NY Life Ad

I previously talked about an NY Life ad.  I've scanned the ad in question from a more recent copy of Businessweek for reference.

This is the ad :

Free 3 month Amazon Prime trial

Right now you can get a 3 month free trial of Amazon Prime when buying any textbook. To get the free trial find a textbook and put in in your cart and then accept the free trial as you check out. It seems you don't even have to actually buy the textbook to get the Prime trial which seems a tad dodgy to me. If you do sign up for the free trial then turn off autorenew to make sure you don't automatically end up billed for a full year after the 3 months is up. If you decide you want the full year then you can just sign up manually.

I learned about this one from Fat Wallet.

Net Worth Annual Summary for 2009

Here is how our net worth changed for the past 12 month period:

Bit of detail on each category:

Cash: Cash increased primarily due to income from my job. But I also got some cash from selling stock and selling an extra car my wife had. We also spent a good chunk of money landscaping our yard and insulating our home.

Stocks :
Stocks dropped because I sold off some stock in my employer that I'd held.

Retirement : I've got retirement funds in a 401k, employer pension account and Roth IRA account. My retirement is almost all in equities. The stock market rebounded nicely in 2009 so I'm up considerably.

Home : The value of our home is flat overall for 2009. Earlier in the year it went down then it started to go up. It peaked at $241k in the summer after hitting a low of $218k in the early spring.

Rentals : Our rental properties went up overall.

Cars : My wife had an old used car that we ended up selling. The car actually sold for about $1800 rather than the $2500 that we'd estimated the value at.

Home Mortgage : We have a 15 year mortgage on our home and we pay $800 a month extra towards the principal. Towards the end of the year I upped that to $900 a month. So over the year we've paid down over $16k on the home mortgage.

Rental mortgage : We have a 30 year mortgage on one rental property that we pay the normal minimum payment on. That mortgage is being whittled a way a few hundred a month.


Big changes in our net worth are:

• Cash went up about $13k. (about $4k is from sale of other assets)
  
• Retirement rebounded by 36% growing by about $31k.
• Real estate assets climbed modestly.
  
• Mortgages were paid down by about $20k.

These are all positive changes in net worth and in our annual net worth overview there are no real negatives that I see.

Overall our net worth is up over $69,000 for the year.

I'm of course very happy with this and hope that the trend continues in 2010.

Interesting Numbers on TV Costs

OK so this doesn't have much of anything to do with personal finance, but I find it interesting....

This article from the AP Broadcasters' woes could spell trouble for free TV has a bunch of numbers on the costs of TV networks that I found pretty interesting.

"On average, the pay-TV providers pay about 26 cents for each channel they carry, according to research firm SNL Kagan. A channel as highly rated as ESPN can get close to $4, while some, such as MTV2, go for just a few pennies."

I really wish that I could just buy TV networks ala carte direct from the network rather than having to pay Comcast an obscene amount of money for 100+ channels I never watch plus the 5-10 that I actually watch. But of course we'd all like that and the cable companies know it so thats why they don't do it.


Here's a few points on revenue incomes:

"Media economist Jack Myers projects online video advertising will grow into a $2 billion business by 2012, from just $350 million to $400 million this year."

"Advertisers spent $34 billion on broadcast commercials in 2008, down by $2.4 billion from two years earlier, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising."

"In 1998, cable channels drew roughly $9.1 billion, or 24 percent of total TV ad spending, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising. By 2008, they were getting $21.6 billion, or 39 percent."


Given those figures we've got $400M from Internet, $34B from broadcast and $21.6B from cable channels. So income breaks down like this:

So the broadcast networks are still getting most of the ad revenue. Internet revenues are still trivial in comparison to the whole.