Bye Bye Betty

News services report that the ABC television show "Ugly Betty" will be canceled. They state that four additional episodes plan to be made, and that they are looking to bring a good ending to the series.

I really got hooked on the show. In my humble opinion, the older episodes did seem more interesting to me, but I still love the show and its characters. I heard over time that ratings were dropping, and the show's viewing schedule changing was also an indicator (to me) of trouble. I don't know how many shows are in ABC's cache to follow, or if there are will be only four more shows. All I can say is when that that show plays, you know I'm gonna cry.

Small Scale Banking

I don't know how many people are like me out there, but I do maintain a modest savings account at a local bank. I decided to look at the numbers today and figured this out:

$ .02 Cost of Envelope
$ .44 Cost of Stamp
$ .46 Total Cost to make deposit

$ .27 Interest earned after one year on $100.00 deposit
$ .19 Effective money lost if $100.00 kept in bank for only one year
20.44 Number of months $100.00 stays in bank before interest breaks even with deposit costs


Although my bank is local, the distance involved makes walking impractical. I can certainly drive a car to get there, but find that simply mailing my deposit in, to be more time and cost effective.

Running the numbers, I found that with a deposit of $100.00, I need to keep that money in the bank over 20 months just to earn enough interest to cover the expense of getting the funds to the bank.

Let's say I wanted to stow away $100.00 for a year. If I drive down to the bank to withdraw the funds, I'd have to keep that money in there even longer just to reach a break even point. I'm estimating a bit over 3 years. If I chose to withdraw the funds after a year, I'm estimating interest less expenses would leave me with $99.35 out of my original $100.00

Where really is my incentive to save?

Just thinking.