My favorite post from this week’s Carnival of Capitalists comes from View from a Height in an article entitled “The Morningstar Empire Strikes Back…”.

That’s right, some research the author helped on that investigated Morningstar’s classification system has gotten a response from the company itself. Statistical proof, going against the mainstream, I love it. (Of course, that their findings fit with my recent post on obfuscation in finance and business terminology doesn’t hurt, either!)

Both articles are worth reading, and they make cogent arguments as to why a commonly used classification system may not be all that great.

In this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, Blogging Away Debt wrote about using feng shui to improve attitudes and possibly your finances. Personally, neither I nor my immediate family believe in feng shui even though we’re Chinese, but I admire Tricia for writing about a controversial subject and putting her experiences with it out there.

Feng Shui (literally, feng=wind and shui=water) is an ancient type of geomancy practiced by many Asians. Rearranging, cleaning, or organizing your home or work area can definitely make you feel better, but feng shui takes things many steps further. Though I don’t believe in it, I have many friends who do. Let me describe an example of how seriously feng shui is taken in some families:

One day during high school, I went over to visit friend Mei at her house. Upon knocking at the front door, she peeked through the curtain of a side window and said, “Hey, glad you came! You need to enter through the door in the garage.” I headed over there, went into the house, said hello to everyone, and then, stepping into the living room, couldn’t help but notice that a large upright piano had been set against the front door.

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All too often, we ignore the enjoyment of the purchase process by focusing all our attention instead on the dollar figure being spent and the value of the item.

Trying to get great deals isn’t a bad thing, but I’ve found a far more effective and long-lasting way to be frugal: by remembering the enjoyment I felt spending money on a few special items, I’m far less motivated to spend casually. The reason this works is that most items you’re interested in buying will pale in comparison to your memories of acquiring your most treasured objects.
Here’s my decision-making process when shopping for fun. If I see an item I like, I go through the following list of questions:

1. Why do I like it? Is it because it reminds me of something I already have and haven’t used in a while?
2. How unique is it? (Very few things are truly unique.)
3. How good is the quality of the item?
4. If I buy the item, am I in a time and place where it will help me treasure an experience for years to come? (In most retail shops, the answer is no.)
5. Do I feel as excited about owning it as I did about one of my memorable items? (If not, then I’ll walk away and save my money for a more worthy purchase in the future.)
6. And finally, how much is it?

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Feeling a bit under the weather right now, so I can only offer a quick post recommending that you check out Unusual Business Ideas That Work, which I found via Get Rich Slowly‘s new sidebar. The site profiles real small-business entrepreneurs who’ve come up with a wide variety of ways to make money.

My favorites are the guy who writes Santa letters to children and another who runs a document storage and retrieval service for other businesses. They’re doing well for themselves, and maybe it’s exactly because they’re in overlooked industries instead of high-tech or glamorous ones. Just like in many developing countries, where being an entrepreneur is sometimes your only choice, and becoming wealthy isn’t necessarily the primary goal.

In contrast, most people I know of (especially here in Silicon Valley) who dream of becoming entrepreneurs or VCs do so in the hopes of becoming rich or finding the next Google. Maybe there’s something to thinking “small” after all!

The sibling rivalry between my (younger) brother and me takes a rather geeky form. I realized recently in talking to friends that we’re a very unusual case, because rather than arguing over who owes what money to whom, or who needs more money from mom and dad, we argue over who gets to pay. Maybe it’s just typical Asian upbringing at work.

A couple of months ago, we both paid a visit to our parents. I rented a car which he never used, we bought a Mother’s Day present on my credit card, and as usual, he insisted on paying for meals and everything else he could get his hands on. Not that I would have made him pay me back even without his nice gestures, but after all that, we were nothing if not even. He still insisted that I take a check back with me on my flight. I did, and kept it just long enough to shred it as soon as I got home.

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