Although I’ve previously written various examples of my investments in going-private transactions, one type of special situations investing that I had not tried until recently was odd-lot tender offers.

In a tender offer, a company usually offers to purchase all or a portion of its outstanding shares at a specified price and time. Sometimes these offers come with an odd-lot preference, which means that shareholders with less than 100 shares will receive preferential treatment and their shares will be purchased first assuming other conditions (such as tender price and submission dates) are met. This allows the company to reduce its overhead and administrative costs for small shareholders.

Fidelity National Services (FIS) had announced back in May that their board had authorized a $2.5B share repurchase plan via a dutch auction, with tender prices expected to range from $29 to $31. In a subsequent amendment a month or so later, preference for odd-lots was announced and the expiration date of the offer was set to expire on Tuesday, August 3rd.

I decided to give this opportunity a try by using my son’s Coverdell account (a small account with preferential tax treatment) to purchase 99 shares at $27.75 on July 15th. At this price, I believed that if anything were to happen and the tender offer fell through, this would still give me sufficient safety to sell the stock with limited losses. It also allowed me to go through the actual motions to figure out how to submit my shares for tender, at what price, with my brokerage firm at Schwab. In this case, it turned out that I needed to phone a representative to handle my request to tender shares (I opted to tender at whatever amount resulted from the dutch auction, but I could have submitted any figure from $29 to $31).

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Clipping coupons used to be something anyone who claimed they were frugal did on a regular basis. I admit I haven’t done this in a while, but I happened to look through our Sunday newspaper last week and was amazed to see how poorly coupons had kept up with inflation (and that’s an understatement).

When I was a kid (in the 80s), I remember clipping coupons pretty regularly. $0.75-1 off a favorite box of cereal, helping my mom find ones that were useful to us. I always kept my eye out for those when it was time to buy new clothes. It was actually a fun thing to do: the hunt as well as trying to see how much money we could save.

Fast forward to 2010, and I was shocked at how little you save on coupons these days. I took pictures of a few from our Sunday paper, and these were quite typical. Instead of $1 off a box of cereal, the deal now is:

Really? $1.50 off two boxes of cereal + a gallon of milk. Around here (Bay Area, admittedly), brand-named cereal is about $5 a box plus $4 for a gallon of milk.

Or how about coupons for toilet paper or paper towels?

Wow — and I just discovered that people sell these coupons on eBay. Huh. Is there actually a market for this stuff?

I’m starting to see why online stores like diapers.com or their new sister store soap.com actually might work and be popular — sell consumer staples with a slight discount, with free shipping after meeting a threshold amount, and deliver quickly. Better than clipping coupons and going to the store, it seems.

One website I enjoy immensely whenever I have time is TED (Ideas Worth Spreading), and I thought I’d share it here. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design” and is a non-profit that hosts lectures from thought leaders across the world on a regular basis. Although tickets and invites to each event are astoundingly expensive, they provide all the content for free on their website.

One popular speaker I’ve admired a lot is a professor from Sweden named Hans Rosling. In addition to presenting his findings and data in a very visually understandable manner (through software he and his team created), his lectures themselves are very thought-provoking.

As mentioned recently, I’ve started investing in the BRIC countries to diversify my portfolio, and I found one of Prof. Rosling’s presentations quite pertinent. It’s entitled “Asia’s Rise – How and When”. He predicts the year when the average pay per person per month in India and China will be equivalent to those in the US and UK.

As part of his lecture, he shows how the data move historically over the last century and half. Part of why I think his lecture is especially interesting is that, although it’s gotten better, I remember always having to learn about the history of major Western civilizations in high school — Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe, the Renaissance — but never once hearing about the histories of China and India. You’d think they never existed or weren’t learning about, at least in my day.

So, take a look at that lecture, and bookmark that site and browse around it when you have time. There’s a lot of good content — not only on geekery and intellectual topics but also music and art. Enjoy!

We’re currently on vacation, so an updated post will appear here as soon as we’re back. In the meantime, enjoy this fluffy article about the 20 US colleges that supposedly offer the best value for your money. I admit I’m posting it here only because I went to #2. :) Not terribly sure how they calculate their figures though, so I’d take it with a grain of salt.

Friends of mine who are soon-to-be parents often ask how much it costs to raise a child, or a baby for the first few months, or how much money to put aside in a Flexible Savings Account for delivery costs. While there are many resources out there to help answer these questions (just take a look at a recent Wall Street Journal blog entry that mentioned the US Dept. of Agriculture estimate of $223K to raise a child born in 2009 to maturity), by far, our biggest expense has been unexpected health bills.

Our current cash outflow right now is $120 weekly from sending our son to speech therapy once a week, because he’s not speaking enough words for his age. This doesn’t include the evaluation itself, which cost $750. I count ourselves lucky because our PPO insurance will cover 80% (with no maximum, assuming I read our limits correctly).

To be honest, I sometimes can’t tell if, by being in the uber-competitive Bay Area, we’re alarming ourselves unnecessarily with my son’s speech situation, but since the speech therapy can’t hurt and we’re being told there’s a chance he has a more serious condition causing his speech delay, we of course want to give our son the best chance he can get early on.

I know of friends whose insurance would either not cover this type of health issue or max out at a particular amount like $4K and cannot imagine how much of a drain something like speech therapy could be on a family’s situation, let alone more serious health conditions. And then I think of all the kids and families out there who can’t afford this sort of help, or early intervention, and really feel terrible.

If you’re a parent, what’s been the most unexpected financial cost or change to your financial life that you’ve had to make so far? I’d be curious to know!