ING Direct raised its savings account interest rate to 2.60%. What a great business. In exchange for no tellers or branches and non-immediate availability of funds, you reap the benefits of a dramatically decreased cost structure. It takes some planning but is well worthwhile, considering the paltry rates paid out by traditional big banks.

Which brings us to tax refunds. So much marketing and advertising revolve around tax refunds. H&R Block even provides a "refund anticipation loan," a practice of dubious honesty beyond the scope of this entry. Anyway, the point is that I think people have been trained to look at tax refunds in too celebratory a manner. They're simply getting back what they should never have given up. Not only that, but by giving the government an interest-free loan for a year, they've sacrificed the opportunity to save or invest that amount and get a return. If you get a refund of $100, that's not the whole story; if you had kept the $100 instead of giving it to the IRS for a year, you could have turned it into $102.60 in an ING savings account.

It may seem like small change, but the time value of money, and float generally, is a phenomenon of primary importance. When I got my refund last year, there wasn't a sense of windfall--it was more like an annoyance had been corrected, but still somewhat short of what could otherwise have happened.