Omaha, NE - Billionaire investor Warren Buffett today announced the purchase of the Wrigley Company while munching on a giant wad of Big League Chew. As the details of the $23 Billion dollar purchase were being read, the Oracle from Omaha continued to put more of the shredded bubble gum into the side of his cheek. While the reasons for the purchase were hard to decipher, at the end of the call Buffett said he was “Werry excited to buy the wigglies thewing bum business.”

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ASSOCIATED PRESS - Holbrook, MA - An 11 year old boy with a passion for coin collecting saw his nightmare transform into a miracle in a heartwarming story from this small rural town. It all began when a single family home on Harwich Ave was robbed in late August of 2007. Christopher Foley, a tiny, freckled boy with curly blonde hair, returned with his family from a summer trip to their ransacked home. Among other valuables, the thieves had stolen Christopher’s most prized possession: his coin collection. Christopher had been collecting coins since he was six years old. He had an Ike Dollar, two Buffalo nickels, Liberty Heads, and dozens of other rare and old coins. His favorite piece however, was only worth sixty four cents. “I had every year’s penny from 1943 to 2007. The pennies were my favorite,” he told us. A month later the Foley’s insurance company had reimbursed them for most of their losses. A penny collection, however, is not something easily replaced.

That’s when Christopher’ dad gave him his big idea. “I told him, why don’t you send Grandpa a letter? I’m sure he has a lot of old pennies in his house,” the elder Foley said. So Christopher did exactly that. He sent his grandfather in Florida a letter with his request, a return envelope, and a cardboard pennyholder that has year labels underneath slots to place each penny in. Christopher expected his grandfather to find a dozen or so pennies and send him the package back within a few days.

After two weeks passed without receiving a reply, he got worried. With his dad’s assistance, Christopher called his grandfather and asked if he had received the letter. When he replied yes, Christopher then asked why he hadn’t returned it yet. The answer foreshadowed what was about to happen–”I’m sorry Christopher , but I only could find a handful of old pennies here.  So I forwarded your letter to a friend of mine in South Carolina. I am sure he has some pennies from back then that he’d be happy to share.”

When two more weeks passed and still no pennies, again Christopher called his grandfather. This time he was told that the friend in South Carolina had sent the package off to another friend in Kentucky. And slowly a chain began.

The weeks continued to pass, and Christopher had nearly forgotten about the letter. Then one evening, as the Foley’s were about to sit down for supper, a FedEx truck pulled down old Harwich Ave. Christopher’s father signed for the package, then looked at Christopher, “It’s for you”. Excitedly the boy, not quite knowing what to expect, opened the box. When he pulled out what was inside–”I almost fainted!”–he later told us.

Inside were one hundred and forty-seven pennies, a penny from every year dating back to 1860–the first year of the Civil War. Also inside was a journal with well wishes and signatures from forty two people who had helped rebuild the collection way beyond its original size. What once was a child’s modest hobby was now a collection worthy of the Smithsonian–all thanks to the generosity of mostly strangers. “It was probably the most amazing thing that I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” Christopher’s father said. “Here he is, a young boy who’s strongest memory of the world was that a few strangers had broken into his home, and stolen his coin collection, now gets to see how good the world can be and how the good is even greater than the bad.”

Christopher now displays his penny collection proudly to visitors of his family’s home, but now he’s a little more careful, “My parents bought a safe, because now the collection is worth ‘real money’ they said, and we want to keep it safe.”

Real money indeed. One coin afficiando estimates a collection that large is worth tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. But to little Christopher, these pennies, and the story they come with, are priceless.

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Los Alamos, NV - Have you ever wondered in quiet dread if that money might really burn a hole in your pocket? Now we know. Scientists have made the startling discovery that money can indeed burn holes in your pockets–and possibly even more.  As the video below shows, when a strong flame is held steadily against a dollar bill, it will indeed catch fire. If this experiment had taken place inside a real pants pocket, there’s no telling how many holes the bill might have burned. Although the experiment was only conducted on $100 bills, scientists predict that they would’ve gotten the same results had they used $20, $10, or even $1 dominations. The head of the research project reported that he chose to use $100 bills for the taxpayer-funded study because “it was much more badass.”

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Washington, D.C. - President George Bush spent Tuesday morning waiting for a local Bank of America Representative to give him his ATM card back. Apparently the President had forgotten his PIN number and didn’t realize it until after he had inserted his card into the machine. After three failed guesses, the machine ended Bush’s transaction and kept his card. Some ATM machines are programmed not to return a card for a number of reasons, to prevent fraud or people from leaving their cards accidentally.

The President described the ordeal to the White House press corps this afternoon. “I was trying to use my machine in the card [sic], when I realized, wait, I don’t know my number. So I pressed some buttons, you see, a couple different buttons, 4231, 5555, 4444, I tried em all. But I guess I didn’t get them right, because next thing I know the person behind the machine had kept my card.” When asked by a member of the press if the number ever came to him, the President said “Yes ma’am. Two days later it suddenly came to me—1234! I’ve never been a person with numbers[sic].”

Bush later elaborated on the difficulty caused by the accident, “It was bad. Because it was a holiday weekend, I couldn’t get any money until Tuesday. Here we are, we’ve got a war to pay for, and the machine has my card.” As of Tuesday evening, the card was returned and funding for the war had resumed.

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Dear SmartYoungInvestor,

Brian O.
Reston, VA

Dear Brian,

If only more college grads had your problem. The simple answer to your question is: it depends. I’m guessing the difference in interest rates between your two accounts is .5-2%. Let’s say it’s 2% (which I’m guessing is high). That means you are earning at the maximum $200 a year from keeping things the way they are. More realistically, the difference in rates is 1% or less. So you are probably earning yourself $100 or under. To earn that amount of money, you have to constantly pay attention to your loans and make sure they are made on time each month. If this is all automated, or is very convenient for you, by all means keep things as they are. But if it’s a bit of stress that you’d rather not have to deal with, pay off the loans now. You might pass up a few bucks, but it will certainly make you feel better.

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Bellevue, Washington - Doctors at Bellevue Hospital have confirmed that ShareBuilder.com has contracted the rare sexually transmitted disease orangio trachomatis, more commonly known as the “Orange STD”. The symptoms of the disease include a disgusting, orange rash that spreads rapidly over a company’s website. A quick visit to ShareBuilder.com will illustrate the hideousness of the orange color scheme. The source of the virus has been traced to ING Direct, which “acquired” ShareBuilder in January of 2008. ShareBuilder’s previous website was a pleasing mix of blue and green colors. Millions of ShareBuilder customers have started avoiding the site, and some are even said to be secretly telling their friends to stay away too.

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Main Street, USA - Leading personal financial analysts at The Smart Young Investor have finally declared what many have long suspected: spending that $1 on coffee each morning provides better returns than saving it. “With the top savings accounts now paying only 3% interest rates, we can no longer advise forgoing that cup of coffee in the morning for the future reward,” said SYI Vice President of Savings Advice Penny Horder. “At 3%, even if you saved $1 a day for 10 years, at the end of 50 years you’d only have accumalated $21,281, even with compounding. Is $21,000 worth more than ten years of caffeine highs? I don’t think so.”

Representatives from Starbucks were quick to jump on the news: “We’ve been teaching kids for years that ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.’ Not only is it now apparent we’ve wasted valuable teaching time, but thousands of kids have mistakenly put money into their bank accounts when they could have been developing a much more valuable addiction to caffeine.”

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Washington, D.C. - A federal law now gives all Americans free online access to their credit reports once annually. According to a CNN poll, one quarter of the population says this is “great news”, another twenty percent called it “not bad”, and the other sixty-five percent described the free access to their credit report as “like a kick in the balls”. While a small percentage of Americans will get to glance at their own responsible history of financial management, the rest will learn that “Yes you are a deadbeat and the system knows it.”

But what exactly are credit reports? Credit reports are like those files your principal kept locked in his office that kept a detailed record of what a bad kid you are. Instead of listing your detentions, tardies, and F’s, your credit report lists things like the unwieldy number of credit cards you have, how many dozens of payments you’ve missed, and how unbelievable your total amount of outstanding debt is. It’s not all bad though. If you haven’t had any problems with credit in the past, your credit report will actually help you–by allowing you get a ton more credit until you finally do have problems. In this way the government hopes to stimulate the economy by encouraging those who have good credit to borrow and spend more, and encouraging the debtors among us to realize how hopeless a task it would be to pay back your loans so why not just spend more.

Credit reports have been a foundation of the personal credit market for decades. Three companies handle nearly all the credit reporting in this country: Experian, Transunion, and Equifucked. This is like having three principals at your school, each of whom keeps a seperate file on you. So even if you could sneak into one office and add some creative whiteout to your file, your chances of successfully doing that to all three are pretty much nil.

According to the webmaster of the new site (https://www.annualcreditreport.com/), since it has gone live the site has been subject to nearly two hundred million hacking attempts. They also have received a deluge of angry emails such as this one “I swear that those unpaid credit cards aren’t mine. There must be a different Kristopher Michaelo Zupitoawtsac who also lives in Holton, Alaska.”

A new bill in Congress giving Americans free access to the secret reports the CIA keeps on them has yet to pass.

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New York, New York - The Smart Young Investor, which had previously been a simple website listing great financial products, and was more well known for its newsletter, has undergone a drastic change in direction.

Under the new direction of CEO John Maynard Keynes, The Smart Young Investor aims to become the world’s leading source of financial news and personal money management advice. The new site aims to fill the huge gap created when the Wall Street Journal decided to focus entirely on the latest faux pas’ of Hollywood Celebrities.

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