Hi there! I’m Jesse Popinski, better known as Uncle Hi-Finance. You may know me from HGTV’s Money Hole, the Anything You Can Do I Can Do Richer pamphlet series, and my best-selling satellite radio show, Uncle Hi-Finance’s Tax Shelter Hour. Thanks for tuning in to my podcast, which will appear on your credit card bill as “Northwesthern Pornography Network” for privacy reasons.
If you’re listening today, it’s because you have questions about how to handle money. Questions such as “Money! What is it?”; “How do I handle this money, with my hands or something? Or what?”; “Should I throw this money down a public toilet?”; “If I put this money in a box with some other moneys have sex and make more money?”; and “How come money?”. Okay. Calm down. There is no reason to get confused about this, because I am here to help you. I would not be able to call myself Uncle Hi-Finance if I wasn’t good with money, and had registered that name as a limited-liability company in the state of Delaware.
Many of you have written to ask, what makes you, Jesse Popinski, former desk security attendant at Fifteen Legal Center Plaza, so qualified to dispense financial advice? I’ll tell you: hard work, dedication, and a winning PowerBall ticket. But becoming wealthy isn’t just about having the right birthday: it’s about parlaying your initial investment into a portfolio that you can turn into an early retirement in one of Kansas City’s most exclusive suburbs. My own portfolio is currently worth between sixteen and thirty million dollars, an amount I will be able to confirm with more certainty as soon as I can get my investment advisor to return my phone calls.
My point is, I know how to turn money into more money, different kinds of money, and, occasionally and in agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, less money. And if that’s something you’re interested in, then get out a pencil or a stylus or whatever the fuck you kids are using today and get ready to write this shit down, because it’s important.
STOCKS.
So the first, and best, way to make a small pile of money into a loaded diaper full of money is by investing in the stock market. This is a store that you go to to buy parts of somebody else’s company, by means of yelling and hand gestures. Let us say, for example, that there is this guy named Bill, and Bill owns an airplane parts factory. And Bill comes to you and says hey! You! With the greasy wad! I need a bunch of money so’s I can make more of these high-quality airplane parts. And you says, hey! I bet I could make a bunch of money if you was to sell all of those airplane parts! So you give him, say, a couple of hundred smackers, and he gives you, like, an asphalt scraper. Now he gets to take your cash and go pay a guy to do “viral marketing” or keep another guy from breaking his legs, and you get all the profits that he gets from using that asphalt scraper! It’s a pretty great way to make a bunch of cash, and once a year you get to go to a stockholder’s meeting where you can complain about the fonts they used on the free shopping bag you got.
BONDS.
What a bond is, it’s like a stock, only crappier. Instead of widgets or a social media platform that generates revenue through magic, a bond is like, say, the city of Albany, New York, might come to you and say “Hey! I’m Albany over here! I seem like a pretty reliable city, been here a while, seems like it might be a pretty save bet I ain’t getting traded to Thailand or some fuckin’ thing. So how’s about you give me eight grand to give to the Teachers With Mangled Toes Fund?” And you say, okay, sure, Albany, whatever you say, and as long as Albany keeps up the payments it gets to keep being a city. It’s low-risk and low-yield, but it’s pretty good if you feel like being patriotic, and if you buy enough of them you get to wear a general’s uniform the next time we have a war.
OPTIONS.
This is a pretty crap deal if you’re an employee, but if you’re an employer, it can’t be beat. Basically how this works is, you got a guy who works for you, right? And he says “What are some of the options you might have in lieu of paying me with money?” So instead of paying him fifty bucks, you can instead of $22 an hour, you can give the guy like eight million stock options. This is good for him because he gets to make comments to his lazy beach buddy friends about how he’s goin’ to cash in once you have an IPO, whatever the hell that is, and it’s good for you because you get to pay him in ticker tape paper instead of money. Options are like points on a movie: nobody knows exactly what they are, but hand ’em out like Tootsie Rolls at Halloween, they’re a great way to get idiots to work for you for free.
FUTURES.
This here is one of my favorite kinds of financial instruments. Let’s say you got something it takes a farmer a long time to whip up, like eggs or wheat or something. You put down a bet that he’s gonna have some come this time next February, and you always win, because who knows what’s gonna happen? It’s in the future! Fuck, he might invent a flying jet pack by then, there’s just no telling what farm guys are gonna get up to in the future. You literally cannot lose with this one, or, if you are some party pooper with the SEC who probably doesn’t even like dogs, you can.
That’s gonna be it for now. The rest of this podcast will be the sound of my assistant, Mario, eating a sandwich while I snore lightly in the background. But be sure to join us next week when I’ll be telling you about convertible debentures, which I believe is a type of car, until the Mets game comes on.