The release of Wii Fit this week got me thinking about products and services that can meet our needs at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives. For those of you who haven’t heard of Wii Fit, it’s a peripheral for the Nintendo Wii that you stand on as you do exercises led by the accompanying game. By monitoring your weight and balance, it allows you to control your character in a wide range of activities, including Yoga, Hula-Hooping, Ski-Jumping and many more. The game gets you moving and looks to be so much fun that you don’t even realize that you’re exercising.

Certainly Wii Fit is not a replacement for a full exercise regiment, but for people who don’t exercise at all or who have a hard time getting motivated, it may be a great alternative. From a financial perspective, I thought I’d consider the cost of a Wii Fit to my gym membership. At first, I was thinking about it from the $89.99 MSRP for the Wii Fit versus my $50 per month gym membership. Such a comparison is somewhat misleading. Obviously someone who uses the gym many times a week for many different activities gets a lot more out of it than someone like me. I go to the gym a few times a month to use the pool, track, and play basketball. All of those activities are things that I can do for free in nicer weather.

So a better comparison might be the cost per hour of exercise.

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Reducing the estimated 38 billion plastic water bottles discarded each year will obviously have a huge environmental impact. Those environmental benefits may be leading this effort to switch from bottled water to tap water, but the finances of making the change should also not be overlooked.

Cindy Crawford has joined the effort by teaming up with PUR Water Filtration Systems (PUR) to promote a limited edition Thirsty for Change water bottle. The aluminum water bottle is manufactured and sold by SIGG, the Swiss Engineered Water Bottle company. The idea is to reuse the bottle and fill it with filtered tap water instead of buying bottled water. The Thirsty for Change website claims that PUR filtered water is 1/10 the cost of bottled water, which will save an average of $600 per year. Filtered tap water is being promoted because PUR is the co-sponsor of the initiative but depending on where you live, you may be able to drink unfiltered tap water to save even more.

Any reusable bottle will allow you to make this change, but if you order the limited edition Thirsty for Change water bottle, all proceeds from the sale will benefit Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program, which helps reduce water-related disease in many developing countries around the world.

Personally, I use a Nalgene bottle that cost about $10 less than the SIGG bottle.

Chrysler recently announced the Let’s Refuel America program which locks in gas prices at $2.99 per gallon. Here’s a clip from the press release followed by an analysis of whether the deal is worth it.

From the press release: “In response to direct customer feedback citing the prospect of rising gas prices as a top concern, Chrysler LLC today announces its own economic stimulus package: an exclusive gas price protection policy that eliminates the risk of further spikes in fuel prices. With the U.S. purchase of eligible Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles, customers can enroll in the “Let’s Refuel America” program and receive a gas card that immediately lowers their gas price to $2.99 a gallon, and keeps it there for three years. The offer is available at 3,511 U.S. Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge dealerships through June 2, 2008, and is available on vehicles ranging from popular new compacts, crossovers and minivans to full-size diesel-powered pickup trucks.”

The analysis:

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Portion sizes have gotten so out of control that you often get enough for a small family when you order an individual entree. Sure, you can take leftovers home to eat the next day, but I’d rather not have to pay so much to get more food than I really want. In the past, I’ve said that I would gladly pay more than half price to get half as much food when I eat out.

That’s why I was so excited to hear about T.G.I. Friday’s Right Portion, Right Price menu. Restaurants have traditionally only offered smaller portions and prices at lunch time, if at all. The Friday’s program is all day, every day. I hope that other restaurants follow this innovative idea. I don’t eat out much, but when I do I would definitely consider going to T.G.I Fridays to get just the amount that I want at a more reasonable price.

The advertisement announcing this program isn’t available on YouTube at the moment.  I’ll add it to this post when and if it gets added there.

There’s a Cadillac ad for the 2008 Escalade featuring Brian Bloom that gives terrible financial advice. The actor says that life is “high school with money” and that following what the cool kids are doing, including what they are driving, is still going on. The ad concludes with him saying that anyone who never cared about impressing the cool kids should “graduate.”

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Freakonomics is a random and interesting look at the world through the eyes of a freak economist. I don’t mean freak in a bad way, just not “normal.” That’s the part that can take a potentially boring subject like economics and make it something that I would want to read.

The book is more a collection of random, well documented research, than a sequential stream of information building towards one unifying point. The takeaway is that looking at complex economical situations from new perspectives often shows the flaws in conventional wisdom and the results you expect the data to show. Each chapter is basically an example application of that theory.

Exploring seemingly meaningless questions like “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms” and

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I finished reading The Long Tail over the weekend. The name of the book comes from the increasing importance of the sum of products and services that sell in small numbers. It makes the case that because there are so many of them, adding up these little sales actually makes them more valuable then the small number of products that sell in huge numbers, i.e. the biggest hit is the sum of the non-hits.

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I finally got around to creating my blogroll, which is located on the sidebar below my category list. Rather than just add the blogroll, I thought I’d share my rationale behind adding each of these sites. There are a lot of other good sites out there, many of which I read. I’ll probably add more of them to my blogroll as time goes by, but the ones below mostly have specific reasons for being included.

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One thing you notice when you watch a lot of golf on tv is that the same commercials are repeated over and over ad nauseum. This past week was no exception. I must have seen the ING Your Number commercial at least 10 times. Clearly their marketing tactic worked, because I did indeed go to their website.

The premise of the commercial is that everyone has a number that correlates to the amount they’ll need to have saved to retire when and how they want. In the ad, people are carrying around a physical number. By going to the website, you can calculate your number and then find a new financial professional in your area or email it to your existing one.

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I came across a great article about purchasing a home in a buyer’s market. It can be found on the Irvine Housing Blog (link below). While the article, and the blog, deal with real estate in Irvine, CA, the information is practical as a general resource as well. Even those buyers in markets that didn’t balloon as drastically as southern California can no doubt learn some valuable tips from the humorous and informative post. While not all buyers will go to quite the extremes suggested, you can pick and choose the methods that will work best for your situation and market. Read the post here.