This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. Mike: So, Logan, I heard that after we left the bar last night, I went home to go to bed, and you went back to your neighborhood in Brooklyn and got more drinks?

Logan: Well, that is almost true. I went back to our friend Adam's neighborhood and got one more drink, and also some macaroni and cheese, yes. That happened.

Mike: Oh.

Logan: I'm guessing that you're interested in this fact because you think there are other things I could have spent that $26 on! ($6 for the drink, $10 for the mac and cheese, and [...]

I don’t know why I’m never quoted in trend-pieces about What the Millennials Are Doing. I’m 23. I live in Brooklyn. I’m a perpetually underemployed graduate of a highly ranked East Coast university. I live with a female roommate who owns a lot of ramekins. And I decided to become a sperm donor to make ends meet In This Economy.

Manual labor jobs are on the decline, you know. Based on how winded I got trying to move a box of books into a new apartment a few months back, I probably couldn’t survive in a manual-labor-based economy, but like anybody with a steady flow of testosterone, I still like [...]

"We do not need to further incentivize entrepreneurs and investors to start companies–they already have plenty of incentives to do so… It is silly to think that "entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs in our economy. Entrepreneurs and investors start and fund companies, which is important. But what actually creates self-sustaining jobs and a growing economy is customers who want and can pay for companies' products and services. Without these customers, there's no job creation." —Hee! Henry Blodget writing this morning on how bazillionaires aren't actually the engine of the economy is already attracting the hate-comments.

Before the hilarious Morgan Stanley report—which says that we're "hovering dangerously close to a recession" and then says that "policy errors" have to do with their vote of no confidence in the U.S. markets, by which they mean "make us and/or give us much more money" and/or "don't cut government spending"—came the Goldman Sachs report, which put forward the idea of the U.S. economy being a plane, a plane that can stall, just like a real plane, if GDP growth is below 2%. One of their top two concerns? "US fiscal tightening." (In the end, just FYI, they put the possibility of a "new" recession at 1 in [...]

"The number of dollar bills rolling off the great government presses here and in Fort Worth fell to a modern low last year. Production of $5 bills also dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. And for the first time in that period, the Treasury Department did not print any $10 bills. The meaning seems clear. The future is here. Cash is in decline."

It seems too obvious to even say, but what with the celebrations about Glenn Beck leaving Fox News… well, yes: "Essentially, he's leaping from venue to venue and using each to get richer, more famous, and more validated. Now he's a free agent with millions of dollars at his disposal and more than two million loyal fans." Hi, Sarah Palin quit her job as a governor because it restrained her and her income potential. Why wouldn't Glenn Beck do the same thing? (Besides, he's been gaming this out for ages.) You don't want to be the talent: you want to be the owner. And he doesn't need [...]

10) Vodka.com : $3 million, 2006.

When I got my first royalty check from Amazon, I went to my boss at the bar and was like, “Mike, I quit, dude,” and he was like why, and I was like “Look at this check, man,” and he said, “I’d quit too.”

This is what I’m doing now. My three stories that are out have now sold in excess of 93,000 copies, and I have another Kindle Single that I’m working on for later this year, and hopefully working on a book.

Don't you love knowing how much money people make? This is actually really admirable that the Kindle Singles folks are encouraging writers to [...]

If pennies and nickels are largely useless, why does the U.S. Mint continue to manufacture them? In this excerpt from The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society, out this week, David Wolman investigates why eliminating the penny is problematic.

In the Victorian ballroom of the Charing Cross Hotel in London, the thirteenth annual Digital Money Forum is wrapping up with a session of free beer and wine. Beneath brass chandeliers, people from the worlds of banking, telecom, academia, and international development have absorbed an entire weekend’s worth of talk about money in the form of bits and bytes, and tomorrow’s technologies for handling [...]

"The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation." —You know, nowadays, it's the old man, he's got all the money.

The data we're allowed to have from places like Conde Nast makes it a little difficult to parse, but this helps: "between its eight magazines with tablet editions, the company has 242,000 digital customers." Good night, nurse! Your revolution is… maybe next year? (That being said, I'd love to see income numbers from that. It's gotta be somewhere from $1.2 million to $2.6 million, I figure? The problem is counting people who get iPad access "bundled" with magazine subscriptions; where people get counted is important!) And language is tricky!

But here's what we can figure out. The New Yorker "served" 89,684 iPad copies for an issue in [...]

Did you just get paid? You're gonna die, says some guy out of Notre Dame.

Good news for America's money-hungry colleges and universities! Yale: "Class of 2015 admit rate lowest ever." UCLA: "A record-high number of applicants for UCLA results in low admissions." Harvard: "Harvard Accepts Record Low 6.2 Percent of Applicants to the Class of 2015."

So, yes: application rates are through the roof, admission rates are way down, and at the same time, prices are going up! Coupled with the trend of the use of high-priced admissions "consultants," who help eliminate admissions to needy ("poor") students so as to get more paying students, it's going to be a great year for institutions (to sock away some cash and educate [...]

The Banks are

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We wondered how people pay their bills, so we asked them: how do you pay your bills? They—and we—answered thusly: It's a mess. Someone figure out how to make this less difficult, pronto. So, how do you pay your bills?

Tyler Coates, blogger "My roommate handles all of our utilities. We have a Google doc with all of the expenses, how much she has paid, and what I owe her, and I write her a check every month or two. In addition to that, I have rent to pay, which I do by check. I think [...]

I've been thinking about the way I buy things, the when and where and why of it all, and how totally dumb most of the purchases (big and small, from gum to Apple products) that I make are. So I'm very into Make It Do, which is about a year of wearing things out, mending things, and buying minimally. (But what about pedicures? That's not in the FAQ!) It's nice that it's not a crusade ("my year without any animal products"!) or a stunt ("my year as a cavewoman"!); it's just a way to pull-back, look at the way we interact with products and see what one [...]

$85 million sounds like a lot of money! That's what Tumblr just raised, on top of the $30 million they raised ten months ago, bringing their investment dollars to a bit north of $120 million. There's a staff of 50 (now only 82% male!), so that's like $5 million a year right there. (Also, they've outsourced tech support (rather poorly; if you ask Tumblr for help with something, you get some dude copying and pasting a manual at you) with some minimal supervision, and that's probably a significant, if user-annoying, cost savings.) But staff costs are surely dwarfed by the cost of doing at the very [...]