Dave Barry's Money Secrets Read Free Page B

you actually bought penny wrappers, but you never put the pennies in them, and you no longer know where the wrappers are, and you have heard that the banks don’t really want them anyway. You frankly have no idea why the government still MAKES pennies. All you know is that you are going to die with these fricking pennies in your possession.
    •                  When you wake up in the morning, you have to pee.
    •                  Twice a year, you change all your clocks by an hour, but you don’t really know why.
    •                  You occasionally bet on sporting events, and you secretly believe that, by doing certain things such as positioning your hands in a certain way, or not looking directly at the television set, you can affect the accuracy of a field goal kicker thousands of miles away.
    •                  You have convinced yourself that your sexual fantasies are normal.
    •                  Even the one involving the penguin.
    •                  At weddings, when the organ plays “Here comes the bride,” your brain immediately responds with: “Big, fat, and wide.”
    •                  When you watch
The Wizard of Oz,
it troubles you that Glinda, the so-called “Good Witch of the North,” is actually quite
nonhelpful
to Dorothy. Like, at the beginning, she’s all vague about the power of the ruby slippers, as if she has
no idea
what they can do, and then at the end, when Dorothy has gone through living hell to kill the Wicked Witch of the West so she can go back to Kansas, Glinda shows up and—guess what!—she knows
exactly
how Dorothy can use the slippers to get home. When the Scarecrow asks Glinda how come she didn’t just explain this to Dorothy in the first place, Glinda gives a lame explanation about how Dorothy wouldn’t have believed her, when in fact from the start Dorothy
totally
believed
everything
Glinda told her, including this
lie
that the “Wizard of Oz” was great and powerful, when in fact he was a drunk with a smoke machine (as if Glinda wouldn’t know
that
). So what is clearly happening here is that Glinda was just
using
Dorothy to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. What a bitch.
    •                  Speaking of movies: When you’re at a movie theater, and your movie is about to start, you
always
end up in the concession line that doesn’t move because the people in front just
can’t decide
what they want, as if they’re up there trying to negotiate a Middle East peace settlement instead of choosing between popcorn and Milk Duds—FOR GOD’S SAKE WILL YOU MORONS JUST
MAKE UP YOUR MINDS??
    •                  Sometimes, when nobody is around, you scratch your private parts with a hairbrush.
    •                  You do not keep a detailed household budget.

    If any one of these statements caused you to think: “That’s me, all right!” then your personal finances are in serious trouble. What can you do about it?
    One important step, of course, is to purchase products carrying the brand of a popular financial guru such as Suze “Suze” Orman. If you don’t know who Suze is, turn on your TV right now and tune it to any channel, including the Cartoon Network. There she’ll be:

    Suze always has a smile on her face—the radiant, confident smile of a person who will not hesitate to kill anybody who gets in her way. But she’s also smiling because she has helped millions of people who have learned the secrets of wealth by purchasing her many bestselling books and audiotapes, including
Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook; The Road to Wealth: A Comprehensive Guide to Your Money; The Laws of Money, the Lessons of Life; You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It; 9 Steps to Financial Freedom; The Courage to Be Rich; Here’s Yet Another Suze Orman Book About Money; You Might Think That at Some