaking it off and saying it was supposed to be waterproof anyway. But the woman sitting next to him, who I'd at first assumed must be his girlfriend, turned out to be his mother. She turned around and rather imperiously announced "He's going to have to have that dry-cleaned now!" So I said "ok, I'll give you something," and once there was a break between games, I apologized again and gave the guy ten dollars, which he thanked me for and then handed to his mother.
The rest of the evening was without any disasters, but the tennis dragged on a bit and I ended up leaving at about 11:15, in the middle of the 2nd set. (Serena went on to win, though I'd been rooting for Venus.)
So $60 for a ticket, $8.75 for a beer, and $10 for someone else's dry cleaning. It ended up feeling like kind of a dumb evening all around.

Of course, this is just one kind of dumb spending among many. We spend money on things we don't need, things that don't work, unresearched purchases that could have been gotten more cheaply. And then look at all this dumbness of people lending money they knew couldn't be paid back, and people plowing money into investments they should have known were too good to be true. Dumb, dumb, and dumber.

But does dumbness, on some level, actually drive our economy? I mean, if everyone only did the most smart, sensible thing, a whole lot of consumer products would never be purchased. And in every transaction, there is a buyer and a seller-- what benefits one doesn't usually benefit the other too, so somebody's got to be a little dumb or it would all grind to a halt.

But don't let that stop you from trying to be smarter!