I try to post something every single weekday, and I’ve been pretty good about that, but as the midnight deadline draws near, I’m still working–for my real job, that is, the one that pays my mortgage. So I’m afraid I don’t have a new post today–go read Frequent Miler or Saverocity instead.

However, I do have a personal story to share. Some of you may know that I have about thirty children (not really, but that’s what it feels like). My wife took them shopping today, and the oldest, who’s almost 6, made a shopping list. Every time my wife started to deviate from the list, he said “No Mommy, that’s not on the list!” Every item over $1.00 was greeted with “That’s too expensive!” My wife said she actually spent less money today than she otherwise would have.

I am SO proud of this kid. Look for his personal finance blog in a couple of decades.

Have a great weekend!

SAN FRANCISCO RENT EXPLOSION: Continuing my ongoing series of Places That Are Fascinating Because They Are So Darn Expensive, here’s an interesting read from Priceonomics on the current rent situation in the Bay Area. Here are the average monthly rental amounts:

As the article points out:

And that’s just for a run of the mill neighborhood in the city. If you want to live in a spiffier spot in San Francisco, be prepared to pony up big time cash. A one bedroom alone will cost you almost $3,500 in SOMA or $3,200 in Russian Hill.

Rents aren’t just high in San Francisco, they’re rising quickly. In June 2011, the median price for a one bedroom was $2,195. Two years later, the price of a one bedroom has increased 27% to $2,795. During the same time period, the price of a two bedroom apartment rose 33%. That’s almost 10 times the rate of inflation during those two years.

Ouch! I’m quite content with my three-figure mortgage payment, thank you very much. In fairness, I should note that prosperity has something to do with the recent price increases:

HEALTH CARE SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF GDP: I don’t have any point to make, as untangling the relevant issues is far beyond my level of expertise, but this is an interesting graph nonetheless. Relevant questions to ask would be along the lines of “Where does the extra money go?” and “What do we get for it?”

A USEFUL HEURISTIC: I present to you Sturgeon’s Law (H/T: The Big Picture):

From creator Theodore Sturgeon:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms.

This quote is from the 1950s, so no mention of whether blogs are included in this rule.

ARCANE DETAILS OF BORON GROUP METALS PRICING UPDATE: The Daily Show on Goldman-Sachs’s manipulation of the aluminum market:

FIRST THINGS FIRST: Kmart is offering $25 per transferred prescription, up to $100 total. The fine print says one coupon per customer, not per household, so if you’re a family with a lot of prescriptions than have at it!

If you don’t want to go to Kmart, Hustler Money Blog has some helpful advice:

Many of Kmart competitors such as Walgreens, WalMart, CVS, etc will match the $25 promotion. Simply take the Kmart coupon printout to their competitor’s pharmacy for the bonus match.

In other news, Maximizing Money points out that you can get up to $20 off a Costco membership here. It’s $10 off a Gold Star membership and $20 off an Executive membership.

THANKS FREQUENT MILER: Special thanks to Frequent Miler for linking to me yesterday. The timing was great because I had decided I’d take the day off from posting due in part to the fact that work has been hectic but mostly because there has been an usually low amount of interesting news and good deals lately.

Instead of the expected slow day, I hit about 6x my usual traffic and beat my record high, and that’s entirely due to FM’s considerable power to affect the flow of internet traffic.

About this blog: I do it for fun. That’s mostly because my ads don’t make a lot of money, otherwise I’d totally be doing this for money. Well, and fun too.

I like good deals, credit cards, financial outliers, gaming the system, macroeconomics, and other stuff like that. I assume my readers do, but it’s hard to know for sure because they’re usually pretty quiet. I started this blog because I figured I was spending enough time reading about this stuff I may as well start a blog and see what happens. That was November, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Eight whole months!

Since that time, I’ve also written a consumer’s guide to credit cards if anybody’s interested.

About the recent dearth of deals: I don’t know what’s going on, but my goodness, has it been slow lately! Maybe this happens every summer when people who work in marketing go on vacation and take a break from figuring out ways to drive revenue, but this is the slowest I’ve seen it outside of Christmas / New Year’s. Hopefully tomorrow will be a more interesting day.

Anyway, to both new readers and old: it’s both humbling and gratifying to think that total strangers actually read what I write, so thanks to you all!