When I was a kid, July 4th was all about my grandparents’ home in Ohio. They had a nice little chunk of land and every year we were there for Independence Day, there would be grilling out in the back yard, homemade ice cream in a maker you had to actually crank, a walk over to the park to people watch for a little while, lots of grownup boring talk, and then at nightfall, we would move all of our chairs out near the big red barn back by the horse pasture and watch the fireworks. We would “ooh” and “ahh” and after a few lulls that made us wonder if the show was over, there would be the grand finale. Whoops, claps and whistles would combine with the pops and bangs of the fireworks and as the last colors faded from the sky, someone would inevitably say, “I think it was better last year.” And for kids, that was always a true statement - the year before meant we were a year younger, more full of wonder and excitement about it all.

One thing that never really came up was the actual meaning of the day. Declaring our independence from the tyranny of England and all of that stuff … never talked about it. Of course we all knew the origin of the holiday, but two hundred years later, let’s face it - Independence Day is about fireworks, barbecues, baseball, parades, concerts, and flag shaped cakes.

So this year as our family does the cookout thing (I’m thinking “make your own shish kabobs”) and then sets up chairs in the driveway to watch the fireworks our town will be sending up just half mile from the house, I think it’s OK to think about independence in a slightly different way.

Independence from debt. A friend of mine has been using Dave Ramsey’s program to get out of debt and although his personality personal grates on me, it’s working for her and I’ve been so happy to see her post on Facebook when she sends off another check to close out another chunk of debt. She and her husband have had to make some lifestyle changes temporarily in order to pay off their debts, but the liberation she obviously feels is so uplifting. How much of your current monthly income is going towards debts for things you ate, wore or experienced months or even years ago?

Independence from marketers. It’s been amazing to me how many advertisements we apparently don’t see in our household since we ditched cable and went to antenna only television. The decrease in show availability has translated to watching more videos and PBS, which further limits our exposure to advertisements. I personally love commercials - I love the funny ones, and I love breaking the unfunny ones apart - but I don’t miss being completely inundated. Still, we see plenty. I would love to see Americans have independence first and foremost from pharmaceutical ads, and then I’d love to see some better disclaimers on all other commercials. Take, for example, the Dove commercial where they show you what you’d look like under black lights if you bathe with some non-Dove soap … looks like you’re covered in chalk, right? Except that it doesnt. It’s an artist’s rendition, completely bogus. That irritates me, and before you say, “just turn off the TV,” the same claim is repeated in print ads.

Independence from medical insurance insecurity. Not going to get political here, but our system is BROKEN. It is ridiculous that 40+ million people in our nation are uninsured. Some of them may be uninsured by choice, but I’d be willing to bet not the overwhelming majority. I have had conversations with insurance brokers who fully agree that the insurance industry is out of hand, spending an increasing amount of their expense budgets on administrative costs as opposed to claims. Health insurance is not the same thing as auto or property insurance - we shouldn’t have to shop around trying to compare the tiniest details of coverage between several companies when it comes to our care and the care of our families. I read an article from the New York Times should have never needed to be written - check out this bit about a man who purchased group insurance through his employer only to find out that it didn’t actually cover his care during two heart procedures:

He and the hospital say they were surprised to eventually learn that the $150,000 hospital coverage in the Aetna policy was mainly for room and board. Coverage was capped at $10,000 for “other hospital services,” which turned out to include nearly all routine hospital care — the expenses incurred in the operating room, for example, and the cost of any medication he received.

In other words, Aetna would have paid for Mr. Yurdin to stay in the hospital for more than five months — as long as he did not need an operation or any lab tests or drugs while he was there.

Absurd.

In all three of these cases, we as consumers pay money into a system that we really have no control over. We pay our debt interest, cable/satellite fees, and insurance premiums into a system that in a lot of ways has just run amok. We pay the corporations, they pay the lobbyists, the lobbyists get the government to let them do whatever the heck they want to us. Indirect taxation without representation, but at least we do have a little control over how much we contribute to the madness.

This July 4th, I wish for you financial independence. And really great barbeque.

Remember Schoolhouse Rock? I loved Schoolhouse Rock when I was a kid. Still love Schoolhouse Rock. Enjoy ….

Optimism is wonderful, it really is, but not when it’s irrational. There’s a difference between someone who has never been a runner thinking they can a training program and work up to a 5k Fun Run three months down the road versus thinking they’ll be ready for the Boston Marathon in the same amount of time. One is an attainable goal that will require a good attitude, positive thinking and training. The other is folly and probably shin splints.

Still, Americans are an optimistic lot in general and even amidst unemployment carnage, foreclosures and worries about inflation or deflation (depending on who you read), the stock market has been on a streak that implied that the worst was over - and maybe 401ks weren’t going to be completely decimated.

There’s a problem with that, though. Even after we came to the general realization that the economy of the last several years was essentially a fraud, we are still willing to believe that a three month stupendous rally is “real” and then we freak out when it shows any sign of pulling back. From USA Today:

The recent pullback, which has sliced 5.6% off the Standard & Poor’s 500 index since its June 12 recovery high, has etched fresh worry lines into the faces of Wall Street traders, many of whom are starting to whisper the dreaded “C” word: correction.

The drop is the biggest for stocks since the March 9 bear-market bottom. Investors who drove the market up 40% after the March low on hopes the 18-month-old recession was loosening its grip are rethinking their bullish outlook amid signs the recovery will be less robust than anticipated.

[...]

“The market,” says hedge fund manager Patrick Adams of Choice funds, “is coming to realize that the economic news is better but not good.”

[...]

Stocks have come under pressure because of fears that the government’s massive stimulus to stabilize the economy could result in a huge debt burden that will cause a surge in inflation and borrowing costs, says Adams. Both outcomes threaten the recovery.

First of all, I doubt that traders have any more worry lines on their faces than they did before. Traders are gamblers, and the market is their game. They know that a 40% increase in the stock market in three months is absurd and there WILL be a correction (a drop 0f 10%) at some point. They also know that it won’t necessarily be because the economy is slumping - at a certain point, it’s logical to take your money off the table and collect your profits, and if enough people start to do that at the same time, which can become a wave of trading if the market starts to drop and they don’t want to lose the gains they’ve waited so patiently for over the last three months.

Second, using the word “investors” in this context is pushing it a little. Again - three months. Although the technical definition of an investor is someone who purchases assets in the hopes of making money off of them, the generally accepted extension to that is that an investor is more of a long term person or entity. An investor would look askance at a market that was going up at the fevered pitch rate that the S&P has been running over the last few months.

A speculator, on the other hand, would be drooling, and that’s what we as a society seem to not be able to grok. Just like so many things - weight loss, six pack abs, thousands a month in income from buying and selling houses, a huge flat screen TV - we Americans want results immediately. We don’t want to wait, we have no patience, we seem to love freaking out. To be fair, the media really likes to freak us out too, taking every opportunity to declare disaster, but we gobble it up.

And finally, “the market” has never thought that the news was good. Traders can make money whether “the market” goes up and down, and fears about the stimulus program spiking inflation and borrowing costs have existed since whispers of the possibility that a stimulus might be necessary started making the rounds. Making it sound like this is a new fear is irresponsible. If anything, the market’s weakness is that it tries to anticipate and reacts to everything, “imperfect information” that can lead to swings far greater than what fundamentals would account for, and there is absolutely no way analysts haven’t been taking into account the dumping of a trillion or two dollars into the world market.

Bottom line - we will see corrections, we always see corrections. Corrections exist to … correct. They are not a bad thing, especially after a 40% rise in three months. The sky is not falling …

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me, but a recent post in the Smart Money section of the Wall Street Journal recently caught my eye with its simple and powerful advice to use your mortgage insurance carrier to help you renegotiate your mortgage if you need help through this economy:

With more homeowners facing the threat of losing their homes to foreclosure — and more defaulting clients to cover — mortgage insurance companies are stepping in to help them stay put. “As a mortgage insurance company we stand in the borrower’s shoes,” says Michael Zimmerman, senior vice president of investor relations at MGIC Investment, a mortgage insurer.”If the borrower loses the home to foreclosure, we have to pay.”

It’s brilliant! I’ve always hated private mortgage insurance (PMI), a requirement if you take out a loan for more than 80% of the appraised value of your home. It’s a relatively pricey addition to a monthly payment, so I’ve always done whatever I could to avoid it. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it), increasingly creative financing options and generous appraisers came through when I was going through a divorce and I was able to refinance without PMI, and even last year when I refinanced out of that “divorce” mortgage - an interest only with a teaser rate that allowed me to not have to sell my house - we were able to avoid paying for mortgage insurance.

Now that I’m trying to work with a my bank on refinancing the terms of our mortgage since my job went bye-bye, I almost wish we had mortgage insurance. I’d be on the phone first thing in the morning asking if they thought they could try getting through the obstructionist maze of “oops, your fax didn’t get here,” and “yeah, we’re really busy and we’ll be sure to assign you to someone soon,” and “we’re just calling you for the fifth day in a row to let you know that we have no new information for you, please don’t call us.”

If you have private mortgage insurance, the name of your carrier should be in your loan documents. If you don’t have private mortgage insurance and are trying to renegotiate the terms of your mortgage, it might be worth a mention to your bank - the next time you call them even though they told you not to call them - that in case they hadn’t noticed, there is no insurance backing up your loan besides the home itself. Not in a mean, threatening way, of course, just as a friendly point of note that without private mortgage insurance, they’re going to take even more of a loss on a foreclosure if they don’t work with you. Soon.

Have you heard about coupon parties? They’re apparently all the rage in our troubled economy and have spawned a new business - teaching people how to use coupons.

I like the idea of coupon parties, I really do. In comparison to other parties where you end up buying mostly overpriced merchandise, the idea of having someone run a business that encourages money saving instead of spending appeals to me.

Still, it’s kind of sad that we’ve gotten so far away from frugality and “home economics,” and if you don’t have to spend money to throw a coupon party, you shouldn’t. Honestly, when did we turn into a society that feels like unless we spend money on something, it has no value? I guarantee you that if you get a bunch of friends together with a common goal towards saving money on groceries, you can and will figure out how to best implement your own “coupon parties,” and I’ll bet you can do it just as well or better than someone who comes in and tells you how it should be done.

With that said, I do have a few thoughts on ways to maximize your efficiency, because there is still the basic truth that “Time Is Money” and you don’t need to waste either.

First of all, I think it’s a good idea for everyone in your group to sign up for some kind of site like The Grocery Game or Cut Out Hunger.

The Grocery Game has a fee - $10 every eight weeks for one store, $15 for two stores, and $20 for three. In our area, I am signed up for Safeway and King Soopers (Kroger). I believe they also cover Albertson’s and Walgreens and probably others that we just don’t have in our area. Do NOT be tempted to share a membership to The Grocery Game amongst several members. That’s stealing. You can, however, sign up for a trial membership for $1, which gives you four weeks to check it out as well as a month to build up your stash of coupons. As you’ll see when you get into coupon shopping, sometimes the ones you need are from weeks or even months earlier, so you won’t maximize your savings until you have your supply of coupons built up.

Cut Out Hunger is a free membership, but their site is much more heavily laden with advertisements, including several affiliate offer pages you have to get through in order to complete your registration. You can skip the offers and opt out of partner e-mails.

Personally, I prefer The Grocery Game, mostly because the grocery lists it generates are usually laid out in the order of the store. Cut Out Hunger lists everything mostly in alphabetical order. I know myself well enough to know that I’d spend more time running from one end of the store to another after things I missed the first time around, and I have little patience for that. I have a friend who doesn’t mind the layout of Cut Out Hunger’s offers at all and prefers to not spend money on a subscription, so to each their own.

Second, you’ll need access to the Sunday paper coupons on a regular basis. Note, I didn’t say that you actually had to subscribe to the local paper, although our beleaguered newspaper industry would probably appreciate it very much if you did. In our household we only receive the Sunday Denver Post, which runs about $3/month. If you have a friendly neighbor who doesn’t use coupons, you might be able to work out an agreement to relieve them of that section of the newspaper at no charge, but it’s probably easier just to get the subscription.

Figure out how to organize your coupons. Again, this is somewhat of a personal decision and not everyone in the group has to do it the same way. I know some people suggest cutting out every single coupon in every single flyer and organizing them by category. I tried this for a while but found it to be a tremendous pain in the butt so instead, I got a three ring binder, a three hole punch, and a Sharpie. Every week’s flyer gets dated, punched, and inserted into the binder. Every so often I have to go through and get rid of expired coupons but I had to do that when they were all individually cut out anyway and … just trust me. The binder is easier.

Get your lists together. If I were going to be part of a group that traded coupons, what I’d probably suggest next is that everyone go ahead and make their lists with either of the two sites above before showing up at the party, along with notations or a separate list of which coupons are needed and which date’s fliers those coupons are in. To save even more group time, which can really be at a premium if there are kids who have to be brought along, the group could set up some kind of group on Yahoo or Google in order to post the coupons they’ll need for that week and members can come prepared to hand out their extras.

Of course, people shouldn’t expect to go to their party and get more coupons for every item on their list - there are some things that more than one person will want to pick up and you’ll have to figure out how to share. Still, there should be plenty of open ground to help each other out. For example, in this week’s Grocery Game list I noticed that there is a coupon that would net me a bag of free kitten chow. I don’t have a kitten, so it does me no good. Other times there are great savings for hair colorings, certain brand name medications, or food items that we just don’t like. I would be happy to give those coupons away to someone who could benefit from them rather than have them expire worthless. That is, of course, the fundamental benefit of a coupon party.

One issue I would caution you about, however, is the temptation to overstock. I remember when I first joined The Grocery Game, there were huge message threads about how to store all of these great deals. People were trying to figure out if they could freeze eggs (not whole), asking for recipes to use up huge amounts of barbeque sauce (always on sale), and even discussing the best kind of second or third freezer to purchase.

I swore I would not fall prey to this crazy hoarding but was brought back to reality when my husband pointed out that we had upwards of two dozen tubes of toothpaste in our bathroom cupboard, and a similar number of bottles of shampoo and conditioner. I tried to point out that these were things that we would absolutely use, but knew deep down that I really did need to ignore some of these fantastic specials because ultimately the best way to save money on groceries is not to spend it at all. I will make one defense of purchasing more toothpaste or shampoo though - these are items that can be donated to shelters or food banks, as are many of the non-perishable food items, toiletries and makeup on special every week.

This may sound time consuming, but keep in mind the amount of money saved per hour spent. Even without a coupon group, I probably spend a total of 30 minutes per week pulling all of my coupons together, which usually saves me about half of my weekly grocery bill. Last week that meant about $75 in savings for half an hour’s work, which equates to a tax free hourly wage of $150 an hour. Sound worth it? I think so.

I guess when you run a report called Gloom, Boom & Doom, you aren’t the kind of guy who deals in subtle suggestions. Still, Marc Faber’s recent proclamation that the United States would soon see hyperinflation approaching the level of Zimbabwe’s - 230 million percent - it’s hard not to roll your eyes and do a little mental, “oh c’mon.”

From Bloomberg:

Prices may increase at rates “close to” Zimbabwe’s gains, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong. Zimbabwe’s inflation rate reached 231 million percent in July, the last annual rate published by the statistics office.

“I am 100 percent sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation,” Faber said. “The problem with government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they will be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate.”

While others are worrying about deflation, this guy’s thinking that the United States alone is going into a state of insane hyperinflation? I don’t think so.

There are a few ways that the United States could enter into an inflationary period, but we’ll only skim two. What Mr. Faber is saying is something most of us understand about inflation. The more actual money there is in circulation, the more the prices of goods and services will rise. If the Federal Reserve is reluctant to raise interest rates, which would deter spending and investing and slow the pace of inflation, this glut of money will put further upward pressure on prices.

Another way we could see increased inflation is via our actual debt. Thinking about it on a small scale, if the level of your personal debt increases without a similar increase in income, creditors down the road will start to demand higher rates of interest from you if you want to borrow more. Imprudent and loose lending of the last several years aside, that’s how it’s supposed to generally work. Now tack on several zeros to the amount of debt you are personally carrying and consider that the people who lend money to the United States government do so by purchasing Treasuries. If they are concerned that the bonds may not get paid back, they’ll demand higher interest rates in order to entice them to take the risk. Higher interest rates will increase the payoff burden for the government, and the temptation will be there to increase the money supply.

I could see either or both of those scenarios playing out, but that doesn’t mean that the US is going to go into Mr. Faber’s hyperinflation tailspin. First off, the US can’t go into hyperinflation in a vacuum. No disrespect to the Zimbabwean nation but there is a little bit of a difference between their economy’s impact on the world stage and ours. If we went into an inflationary meltdown of that magnitude, the global repercussions would be profound. As much as there are countries who wouldn’t mind seeing us get taken down a notch, they won’t want to do it to their own detriment.

I also find it somewhat suspicious that he’s been buying gold for years now. Gold is thought of as an inflation hedge - gold is gold is gold. If you have an ounce of it, you can show someone you have an ounce and they can purchase it from you with confidence that at least after the transaction is complete, they’ll have an ounce of gold. Paper money and accounting entry money doesn’t have the same appeal for safety as gold does, so when inflation is a fear, people move to gold. The fact that he’s already into gold and would profit quite a bit from anything that would increase the demand for gold makes his statements at least a little bit suspect.

And frankly, 230 million percent? Come on. People like this crave attention and while I shouldn’t give it to him, it makes me mad that they go to these media outlets and say stuff that could create such fear. We’re not going to turn into Zimbabwe,we’re not going to see $5,000 loaves of bread, and it’s irresponsible for him to make suggestions to that effect. C’mon.

I don’t often watch the evening news but one lovelyColorado evening last week, I happened to have it on while I was making dinner and saw two interesting tidbits. One was a story about a photo exhibit documenting hungry children in the United States, which was just heartbreaking and infuriating, and the other was a video of a little girl whose father, an Air Force Master Sergeant, came back from Iraq and surprised her at school.

I went to the CBSNews site in search of both stories to send to friends (couldn’t find the one of the little girl, unfortunately) and happened to notice another story linked to the “Xtreme Eating Awards 2009,” and … ew. Ick. Wow.

I know that many restaurants are marketing - “marketing,” not necessarily “making” - a healthier menu, ranging from lower calorie options to smaller portion sizes, but in what I am certain is a response to demand, there are still plenty of belt snapping options out there.

A couple of outstanding bits from the CSPI story:

From The Cheesecake Factory, deep fried macaroni and cheese - “The entire platter of four coated cheese-and-whiteflour balls over creamy marinara sauce supplies 1,570 calories and 1,860 milligrams of sodium. But that’s ho-hum for appetizers these days. It’s the 69 grams of saturated fat—3½ days’ worth—that sets this dish apart. You’d be better off eating an entire stick of butter (57 grams of sat fat and a mere 800 calories).”

Also from The Cheesecake Factory, an awesome sounding comfort food, Chicken and Biscuits. Seriously, this sounds great until you get to the end of this snip - “Breast of Chicken Served over Mashed Potatoes with Shortcake Biscuits, Mushrooms, Peas and Carrots. Covered with Country Gravy.” … Try roughly 2,500 calories.  … It’s not easy to find an entrée that’s essentially an entire KFC 8-piece Original Recipe bucket (four drumsticks and four thighs) plus five Home-Style Biscuits (2,380 calories and 56 grams of sat fat).“

From Uno Chicago Grill, a dessert that I assume would be shared by a few people at least so it sounds worse than it actually is, the Mega-Sized Deep Dish Sundae - “It starts with a monster chocolate chip cookie that’s baked in the same pan as Uno’s regular deep-dish pizzas. (So efficient!) On top of the pizza-crust-size cookie comes a generous portion of ice cream covered with whipped cream and chocolate sauce drizzle. All told, the dessert delivers 2,800 calories and 72 grams of saturated fat to your table. That’s as much sat fat as you’d get in an entire regular-size Uno Prima Pepperoni Deep Dish Pizza, and the pizza isn’t much higher in calories (3,660).”

Also included were items from Applebee’s, Chili’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and other well known chains. Most of the descriptions sounded incredibly tasty, really, and if you’re only going out to eat for special occasions, I say knock yourself out.

The problem, however, is that Americans don’t just eat out for special occasions anymore. When I was a kid (there’s that phrase again!), I recall eating out once a week when my parents would go for pizza and beers on Friday night with friends from our swim team, and sometimes we’d stop at a restaurant if we had a meet on the road. That was about it. Now, according to a study I found from 2006, the average American eats out five times a week, but meals are much larger now than they were twenty years ago. Heck, kid’s meals now are as large as adult sized entrees twenty years ago, I reckon.

The fact of the matter is that we feel like we’re getting a great value when we go out to eat and have a huge platter of sauced up fried food plopped down in front of us. We want the unlimited refills on our drinks, and we want the validation from our dinner companions that it really is OK to order a dessert as long as we share the calories and the cost.

Unfortunately, there’s no great value in obesity. It raises our healthcare costs, our insurance costs, our (duh) food costs, and if we really get out of hand, it can even raise our vacation costs. We spend billions on diet foods, diet supplements, self-help books, exercise equipment and gym memberships because we’re fat. We try to find ways to keep eating what we want while convincing ourselves that a moderate amount of exercise three times a week will have us looking like a cover model on a fitness magazine. Well guess what? When you break it all down to its basics, the bottom line is that we’re just eating too darned much. I know some people feel like we don’t need a nanny state telling restaurants that they have to publish nutritional figures on their menus, but seriously - why not? Packaged food in the grocery store has to post nutritional content and we’re constantly told to keep an eye on those lables when we shop, so why the heck should restaurants be exempted? It’s not about nanny state, it’s about transparency and consumers having the information they need to make informed choices. Kudos to the states that have already mandated this type of disclosure, I hope it’s a sign of things to come across the nation.

From CNNMoney, news that Countrywide Mortgage’s founder has been accused of being a lying, rotten piece of bottom dwelling filth (or something like that):

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday filed securities fraud charges against former Countrywide Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo and two other former executives.

The trio was charged with deliberately misleading investors by telling them the company was a quality lender of mostly prime mortgages and had prudent underwriting standards, while it actually was engaging in very risky lending practices in order to build and maintain market share.

Mozilo was also charged with insider trading for selling his Countrywide stock for nearly $140 million in profits while knowing that Countrywide’s business model was deteriorating.

It’s a little bit ridiculous, really.  There have been people saying for years that the myriad of new products available were going to lead to a crash. Credit was just too easy to get, income wasn’t being verified, the system was being gamed. Mozilo knew it too - one of the documents the SEC is using to back their allegations of fraud are ones in which Mozilo says that the products his company was selling were dangerous:

In particular, the SEC pointed to Countrywide’s increased origination of pay-option mortgages, which allow borrowers to choose their monthly payments even if they don’t cover the entire interest amount. While the lender maintained they were being prudently underwritten, the SEC says, Mozilo wrote in an email that there was evidence that borrowers were lying on their applications and many would be unable to handle the eventual higher payments.

Also, Mozilo was very concerned about the lender’s 80-20 mortgage product, which allowed borrowers to take out two loans to cover the entire cost of the house. He called it “the most dangerous product in existence.”

“In all my years in the business I have never seen a more toxic prduct[sic],” he wrote in an email to Sambol, according to the SEC.

Mozilo’s attorney that Countrywide’s lending practices were within the guidelines of the law, and if I had to place a bet right now, my money would be on that being a true statement. Part of the problem with the industry were loose regulations, so acting within the law didn’t mean that mortgage companies couldn’t do stupid loans. The charge the SEC is making is not about that, however. They are saying that Mozilo was misleading investors, and Mozilo’s attorney says that’s not true. He says that investors knew the risks they were taking. I agree.

I would love to see Mozilo get busted for insider trading but even if that happens, the $140 million in profit that he pocketed isn’t going to be paid back. Other than that, though, I actually don’t think he should lose too much sleep over this. The truth is that “we” all looked the other way for years, knowing deep down that home prices couldn’t keep going up indefinitely and that we couldn’t pay for our vacations and our credit card debt with cash out refinances forever. Average Joe and Jane knew it, and analysts for large firms who purchased this stock and the stocks of other lenders knew it. They chose to look the other way because ultimately, they knew this business and the banking industry in general was too big to fail - but in the meantime, a friendly political system and a society bent on frantic consumption allowed them to make huge amounts of money. We are all complicit.

As I watched this morning, it seemed like there was just as much about Eminem’s tantrum on the MTV Movie Awards as there was about the missing Air France jet (genius Google CNN headline: “Air France: Missing plane likely crashed“) or about GM filing bankruptcy.

I didn’t watch any of this news at home, mind you. I was at the gym, following my new resolution to use my unemployment time to pretend like I’m at the Biggest Loser ranch and work out probably more than necessary. We don’t have cable at home anymore, so I missed MTV Movie Awards, and even if we had been watching local network news this morning before heading to the gym, the Air France and GM stories probably wouldn’t have been in such constant ticker rotation. And that’s OK.

We’ve been without anything besides the basic networks now for a year or so. For part of that time, we paid about $15 a month for the networks, Discovery, TV Land, MTV, VH1 and The Disney Channel. Then, due to constant and obnoxious reminders every five seconds that TV was going all digital in February (LIARS!), we sent in for our converter box coupons about bought a rooftop antenna, saying goodbye to cable entirely. We currently have CW - “The Deuce,” here in Colorado, which has to be the worst name for a channel ever - CBS, ABC, NBC, NBC Weather, NBC Universal Sports, UPN, Fox, and a few PBS channels. That’s it. No USA, Bravo, VH1, MTV, SciFi, A&E, History Channel, TBS, TLC, Discovery, Food Network, ESPN, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, or any of the other dozens of channels we could get for probably around $100/month. We also don’t have a DVR, so we can’t record anything, and we don’t have OnDemand capabilities.

It’s kind of hard to believe how much pop culture we’re missing out by not having all of these channels. I have no idea who would be my least favorite Housewife of New Jersey. I don’t know what it’s like to raise eight children with cameras following your every bickering moment. We missed most of last year’s football games. I don’t know what the Barefoot Contessa is cooking up these days, and I actually very much miss Burn Notice. I also miss some shows that are pure camp trash, like Rock of Love and Charm School, The Pick-Up Artist and Tough Love - basically the entire MTV and VH1 reality lineup. 100% horrible, and so very entertaining, but a complete and utter waste of time.

Without those shows to drag me into serial brainrotting, I have apparently lost the taste for the free network shows that I used to watch fairly regularly - 24 was out this year as soon as Tony started behaving badly, I missed one episode of Lost - the one about Miles, which was probably the best one EVER because he is hilarious - and ended up not watching the rest of the season that because I knew I’d be confused, and as hot as Gregory House is, I just didn’t much care what happened at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital this year.

And daytime? Fuggitabout it. Daytime television in network land is the most vacant expanse of outspoken, semi-standup judges, ridiculous talk shows, and soap operas. It really is unwatchable. Have you ever seen The Steve Wilkos Show? It’s indescribably bad.

I love reality TV, I really do - I have an incredibly short TV attention span, so reality shows work well for me. Still, it feels like it’s completely out of hand. This year The Biggest Loser managed to stretch two hours a week out of people working out and not eating, the country apparently gave a damn about semi-celebrities and ballroom dancing, and American Idol was on pretty much … wait, was American Idol ever NOT airing? There’s the show where people in silver suits contort themselves to fit through foam cutouts (I cannot remember the name of the show, thank goodness) and Wipeout, which - OK, Wipeout is hilarious. And then of course there’s Wife Swap, a show my kids want us to go on just so they can find out what the opposite of me is, and Super Nanny, which they watch with mouths agape. The Bachelorette, I’m A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here, Hitched or Ditched, Big Brother …

I’m sure I’ve missed most of the reality shows out right now, but wow - it’s like channels get created because the bandwidth is available, and then the networks have to scramble to fill them, instead of having shows first, channels later. I know it’s summer and the networks expect ratings to be lower so they choose to air shows that cost less to make, but the sad truth is that I’ll bet summer really doesn’t have as much of an impact anymore. We sit inside, we watch. It’s so obvious that Hulu even makes fun of our addiction and we love them for it.

So really, what have we missed at our house? A monthly outgoing check for about $100/month for hundreds of channels of nothing, it sounds like. At least the brain rotting in our household is free.

This morning a friend posted a story from Time on his Facebook page that got my attention. When most of us think about the recession, we think about how to save money on groceries, utilities and the like in order to make it through jobless times. But in a good example of how everything is connected, the Time story explains what would be obvious if we really thought about it - prostitutes are seeing a decline in business as well.

“People just don’t spend that freely anymore,” says Anke Christiansen, co-founder of Hamburg’s Geizhaus (”Das Original Discount Bordell”), where visitor numbers have dropped up to 20% since the crisis began. “Customers who used to come to us two or three times a week now limit themselves to once a week.” That newfound restraint has already forced some brothels to shut their doors. In the Czech Republic, where 14% of men admit to having slept with a prostitute, up to half of all sex establishments outside of Prague have closed in the past year, says Hana Malinova, director of Bliss Without Risk, a prostitution-outreach group in the capital.

Apparently those in the industry are getting creative about how to market their business in this economy, including senior discounts and shuttle buses, package deals for sex and a meal at an all you can eat buffet, or (I particularly find this one amusing) free sex on Easter if you bring in a decorated egg.

The jokes practically write themselves, but I’ll refrain.

Then from Bloomberg, we have a column claiming that Latvian hookers an extramarital affairs are actually valid economic indicators, which is just fascinating:

In the U.K., a Web site called www.illicitencounters.co.uk allows married people who are planning to play a few matches away from home to meet up with each other. It has at least 300,000 members, indicating that the British have more on their minds than just the work expenses of politicians and the threat of unemployment.

The Web site crunched its traffic and membership numbers and found that there was a big increase in both when there was a turning point in the FTSE-100 index, which measures the leading companies listed in London. When the market collapses, people plot affairs. And when the bulls rage, the same thing happens. When it is trading sideways, they stick with their partners.

“It has to do with people’s confidence levels,” says Rosie Freeman-Jones, a spokeswoman for the site. “When the markets are up, they think they can have an affair because they feel they can get away with anything. When the market hits the bottom, they are looking for a way to relieve the pressure.”

In a similar vein, John Hempton, who runs the financial blog Bronte Capital, has monitored the health of the Baltic economies based on the price of Latvian sex workers — currently about 30 lati ($60) for the standard service.

“The contractual terms of prostitution are short (an hour, a night) and entry to the industry is unconstrained,” he says. “That means that the prices are very flexible.”

Deep down, the bit about the extramarital affairs is probably one of those things that we all know, but it’s interesting to see some actual correlation to market activity. I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth repeating - economics is a social science more than anything else. Since we’re all part of the social system, we all understand the basics of economics. Sometimes the jargon can get confusing but ultimately if you can think through how you would react to a given financial stimulus, you can probably expand on that and figure out how a group would react. The biggest challenge in economics - professional or armchair - is setting aside the value judgments and just accepting the reality of the data.

For example, in reading about how prostitutes are impacted by the recession, the simple response for many might be something like, “good, those women shouldn’t be in that business and men certainly shouldn’t be going out and spending their hard earned money on them.” Responses like that shut down a thought process, though. The reality is that decreased spending on prostitutes means that they too have less money to spend, and regardless of their profession, prostitutes still need most of the same stuff we all do - food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, electronics, phones, etc.

We’re all connected, even sometimes to people and pasttimes we had never dreamed of.

Like children all over the world, my boys roll their eyes impressively whenever I start a sentence with “You know, when I was a kid … ” They know that whatever is about to follow will at the very least be incomprehensible to their spoiled rotten, pampered little rear ends, and possibly an outright fabrication. Either way, it’s almost completely irrelevant in their world of cell phones, multiple gaming consoles and computers, and digital entertainment in general.

When I think about Blockbuster and what seems like their losing battle to keep up with the kids these days, I feel a big old “when I was a kid” needing to make its way through.

When I was a kid, there were still dials on televisions - two of them. One for the “real” channels and one for the random channels that I don’t think anyone ever really watched. The remote control was my little brother, even if he was upstairs or possibly even down the street, depending on how loudly I could yell that day. If the President had something to say or if a new Pope was being selected, you were just out of luck unless you wanted to watch PBS - and nobody wanted to watch PBS at night, which was when the President was most likely to show up.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to actually go to the theater or wait several hundred years (in kid time) for it to show up on television. The Wizard of Oz was an annual spring event. I vaguely remember when we got cable, but it wasn’t until high school that it seemed like our house starting having more channels than we knew what to do with. I remember when MTV had lots of music videos and no ridiculously drunken, strippers drooling over half-wit suitors. I remember watching The Shining while recovering from having my wisdom teeth taken out and thinking it was nothing compared to the book, which was terrifying.

I also remember the beginnings of the video rental era - how incredibly novel and revolutionary! We could go to a store and rent a video, and then after taking some time to rewind it and then figure out why the tracking wasn’t working, we could sit in our own living room and talk as much as we wanted while we watched, and then rewind to see what we missed during our chatter!

Fast forward a couple of decades and poor Bockbuster just can’t seem to stop hemorrhaging.  I would feel sorry for them if I didn’t despise them so much, a long term hate/kinda-tolerate relationship that has developed mostly because of the many times I know I’ve returned videotapes before they were due and then have gotten nasty extra charge surprises the next time I went in to rent something. I’ve given them a shot through their first attempt to have an online service, which went well until they changed their terms a few times and completely negated any customer advantage they had over Netflix - especially considering our experience as far as them not having videos in stock a fair bit of the time. I kind of half applauded their “no late fees” policy as perhaps a way to minimize the mysterious black hole that sucked in videos until after they were due and then spit them out back onto shelves until they instituted some new automated calling program to remind me that my videos were due something like two days after we had rented them. Even that I could understand, in a way, but wrapped up in that “no ate fee” program was the automatic purchase after a while and then the “restocking fee” if you brought the movie or game back.

A “restocking fee?” How can there be a restocking fee? Isn’t “restocking” what Blockbuster does?

So last night, we decided to have a little movie night and found out that once again, Blockbuster has switched gears. Now customers have the option to rent a movie for two nights at a lower per unit price, or to rent for seven days at a higher rate. The catch if you go for the two day rental is that after the two days, an extra daily charge is added - and then after two or three weeks (I can’t remember), you get to own the movie for an additional fee. I assume that you can still return it after that time if you’re willing to pay the restocking fee, but am not sure on that.

This after they changed the terms of their online agreement in February and ticked off their customers, and after they’ve announced that they’re going to give the kiosk thing a shot, which I personally don’t see as a real advantage over going to a store. They just can’t seem to regain their position in an industry where competitors can either use the postal system to get a DVD out to you within a day or let you download a movie within a few minutes - no brick and mortar locations needed.

Poor Blockbuster. I almost feel sorry for them.