Intrinsic Value

It's Sunday morning and, because we're both exhausted and not feeling well, we stayed home from church. Usually, on the way out the door, we'd watch "Sunday Morning" on CBS, but today we watched the entire show. It was about a guy who was hitting a golf ball across Scotland for no apparent reason, an extremely eccentric artist who paints mostly birds, butterflies and monkeys (this guy has a HUGE loft in the middle of New York and two VERY impressive antebellum plantation homes in Louisiana. MDB and I had never heard of him or seen his work before, but he's apparently pretty popular with the art-buying public; they said his paintings go for as much as 100k!), the song-writing team of Ashford and Simpson, the Pony Express, and, the coup de'grace....license plates in Delaware.

Okay; why did they do a show on Delaware license plates? Apparently, in Delaware, it's a REALLY big deal to have a license plate with a low number on it. The Governor always gets #1, the Lieutenant Governor #2, and the SS #3. All of the other plates were issued in numerical order beginning with #4. Naturally, rich guys who were the first to buy cars way back when were issued those first plates. Anyway, buying and selling "low-number" license plates in Delaware has become quite the cottage industry. The story mentioned that one such plate sold for nearly 200k almost twenty years ago! Well, the centerpiece of the story was the death of a guy who owned plate number 6. Wow! #6!!! At auction, the plate sold for 3/4 of a MILLION dollars!!!! 750k!!!!! Several auction attendees were interviewed and they all said that buying such a plate was a "Great Investment!;" even better than the stock market!!!

Uhhhh.........................................................WHAT?!?!?!

I have two words for these fiscally-challenged soothsayers: BEANIE BABIES!

Yes, boys and girls, I remember all too well those heady days of driving all over hell's half-acre in search of the "latest" or "limited edition" stuffed animals that were going to be worth hundreds, even THOUSANDS more than we paid for them. All we had to do was protect those precious tags (by buying those pre-formed tag protectors) and watch the money come rolling in!

Some lessons are harder-learned than others.

Now, I have a box (oh...and not just ANY box; a small refrigerator came in this box) full of these "priceless" little commodities. I'd have to say that, overall, over a thousand dollars were "invested." If I could find someone crazy enough to overpay for the whole box, it's probably worth a buck seventy five altogether.

The recycled value of the cardboard would be half the price!

Anyway, for those clowns who really believe that a license plate is a better investment than the stock market, let me share the benefit of my expeience with you.

Things with no intrinsic value do not hold their "perceived" value after the trend wears off.

"But Dan!" you say, "There have been cars in Delaware for over a hundred years! This little 'trend' is still going after all of these years! Isn't that a safer bet than Beanie Babies?"

If you have nothing better to do with your overabundance of money than waste it on a license plate or a really bad painting of cockatoos, send me some of it, will you?

Okay...if you don't want to send it to me, how about sending it to help rebuild New Orleans, or to the tornado victims in north Texas, or to any of hundreds of other worthy causes?

Nevermind. If you're spedning large sums of disposable income on garbage, you probably wouldn't be interested in putting any of it into a worthwhile cause in any case.