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Tours de Farce: If You’ve Got The Money…
You’re not alone. Millions of Americans face the same questions that greet you each and every morning: “How can I afford tickets for Jimmy Buffett and Simon & Garfunkel yet still make next month’s car payment?” “How can I keep a roof over my head if I’m going to see Ozzfest this summer?” “Can I skip on a dialysis treatment in August so I can see Loverboy and Styx in September?”
The biggest fallacy when it comes to buying concert tickets, no matter if the tickets are for Evanescence, Hal Ketchum or Toby Keith, is that you have to have money in order to see a show. However, leading economists agree that such thinking is “so yesterday,” and that concert fans can see all the shows they want as along as they follow a few fiscal guidelines.
First of all, check your credit card statement. See that box at the top marked “credit available?” Now divide that amount by the price of the tickets for the act you want to see, say P.J. Harvey in Los Angeles in August. The final figure will be the number of tickets you can buy. Simple, eh?
What’s that? Your available credit box lists a big fat goose egg? No problemo. While a maxed-out credit card may seem like an insurmountable hurdle when one wants to charge tickets to see Barry Manilow or Norah Jones, one simple trip to the mailbox will easily solve that problem. Go ahead and check the mail. We’ll wait.
Now, if you’re like most Americans, you probably received two or three credit card offers in the mail. Fill them out and mail them back, pronto. Better yet, FedEx them back overnight, but be sure you transfer the balance of your current credit card first. This way, you’ll soon be able to use your currently maxed-out card to buy more concert tickets, like Phish and The String Cheese Incident. Plus, tomorrow is another day, meaning there will be more credit card offers, more balance transfers, more concert tickets. The sky’s the limit! That is, unless you stop receiving credit card offers. Like that’s ever going to happen.
When it comes to concerts the secret to successful money management isn’t about that balance in your checking account or how much you have stashed away in savings. In order to buy as many tickets you want for as many shows as you want to see, all you need do is spend against future earnings. We just bought tickets for Sevendust and John Mayer and the total spent won’t even leave a mark on our current cash flow. That’s because we used our future earnings. Right now, we’re up to the second payday in June 2075. Of course, we don’t expect to live that long. Instead, we’ll let our children worry about that problem. And our children’s children.
After all, if it’s good enough for Uncle Sam…