I think it was about eight or nine years ago—and it happened overnight, perhaps on a Tuesday—that marriage became all about money.

Consider the case of RoseMary Shell and Wayne Gibbs. You can read the article for the full story, but here’s a quick summary of what went down in short-attention-span format:

1. Guy likes girl; girl likes guy. Guy and girl date.
2. Relationship goes nowhere. Girl moves away for $81,000/year job.
3. Guy proposes a year later. Girl accepts, leaves job and friends, moves back with guy.
4. Guy wants to postpone wedding. Eventually guy and girl break up.
5. Girl moves away, takes crappy $31,000/year job.
6. Girl sues guy, wins $150,000 from him.

It really makes you wanna run out and get engaged now, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I wanted to highlight this story because it provides a lot of great examples of how money and marriage can interact.

• The debt of one… The girl in the story brought a boat-load of debt with her going into the relationship, though she disputes just how much that debt was. When postponing the marriage, the guy indicated that undisclosed debt was one of the reasons. Lesson learned: Tell the poor schmuck you’re marrying if you have tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
• Beware of leaving your life behind for love. Regardless of how debt-saddled the girl in the story was, she was doing something about it by making $81,000 a year at her previous job. All it took was a shiny five-figure engagement ring to make her give it all up. (Though you have to wonder why this woman went from making $81k to $31k a few years later.) Lesson learned: Keep your financial future secure before, during, and after any major relationship.
• If you’re going to pay off someone else’s debt, know what you’re getting into. The guy in the story must be fairly wealthy if he can afford to pay off $30,000 of the girl’s debt and still have enough in the bank to give her an enormous engagement rock. (Or maybe he charged it all on credit cards.) Lesson learned: Marry her first, then give her lots of money.
• I don’t believe in pre-nups, but… how about a pre-pre-nup? The couple in this story could have benefited from continuing to lead their lives separately until their wedding day. This way, girl would have had her $81,000 a year job to fall back on, and guy wouldn’t be out $150,000. Lesson learned: Have a plan for what happens if the engagement falls apart.
• And about that $150,000 judgment… what the hell, jury? Engagements fall apart all of the time and you don’t see couples suing each other for six figures. (That doesn’t happen until the marriage falls apart!) In a way, I hope this ruling encourages couples to use their engagements more wisely to examine their relationships and finances; but in another way, what the hell??? Lesson learned: Stay out of Florida courtrooms. Heck, just stay out of Florida altogether.

Oh, and ladies, if you’re having problems getting your man to commit to the idea of marriage now, wait until he reads this article. If stories like this keep making headlines, I fully expect the divorce rate will plummet… because no one in their right mind would commit to getting married!

As was first reported on Punny Money (yes, weeks before even the freaking New York Times picked up the story), a shortage is plaguing gas station owners around the country. Fortunately for people with cars, that shortage isn’t of gas or overpriced convenience store food, but of the number “4.”

As you are certainly familiar with by now, the plastic lettering on gas station price signs have been getting a lot of exercise lately—sometimes changing daily in response to imaginary high demand and signs of political flatulence in the Middle East. Due to the sudden run-up in gas prices, however, many refueling stations were woefully unprepared for the urgency with which they would need number “4″ letters for their pricing signs. After all, it hasn’t even been a year since we last saw $2.xx gas.

This was all great fuel (hahaha) for a humorous fictional story on gas stations running out of number “4s” before running out of gas. Unfortunately the story has become a sad reality as lettering shortages really are striking gas stations nationwide. Wait, did I say sad? I meant hilarious!

Thankfully, relief is finally on the way for letter-poor service station operators as the President recently issued an executive order authorizing companies to drill for plastic lettering in panda bears and bald eagles.

As I mentioned earlier, the folks at the New York Times finally woke up long enough to report on this story that I first imagined back in April. April. Come on, guys. What’s next? The Iraq War really finished back in 2006, and you’re not gonna get around to reporting it until 2011? Sheesh.

Well, for up-to-the-minute news on everything that freaking matters, stay tuned to Punny Money. But if you want your news three months late and based in reality, then by all means—go read so-called professionally researched “news”papers… or as I like to call them, last-week’s-news-papers.

Let me just get something out of the way first: I am not a big air traveler. In fact, I hate airplanes. It’s not that I’m afraid to fly, because I’m not. You’d have to be an idiot to be afraid to fly while not being absolutely mortified to set foot in an automobile. I just don’t like the idea of airplanes and how they are, essentially, controlled, self-contained people catapults.

For the people who know just how much I dislike air travel, it would freak them out to know that I’ve booked nearly a dozen round-trip plane tickets in the last couple of weeks. This comes after only having booked plane tickets one other time in my entire life (last summer, for a business trip to Colorado). Lest you think I’ve somehow gone plain crazy (plane crazy?), most of those tickets were not purchased for myself. Most of them, in fact, were booked on other people’s behalf. Here’s the breakdown of just who got those tickets:

• Four out-of-town co-workers. At a recent business conference, several of my co-workers located in other states asked me to help them get interviews at our locations in the Washington, DC area. And since I helped them get those interviews, I also volunteered to help them order their plane tickets (paid for by the company, of course) so as to avoid busy travel times and other retarded features of flying into and out of our nation’s capital. All four got round-trip tickets there and back; two are coming back in the next week or so for another interview while two others have or soon will be taking a one-way trip to the area to start their new jobs. (Oops, I fibbed about all 10 of those tickets being round-trip.)
• One out-of-town co-worker and close friend. I became good friends with one particular co-worker who managed to turn a separate three-day finance conference in the DC area into a fun-filled week-long orientation to her soon-to-be new city of residence. But because her plans changed several times, we ended up going through three different round-trip itineraries (and the associated change fees) just to accommodate her conference and her interviews.
• One round trip for myself. Lucky me, I just found out last night that I get the wonderful pleasure of doing some traveling myself next weekend. Yay.

So in about half a month I’ve gone from not knowing the difference between an e-ticket and standby to knowing all 37 different ways you can get from Denver to Dulles on a Thursday afternoon. But that’s just one of a few lessons I’ve picked up from my ticket-purchasing spree of late. Here are some of the other things I, an air travel novice, have learned about going from point A to point B via giant winged metal monstrosity.

1. Flying is actually not that expensive. It only runs about $250 round-trip to come up here from Orlando and go back… if you don’t mind flying on a discount airline. Considering you’re going about 1700 miles in less than five hours, that only comes to about 15 cents a mile—about what you’d pay for gas alone if you drove instead.
2. Flying is expensive. Considering that traveling economy class on a discount airline is about half a step up from packing yourself in a cardboard box and shipping yourself to your destination, it sure does cost a pretty penny.
3. Changing a flight is expensive, a pain in the ass, and expensive. In one case, the itinerary change fee was almost as much as the one-way trip itself. By 2020, I imagine the average round-trip flight fare will still only be $250, but you’ll pay $3,000 in “because you breathe oxygen” fees.
4. Frequent flyer miles fail if you don’t freaking fly frequently. After saying that three times fast, I’ll just note that frequent flyer plans aren’t like credit card rewards where even schmucks who just buy a few items here and there can still get something for their trouble. Even after booking a dozen flights with my own frequent flyer numbers, I still don’t have enough miles on a single airline to get me off the ground! Oh, and why do they say you have “15,000 miles” if they’re really only good for a flight that’s 500 miles? I guess inflation has hit the airline industry harder than everyone else.
5. There’s never a plane flying when you really want one to be flying. So you want a flight that departs Denver for Washington sometime between 2pm and 6pm? Okay, we have flights leaving at 9am and 8pm with available seats. Or you could connect through Chicago and Atlanta, but we can’t promise that your baggage won’t end up in, say, Dublin.
6. Cheap airlines are cheap for a reason. As if no food service was bad enough, some discount airliners thought that a great way to save money would be to introduce negative leg room. Yes, worse than 10 inches of leg room. The next guy’s seat actually starts before yours finishes. Hopefully you have detachable feet you can store in the overhead compartment.
7. Sites like Expedia and Travelocity are great. You use them to find the flight you want across 50,000 different airlines; then you go to that airline’s website and book it directly with them instead of paying Expedia or Travelocity’s stupid fees.
8. Two of the three DC-area airports are not public transportation friendly. In a way, planes are a form of public transportation. Okay, in many ways because they freaking are. So why DC doesn’t do a better job of getting folks from all points in DC to Dulles or BWI Airports on public ground transportation without having to transfer at least twice on Metro and then take an hour-long bus ride is beyond me. Sure, there are plans to build Metro lines out to Dulles one day, and DC residents typically don’t give a crap about BWI anyway, but whoever planned the placement of these airports relative to the rest of the area really didn’t take into account that, hey, everyone lives 30 freaking miles that way.
9. Airport food is expensive. Three bucks for a bottle of water? Fifteen dollars for a crappy sandwich at the airport restaurant? I fully expect that we will soon see airlines purposely delaying arrivals so that passengers disembark so famished and thirsty that they’ll gladly pay the $42 for a piece of baloney and a packet of mustard.

There’s one thing I learned from all of this recent air travel planning that deserves to be kept separate from the rest of the list: Arrival gates are one of the happiest places on earth. Seriously, anytime you’re feeling down in the future, just take a trip to the nearest airport’s arrival gate for a couple of hours. You’ll witness a steady stream of tearful reunions that’ll really cheer you up and renew your faith in humanity.

Your faith in the airline industry, on the other hand, is now departing from Gate 15A on a one-way trip to Never-Never Land.

If it seems like I’m not popping up in your daily reading list as often this week, I do apologize. You see, I’ve simultaneously caught every virus and bacteria known to man which is making it slightly difficult to hold a pen for drawing comics, type on a keyboard to write articles, and resist the urge to rip out my own lungs and beat them with a shovel. Happy times!

So in the meantime, join me in enjoying a website which has entertained me for the last 24 hours or so with tons of free electronic versions of your favorite print magazines. The website is called Mygazines, a clever play on the words “magazine” and “gay,” I think. At this website, you’ll find lots of current magazine issues including popular ones like Money, Smart Money, Even Smarter Money, and Naughty Neighbors. Yes, that’s right, financial and pornographic magazines, all in one place, all for free. No need to thank me.

Tune in for more Punny Money programming just as soon as these 73 prescription drugs start kicking in…

Japan—that island super-nation that gave us such innovations as karaoke, Super Nintendo, and Ice Cucumber Pepsi—has a bit of a problem. You see, the people in Japan just work too damned hard. Whereas the typical American 40-hour work week consists of 20 hours of coffee breaks, 10 hours of unproductive meetings, 7 hours of sexually harassing your gorgeous secretary, and 3 hours of actual work, the Japanese work week averages 60-70 grueling hours. What happened was, a while back, Japan realized that the only way it was going to overtake the United States (a country with more than twice its population) in areas like technology, education, and pornography was to work roughly 17 times harder. And that’s just what they did then and continue to do to this very day.

Sadly for Japanese workers, working yourself to death has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes actually killing you as one unlucky engineer at Toyota found out recently. The occurrence of overtiming oneself into an early grave has become such a frequent happening in Japan in the last half-century that they’ve even invented a word to describe the phenomenon: karōshi which, roughly translated, means “happy fun hard-working death time.” There have been dozens of well-publicized karōshi deaths in Japan since the phrase was first coined around 1970, though many other cases likely go unreported as companies pay surviving family members quiet settlements. The typical karōshi death is a direct result of a heart attack or stroke caused by sheer overwork.

While 80-hour work weeks aren’t as common on this side of the Pacific, there are nonetheless plenty of Americans who are prime candidates for exiting this life karōshi style. You might know a few people like this yourself. Heck, you might even be someone like this—toiling thanklessly for the good of your employer with little regard for your own self-preservation. If that sounds like you, then there are some steps you might want to start taking right away to help ensure you don’t drop dead from overwork.

1. Um, stop working so much, eh? If you don’t realize this is the best option, then you’re probably too far down the karōshi path to turn back now. Don’t worry, I’m sure your boss will take good care of your spouse after you’re gone, if you know what I mean.
2. Get paid more. Believe it or not, knowing that you’re fairly compensated for your job can make it less stressful. If you’ve got plenty of money coming into the household, you won’t have as much to worry about outside of work, which means you’ll be able to pull off a few 80-hour work weeks here and there without dissolving yourself into a puddle of overworked goo.
3. Get paid overtime. If you already get paid well for your first 40 hours, but you’re working 70 hours a week, then you’re giving away 30 hours of your time for free. Ask your company for overtime pay or work somewhere else that already offers it. You’ll still be working as hard, but you’ll know in the back of your mind that there’s a small reward for your efforts.
4. Use your vacation time. Another good sign that you’re on the karōshi death spiral is if you have a habit of never using vacation and/or letting vacation time expire without using it. There are very few workplaces that give “too much” vacation time, so you should be using most or all of whatever you’re given.
5. Change careers. Maybe your current job is too conducive to overwork. You might want to start looking for a job somewhere more relaxed. And if your line of work is such that you’ll be overworked no matter who your employer is, then it may be time to completely change careers to sometime a little less suicidal.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go show those Japanese that us American engineers won’t take their 80-hour work weeks lying down! Oh no no no, I’ll be sitting upright in my comfy chair, sipping my coffee… maybe take a long lunch, leave a bit early… take the rest of the week off…