MyGallons.com is a new service that allows you to prepay for gasoline, “locking in today’s prices.” As more an more people come to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that gas prices can only continue to rise, it’s no surprise that a company came along to take advantage of this line of thinking. I seem to remember another item that could only go up and up in price: real estate. Prepaying for gas at today’s prices seems so savvy because the thought of a decline in gas prices is so unbelievable to most people today.

Obviously if gas prices start to fall, mygallons.com is going to start making more and more of a profit as people pay more than the market price for gas. Prepaying only locks in today’s “low prices” if prices continue to climb. If they fall, then prepaying is locking in today’s “high prices.” I suspect that mygallons.com is hedged for either move in the market. Since their public business model only seems to profit with falling prices, they are probably using some of the money you give them to buy oil futures expecting price increases. If that’s true, they stand to profit either way.

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Budweiser has been running an ad showing an old refrigerator being moved to the garage when the new one is purchased. It says that although it doesn’t have a water dispenser or an ice-maker, it has plenty of room for what’s really important, i.e. Cold Beer. While the ad is entertaining and does make a good point about reuse and storage capacity, it fails to consider one of the main reasons we replace appliances today: improved energy efficiency. We will only see our electric bills go down if we replace appliances with more energy efficient ones. Adding a new appliance, even one that is energy star compliant, while still running the old one will cause our electric bill to go up.

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Many real estate sites can give you a profile of a town, or even a neighborhood, but none tell you about your actual future neighbors. To fill that need comes the site Rotten Neighbor. There you can see negative (and positive) comments made about people in your neighborhood. More than just barking dogs and lack of yard maintenance, you can get the inside scoop on other items that may devalue property that you are considering. Nation sex registry data is also included to show if dangerous predators live nearby. Foreclosure data is also available. Knowing the good and the bad about a potential neighbor may influence your interest in a property and may even cause you to reconsider the price you’ll offer. Not knowing this information could end up costing you both while your living in the home and when you try to sell.

The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not? by Robert Shemin.

The author has always had trouble getting things right. He constantly made mistakes. As a result, he also got it wrong when trying to make the mistakes that hold people back from wealth. By understanding this double negative, backwards logic (he can’t even screw up right) he was able to rewrite the rules for success, which are oftentimes the complete opposite of the things we do when aiming for success.

Following his own advice to keep things simple, the simplicity of the philosophy is what makes it so powerful and achievable. Simplicity inspires focus

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Finding cheap gas in your area is becoming increasingly important to everyone’s budget. In the past I’ve spoken highly of Gas Buddy which does just that. To make the search even easier, there is now a website that merges Gas Buddy data with a Google Map of your area. The combination of the two is so natural and should prove to be highly successful. The site, affectionately known as Google Gas, has gained so much interest that it has been overwhelmed with traffic and largely unavailable. Hopefully Google will provide some reliable server space to this excellent use of their technology. Until Google Gas is back online, you can use the old Gas Buddy site to find the best deal.

There are some computer based tasks that computers cannot do as well as humans. Instead of hiring people full time to perform such services, many companies turn to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website. There you can sign-up and get paid to perform simple tasks.

To get an idea of how profitable the site could be, I created an account and began working on a few Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). After practicing with a few, I thought I’d time myself. I was able to complete 69 HITs in 10 minutes. The HITs I was working on paid $0.02 each, so I earned $1.38 in 10 minutes, or $8.28 an hour.

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My latest book review is for Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System To Benefit The Super Rich - And Cheat Everybody Else.

When I first heard that Perfectly Legal was written by someone who works for the New York Times, I was hesitant to waste my time, fearing that the book would have the same liberal bias that makes the paper hardly worth a glance. I was pleasantly surprised that author David Cay Johnston largely succeeded in presenting a balanced view of the issues surrounding the tax system. In fact, I only thought “what a load of crap” a few times throughout the book, and only yelled it out once. Even the sections with which I did not agree were valuable because they presented an alternative view and inspired consideration. I can imagine that the author would be open to debate the issues, giving respect to those with differing opinions. The entire book was well presented, well written, and seemed to present the issues in a completely unbiased manner.

I particularly enjoyed

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Most of the advertisements reviewed on Richer by the Day are directly related to personal finance. Budweiser’s Swear Jar ad inspires further discussion, though it doesn’t directly deal with personal finance. In the ad, office workers, who are required to place 25 cents in a jar each time they swear, beginning swearing a lot when they hear the money will be used to buy Bud Light.

Watch the ad, sourced from YouTube. (The ad contains censored profanities)

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Predictably Irrational made economics entertaining in much the same way as Freakonomics. The fact that I enjoyed both of these books probably indicates my appreciation of behavioral economics in general. In Predictably Irrational, author Dan Ariely presents counter-intuitive theories and backs them up with very interesting experiments. He seems to have one of those jobs that appears more fun than what most of us do for a living.

What follows are quick overviews of each of the chapters. These overviews are not meant to trivialize the work presented but rather whet your appetite for a more thorough explanation.

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I’ve always been a big fan of Google, both as a search engine and as a company. They seem to be the best at just about everything they do. Their Froogle product search (now called Google Product Search) dominated when it was introduced, but Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback program may stiffen the competition. Both tools allow you to do comparison shopping online, but the Microsoft tool seems better equipped at finding the lowest total cost and also pays cashback for purchases made through the site.

The program will give you 2%-5% cash back on the purchase. Also, the search includes shipping charges so it does a better job than Google in finding the overall lowest price.

Due to heavy interest in the program, the live search cashback website has had trouble staying up.  Try this alternate link to live search cashback.