My wife received this note in an email at work. Sadly, even though it's a joke, the advice it offers seems quite sensible:
New Retirement Plan: If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00. With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left. But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of Beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling price, you would have $214.00. Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It's called the 401-Keg Plan.
Comments
Assume each case of beer costs $10, thus $1000 would buy 100 cases of beer.
Assume a case of empty cans weighs a pound. Thus the weight of aluminum from $1000 dollars of beer would be 100 lbs.
Historically, aluminum can scrap prices hover around $0.50 per pound, making that 100 lbs. of cans worth $50, not the $214.00 the hoax claims. I'd be equally skeptical of the figures they cited for prices of WorldCom and Enron stock.
Note: all of these estimates are very generous - - Beer costs more than $10/case. It takes more than 24 cans to make a pound of aluminum scrap. Prices for aluminum can scrap are lower than $0.50/lb.