Some hoodlums from a debt collection company just showed up to repossess Punny Money. They are currently printing it out page by page and loading it onto their big white truck. Looks like this is the end folks. Unless… A Penny Closer comes to my rescue with tips on disputing collection errors. I’m saved! Yippee!

Here’s some other great stuff to read while I’m fighting off the repo men with a giant stick.

1. Like me, Cash Money Life has a closet full of baseball cards and ponders whether selling them is the right thing. Unlike Cash Money Life, I also have a closet full of baseball players. Hey, Ken Griffey Jr., get back in your box!
2. Check out Lazy Man and Money for some great ideas for saving money on hobbies. My favorite inexpensive hobby: sitting in a lonely, quiet corner repressing painful childhood memories. Fun times!
3. Little known fact: the United States Postal Service uses sharks and alligators to sort your mail, something Money, Matter, and More Musings found out the hard way. Just another reason why the postal service is the #1 company we’d be better off without.
4. My Two Dollars has the best tip I’ve ever seen for not spending money on food. Indeed, watching Oprah will make you never want to eat again.
5. Even irregular income makers can budget, says No Credit Needed. Sadly, people with irregular bowels cannot budget.
6. The Frugal Law Student claims you don’t need to change your car’s oil every 3,000 miles. You should also not change your turn signal every 3,000 feet to annoy the people behind you. Yes, I’m talking to you, green Honda Civic on I-270 this morning.

I managed to chase away the repo men, but not before they took possession of my baseball player collection. Looks like I’ll be running the bases alone tonight.

Parents, how many time have you had this conversation with your kids:

Kid: Mom or Dad, I need the new Sony PlayStation 800 Billion. There’s no new games coming out for the stupid PlayStation 60 Million.
You: Okay fine. Here’s $7,000.
Kid: Damn straight!

It’s a pretty clever scheme videogame makers have going on here: crank out a new game system every three or four years and force kids (rather, their parents) to keep shelling out enormous wads of cash for the latest and greatest technology. Game developers are usually pretty quick to jump ship from the older systems.

But thanks to the work of smaller game developers and fans of older systems, brand new games are still being made for videogame systems introduced 20 years ago. Assuming your game hardware is still in playing condition, you can simply whip those old consoles out of the closet and drop in some of these brand new releases for out-of-production videogame systems.

Commodore 64

Stop using your Commodore 64 as a doorstop and feed it a copy of Silo64 by Seth Sternberger, a two-player shooter which places you in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in a race for survival. $9.99 at oldergames

Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Feed your need for puzzle games with the brand new Sudoku 2007. It’s no Super Mario Bros. 3, but you can still blow into the cartridge just like in the good old days! $20.00 at RetroZone

While perhaps a bit legally dubious, you can explore dozens of NES titles never released in North America. Titles include Adventure Island 4, Super Contra 7, and many other. $25 plus a donor cartridge at NES Reproductions

Sega Genesis

Beggar Prince is an absolutely gorgeous role-playing/adventure game from Super Fighter Team. Released late in 2006, the game quickly sold out, but its maker promises more copies will be manufactured soon. The game has received decent reviews, but the fact that it’s the first commercially released Genesis game in nearly a decade should be all the reason that Sega fans need to pick this one up when it’s re-released.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

The SNES featured some of the greatest videogames of all time, so it’s a shame there aren’t more new games coming out for it. I was able to find Frog Feast, coming soon to the SNES but already available for other systems like the Sega CD and Atari Jaguar CD.

3DO

All five of you 3DO fans out there have a lot to cheer about with several new games available. There’s ICEBREAKER 2, a sequel to the original cult favorite puzzle game by Magnet Interactive Studios. (The original Icebreaker was highly addictive, so anyone still in possession of a working 3DO system should definitely grab a copy of this official sequel.) Sports fans will enjoy OnSide Soccer, an older but previously unreleased title from Elite Systems. And Off Road lovers will definitely want to give Powerslide a try, though the game’s website does indicate that the software is in an unfinished but playable state. $24.99-$29.99 at oldergames

Sega Dreamcast

Not exactly an ancient system, the Dreamcast is still considered by many of its fans to be the best videogame system ever made. In Japan, the Dreamcast following is so strong that big-name publishers are still releasing games for it with official support from Sega. You won’t be able to play these titles on your North American Dreamcast without stopping by your area import videogame store for some hardware modifications, but they’re still worth mentioning just to show that the Dreamcast lives on.

Under Defeat is a helicopter shoot-’em-up game from G.rev with beautiful graphics and a riveting war story (or at least it looks like one; I can’t read Japanese).

Radilgy, another overhead shooter game, was originally released for the Dreamcast in Japan in 2005 and was supposed to make it to American shores on the Gamecube, but falling interest in Nintendo’s previous-generation system led to its cancellation.

Trigger Heart Exelica is yet another Japanese Dreamcast shooter title based on the immensely popular arcade game.

Karous is—you guessed it—another shooter title from the makers of Radilgy. If you don’t have a modified Dreamcast at home, fear not; a Wii version of Karous is in the making.

There are a few titles available to unmodified American Dreamcast owners, like the four-player puzzle game Inhabitants from S+F Software. Then there’s Maqiupai, a Mahjong variant. Probably the most promising of the late-breaking American Dreamcast titles are Cool Herders, a multi-player sheep-herding game, and Feet of Fury, inspired by Dance Dance Revolution with 22 songs from which to choose and the ability to use swap CDs to dance to your own tunes. $14.90-$19.90 at The GOAT Store

So now when your children ask for the newest videogame system, here’s how your conversation can go.

Kid: Mom or Dad, I need the new Sony PlayStation 800 Billion.
You: What, did they stop making games for all your old systems?
Kid: Yup.
You: Don’t lie to me you little punk. Here’s a huge list of newer games for older systems.
Kid: Wow! I’ll click on that hyperlink you just spoke right now to find out more!

Do you know of any other new-release commercially available videogames for these or other out-of-production systems? Comment here and they’ll be added to the list.

by Valerie March

To make money in the stock market, you don’t have to actually buy any stocks.

“Wait. Wha…?”

No, seriously, it’s true: there are things call stock options, which are simply contracts between a buyer and a seller that outline prices and time periods for buying or selling a security, most notably stocks.

It sounds too good to be true, but with stock options, you can often pay pennies on the dollar to make money on your favorite companies with two basic types of options, “calls” and “puts.”

If you’re sure a stock, index (think S&P 500 or the NASDAQ), or commodity is going up, you should purchase a call option. When you think a stock or security is going to fall, you should buy a put.

A call offers the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a given price for a set period of time. Calls act very much like discount coupons for stocks that investors already like and want to own. Each options contract gives you the right to buy 100 shares under the terms of the option contract.

Let’s look at an example to see how you can make money on calls with hypothetical stock for the Fun Company, whose stock symbol is FUN. FUN is currently trading for $45. But, you think FUN is going way up, so you buy the FUN December $45 Calls, which are selling for $2. With this FUN call option, you’re betting that the Fun Company’s stock, also called the underlying, will climb above $45 before the option expires in December.

When FUN shoots up to say $50, the call option gives you the “option” (get it?) to buy FUN stock valued at $50 for only $45.

Or, if FUN does go up, but you don’t want to buy the stock, you also have the option to sell your FUN December $45 Calls anytime before they expire in December. By selling, you’re releasing your right to buy shares at the $45 strike price to another trader, but with FUN performing well, the value of the option will also increase and you will likely get a nice profit now that the calls are now worth, say $10.

Again, the cost of purchasing options is far less than buying the underlying stock. For the FUN December $45 Calls, which you bought for $2, you must multiply the $2 selling price by the 100 shares per contract: The total output is $200. If you were buying 100 shares of FUN stock, you would be out $4,500.

In addition to lower output, options allow investors to make money when the overall market, sectors or individual stocks fall, simply by using puts. That’s right—with put options, you can make money when stocks tank.

Puts offer the right, but not the obligation, to sell a stock at a given price for a set period of time. Again, each put option offers investors the right to sell 100 shares under the terms of the option contract.

When purchasing puts, you still want to see the value of the options go up, but at the same time, you want the stock to bomb bigger than Daddy Day Camp. Staying with the Fun Company example, if you think the $45 share price will go lower, you might buy the FUN December $40 Puts.

This would now give you the right to sell FUN stock at that $40 price—or, said simply, you’d have the right to put stock to the put-seller at $40 a share, even if FUN trades down to $35. Yes, the suckers would have to pay you nearly $5 per share more than the market value if you’re right!

And again, if you don’t want to take advantage of selling the stock, if the value of the options increases, you can sell your right to make that move by closing (selling) the option position. If your prediction about the direction of the stock and the option were right, you stand to profit either way.

There are endless ways to use options to profit in any kind of market without actually buying a single stock. Most importantly, options investing gives you, well, options and they’re great tools to profit in markets that are going up, down, or sideways.

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Valerie March works at a financial publisher and frequently goes up, down and sideways. She is currently trying to find new and interesting recipes for her abundance of zucchini. If you have any ideas (zucchini-related or otherwise), please leave a comment.

That’s theater as in Shakespeare and Rent, not theater as in “whatever crap movie Lindsay Lohan has out this week.” Real theater can run you a lot of money. Even garbage seats half a block from the stage cost $18,000 in New York City.

That’s why you should check out the third annual Free Night of Theater which will take place on Thursday, October 18, 2007 in over 50 cities around the country including:

• Atlanta
• Austin
• Boise
• Cincinnati
• Cleveland
• Connecticut (not a city, but small like one)
• Indianapolis
• Kansas City
• Lexington
• Los Angeles
• Minneapolis
• New Jersey (also not a city, but this is theater not geography)
• North Carolina (possibly the whole state, except the cities without culture or reading)
• Ashland and Eugene, Oregon
• Philadelphia
• Sacramento
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Charleston
• Washington D.C.
• Wisconsin

If you’re not lucky enough to have a free night of theater happening in your area, check out local performances at area colleges. The students might overact a little to get a good grade, but the tickets are usually a lot cheaper than grown-up performances.

Sometimes, when nobody’s looking, I like to spread my credit card collection on the floor, sprawl out on top of them and make credit card angels. I… I just like how the raised lettering feels all over my body. What? Don’t look at me like that. Instead, look at these articles from other quality personal finance writers.

1. Somehow Punny Money ended up in two carnivals this week which is quite strange since I didn’t submit anything to them. Maybe I have a stalker. Ooh, I hope they don’t steal my credit card numbers. Oh, and here’s the Carnival of Personal Finance and Carnival of Debt Reduction.
2. Money, Matter, and More Musings has found the worst credit card ever made. Apparently just touching the card incurs a $75 “molestation fee.” I’d be in real big trouble with this card then.
3. Some sad news from The Sun’s Financial Diary: the days of making free money from Bank of America credit cards is at an end. I just don’t understand why credit card companies don’t want us borrowing their money for free to earn interest from it…
4. Our next-door neighbor Clever Dude gave his credit cards a workout purchasing a new Nintendo Wii last week. Now I hear “%$@# tennis ball, why won’t you go straight?” across the street ten hours a day.
5. My Money Blog has a great idea for a projector rental business. So whip out those credit cards and get ready for 84 inches of projected magnificence!
6. And finally, Stephanie at Poorer Than You is turning 21, so buy her a beer. In other news, this site has a new slogan: “Punny Money: Helping More Women Get Drunk Than Any Other Personal Finance Website on the Internet.”

Uh-oh, I’m in trouble now. I just called out the name “Visa” in bed. Tune in next week for more fabulous money mumblings live from my couch where I’ll probably be sleeping for a while.