What Will You Do With Your Stimulus Check?

Now that it is looking more and more likely that Pres. Bush's economic stimulus package will in fact be made a reality as early as next month -- raining down checks of $300 to $1,200 per household.. What do you plan on doing with your check? I plan on investing the money (I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise since I blog about being cheap). Sorry to those of you expecting me to do my part to get this economy back on track - hopefully other people carry my weight for me.

I'm curious to hear from other people what they plan to do with their refund. Of course, if this plan is going ot work people need to spend the money and the sooner the better. It has been reported that it takes at least six months for the spending to stimulate the economy.

Economists are notoriously poor at predicting and modeling what will happen with the economy, so what is your guess? After all, you have a better chance of being right than the weather man.


Read more about the plan @ NYT

Image: dcjohn @ Flickr

Study: Want to be rich? Be Moderately Happy

We’ve all hear that the rich are unsurprisingly more happy on the whole than typical common folk, but there is a new study that says when it comes to financial success, it’s better to be only slightly more happy than average.

Turns out that after researchers at U. Virginia, U. Illinois, and Michigan State analyzed data and published findings in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The conclusion was that people who rank themselves a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10 achieve more success than people who rate themselves a 10.

So, does this mean that someone like Richard Simmons who is an eternally perky 11 on 10-point scale would do better if he turned it down a notch? Not sure, it’s difficult to accurately quantify happiness since happiness is a subjective beast.

The study posits that people who score off the charts for happiness tend to look at the world through rose colored glasses and as such don’t learn from mistakes – making them less productive than people who are less happy.

I will throw my completely unscientific theory out there… I think that people who are really happy are less successful because they are in a word content. People who are completely content in my opinion generally have less drive – and maybe lack the Type A high achiever personality found in many people who find above average financially success. People who are super happy might fall into either people who are content with meeting an average level of success and comfortable lifestyle – or they may be entrepreneurs who continue to keep on going regardless of what life may throw at them taking bigger risks for bigger rewards. Just my two cents.

Link @ Yahoo Finance

Image: Itzafineday @ Flickr

Guest Bloggers and Article Ideas Wanted

If anyone has ideas for articles that they would like me to write about on The Golden Parachute please feel free to send me an email. Also, I’m looking for people who may be interested in writing an original article or two to be featured on this site. Although I don’t have much to offer you’d get some free publicity and a link back to your website on this blog. If anyone is interested send at email to goldenparachuteblog@gmail.com.

Post Comments & Other Odds and Ends

I apologize to everyone for not updating the site as much as I would like. I have made a goal to post at least three times a week going forward here. Grad school has caught up to me and been a huge time suck lately. On a related note, I went through and tried to strip out all the spam from the blog comments. I got hammered over the past week with about three dozen spammy comments so that should be fixed now. If you find any that I may have missed please shoot me an email. Thanks.

Free Online Financial Calculators

Most of us don't remember the first thing about present and future value calculations (especially without the help of a financial calculator). The wonder of the internet makes plenty of good tools available at your fingertips to calculate figures for your retirement, you mortgage, credit cards, investment allocation or business. But, if you use these tools somewhat frequently you may want to bookmark Dinkytown.net. The site has a bunch of easy to use free calculators on just about anything you can think of and also has special calculators for those of you in Australia and Canada.

Image: ansik @ Flickr