His Hers Money

So I received my direct deposit “stimulus” check this week. It was a big whopping $296. Let me tell you, I wasn’t overly stimulated when it arrived. Yes, it is certainly better than nothing but really what am I going to do with $296? I guess I could buy five weeks of groceries, or maybe get my hair done twice (not including tip) or pay a fourth of my car insurance bill. None of which are very exciting if you ask me.

I really think they missed the mark on this one and I’ve thought this since they announced it a few months ago. I think a better program would have been a “Pick a Pot Hole Campaign” where each taxpayer could pick the pot hole they hate the most on the under maintained roads and they would come in a fix it. I personally hate pot holes.

How about a “Cow for Everyone Program” where you could get a cow’s worth of steaks per person, enough to last the entire year. I would even kick in the cost of the A-1 out of my weekly grocery budget!

So, what will I really do with my humungous stimulus check? Probably nothing. I’l put it in the checking account, add it onto the current balance number and move on. HIM should be getting the entire $600 which will be a bit better but we still aren’t going to be hitting the local mall armed with fistfuls of cash ready to stimulate the heck out of the economy!

It’s better late than never and so I present to you my updated net worth for April courtesy of both NetworthIQ and Zoho.

As you can see, things are going well in terms of paying down the debt. That’s my biggest goal right now and then I’ll really step things up in terms of savings and retirement. Hers and I have set up a new budget for after we combine our finances and we’ve built in a pretty ambitious savings plan that I feel we’ll be able to stick with.

So I had a bit of a dilemma. You see, I am a Gamer. Essentially I get probably 60-70% of my entertainment out of video games, with about 20% from TV and the rest from going out for a few drinks with Hers and friends.

Overall, I feel this is great value as the amount I spend on video games per hour played comes out to be far less money spent than other forms of entertainment. If I spend $60 on a video game that I end up playing for say 40 hours that works out to be $1.50 an hour. Compare that to a movie at the theater which is normally say $7.50, for a total of $5 an hour for a 90 minute movie.

The key is to figure out which games will I play for that amount of time. So I spend quite a bit of time researching different websites and magazines, reading reviews and talking to other people that I play with to see what they’ll be purchasing. That’s a big key with the games coming out today as most of them are playable online against other people. This really enhances the amount of time that you can expect to spend playing the game as it is never the same game when playing against human opponents.

So I had my eye on both Eve Online and Grand Theft Auto IV. The key differences being that Eve is a purely online game and subscription based, while GTA is a single player console game with a larger initial outlay of funds. The subscription model is still a fairly recent idea when it comes to games. Everquest was the first really popular game that used it. Normally you pay about what you would or slightly less, for a normal game. After the first month, however, there is a monthly charge of anywhere from around $9.99 to $15.99 for access to the required online servers. This makes the company more money long-term but also opens up gamers to having a huge online world where they get to interact with others.

In the end I decided to get them both. I’m figuring that GTA should take me somewhere between one to two months to finish, unless I play it much more than I’m guessing I will. Then I’m going to sell it on half.com. I’ve had pretty good success with selling there recently and I figure that it should easily go for 75% of my initial cost. So if I get $45 back on my $60 purchase and play it for 40 hours (it probably will end up being more) that ends up being a little more than $.33 per hour of entertainment. Not bad.

With Eve, luckily it’s a slightly older game that’s been out for 4 years. It still has a thriving community of players, with greater than 300k subscribers. It is less than a lot of other games, with the first month coming in at $19.99 and the monthly fee after that being $12.99. So for essentially one night at the movies each month, I get a virtual world that I get to explore in a spaceship and interact with some friends. I see value in that.

In closing, just let me say that Hers does not share my ‘passion’ for video games and this obviously will be coming out of my discretionary ‘allowance’ fund.