“Currently, the costs of making the penny and the nickel are more than twice the face value of each of those coins.” - Timothy Geithner

As a personal finance web site, we here at DQYDJ tend to spill more than the average amount of (digital) ink on the topic of inflation. The correct way to measure inflation, the comparison of interest rates and mortgages, and loads and loads of articles on market inflation expectations... we've covered it all. One thing we haven't covered is the specific irony the US Treasury encounters when it comes to coining currency - specifically, small denomination coins currently cost more in raw materials to produce than the actual value of the coin.

We're sure you've heard the quote "greater than the sum of its parts". In this case, the value of certain coins is less than the sum of its parts... Oy Vey!

How cool is that? We technically gave you guys 4 new articles Sunday through Thursday.

Happy Thursday, readers! I'm delighted to share with you this short story about my entry into the recent Mega Millions drawing. Alas, I didn't win anything, but I'll share this little anecdote with you nonetheless. Skip to the end if you are easily bored by math!

Is it just me, or has there been a huge decline in activity on other personal finance sites? Maybe it's just me... anyway, we're still around and here's another weekender!

It wasn't that long ago that we featured an article here at Don't Quit Your Day Job about gambling in America. Knowing that 5.566% of our visitors are Canadian (for the record, 70.175% of visits originate from America and .474% are unknown), I figured we should shine our flashlight on the Land of the Loonie.

(For the uninitiated, that's the currency, not a comment on our northern pals).

Random musing,s links, and places that liked us in the last week...

One of our favorite things to debate here on DQYDJ is the validity of the inflation rate. On the whole, we think that the method the government uses to track inflation is a decent gauge of the prices an 'average person' in America pays for a particular basket of goods.

That strict definition is where many of you have a problem. Who among us is a 'typical person', who spends their money in the exact proportions as the average of all Americans? Well, no one.

Do we have a good excuse for not doing this in February? No, we don't. Please, accept our virtual apologies and enjoy our predictions for the closing price of SPY on April 20, June 15, and January 18 (2013)!

From the coding that never ends department, fixed the Feedburner script so that whenever it receives a '0' for one of the last 7 days it doesn't update the subscriber count. Of course, Feedburner had to go and test that theory by marking the subscribers as '0' for a whole day... and we'll be stuck at 131 subscribers for at least 2 more days. Well, it's better than when it was showing 81!

We have dealt a lot recently with historically low interest rates and their implications on not only the cost of housing and mortgages, but also implications for consumer credit and inflation. Although we have explained home price affordability in the San Francisco Bay Area before, we haven’t discussed the large variance in regional real estate prices.