I’ve been at the age where weddings and showers have become as common as going to the movies for a couple of years now. Since the traditional wedding and bridal shower season is coming soon, I thought I’d post some of the best ideas I’ve seen when it comes to wedding and party favors for guests. Of course, “best” in this context doesn’t mean the most extravagant or impressive. Let’s be realistic: most people won’t do much with their party favor, if they take it home at all, right? How about putting the money to better use elsewhere?

1. Donations made to charities in the name of guests

I’ll start with my favorite. Instead of spending money on bookmarks, trinkets, and whatnot, how about making a donation to a charity of your choice on behalf of the guests attending your wedding? Even $2.00 per person at 100 guests is a nice donation of $200 that goes to someone who probably needs it. In fact, the concept has become popular enough that several organizations and charities have dedicated departments that will work with you to create a nice card that your guests can take home, if they wish. Here are links to a few of them, although I’m pretty sure you could probably work out something similar with other charities:
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I’m not a fan of being taxed on my earnings, taxed on my capital gains, and then taxed again on my estate, assuming there’s anything left by then. So you’d think that the richest people in the US would also be die hard advocates of repealing the estate tax, right?

Not necessarily. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and even Andrew Carnegie all support(ed) the estate tax. In fact, Gates’ father William H. Gates even wrote a book arguing why taxing estates is a good idea. If I may summarize so bluntly, their argument is essentially that if you’re fortunate as to be so wealthy, you have a duty to helping your community by giving back the extra wealth, either by way of this tax, or by giving away your estate through charitable donations and foundations, before you’re no longer around (in which case the estate tax serves as an incentive to do so). They point out that the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent aristocracies from being created and to always ensure a level playing field when they created this country.

Of course, not everyone is so altruistic. 18 of the country’s wealthiest families are also lobbying to repeal the estate tax, as might be expected.

The poll I ran a while ago on 10-Ks didn’t get many takers, but I decided this might be a useful enough topic to write about anyway. It turns out, I think, that unless they’ve had a business school education or worked in finance, most people find 10-Ks intimidating, boring, and unappealingly long documents. That might seem to be the case, but they’re chock full of information on a company and well worth reading before choosing to invest money in the company’s stock. Even if you don’t know what all of the terminology means, or how to calculate financial ratios, you can get a good idea of what the company does, what risks there might be to its operations, and what plans management have in mind.

What are 10-Ks?
10-Ks are documents that the SEC requires that each and every publicly-traded company file at the end of their fiscal year. They’re also sometimes called annual reports, though I tend to think of these as the nice fancy books that come with the 10-Ks that the company mails out each year that do more highlighting and marketing of the company than anything else. Companies are required to mail you these documents (physically or, sometimes, electronically) if you own even one share of their stock, but if you’re looking at potential companies to invest in, you’ll find these easily accessible at either EDGAR or the company’s own website. Yahoo! Financials also links to a company’s most recent SEC filings, and their interface is a little easier to use and read.

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From the frugality-be-damned part of the world and the WSJ comes news that fancy and unique business cards — we’re talking silk and wood materials — are the new fad in executive life. Their purpose appears to be mainly for paper companies to continue to compete in a world of electronic address books and high-tech PDAs. Having never owned a business card in my life, even a plain and basic one issued by the corporation, and even as a professional, I can’t say I’ll be buying. But I know of many who’ll gladly plop down money to use it as a way to define their uniqueness. What do you think?

Scott Travers, a famous numismatist, has put 3 rare pennies into public circulation in the hopes of rekindling the public’s interest in coin collecting. The coins in question are worth between $200 and $1000, though none have yet been found, or so says the Dallas Morning News, who published a story on Travers’ exploits earlier this week. I doubt his coins will get from NYC to the West coast anytime soon, but who knows? I once got a $5 bill in change back from Bartell Drugs in Seattle with a “Where’s George? www.wheresgeorge.com” stamp on it, which turned out to be a pretty nifty site that tracked US dollar bills as they made their way around the nation. Anyway, why not check your coins the next time before dumping them into a Coinstar machine? You never know what you might have.