How to Throw Your Money Away: A Comparative Analysis

There are hundreds of invigorating ways to throw your money away. You could spend a few nights in Vegas, invest poorly in real estate, lease a Mercedes, or use your cable TV dollars watching “Dancing with the Stars.”

The options are limitless.

But for the purposes of this study, we are going to focus on two primary ways that we have found to be extremely successful.

Option #1:

Go to the ATM and withdraw the maximum amount of money your bank will allow. Take that money to the nearest paper shredding facility, and have the folks there shred your money. Be sure to pay for this service. Repeat these steps until you run out of money.

Pros: Fast, efficient, and relatively hassle free.
Cons: Can get boring and repetitive.

Option #2:

Have children.

This can be done through adoption, god parenting, artificial insemination, boning or abduction. Choose the right way for you and your family. Whatever your means of acquiring children, once they are in your care, you will find a vast array of opportunities to throw your money away. For the purposes of this study, however, we will focus on one popular option with which parents in the past have had success: Food.

Purchasing food for your children is arguably the simplest way to throw your money away.

To begin the process, you need to first buy ample amounts of food at the grocery store, making sure to pay extra money for organic food. To further ensure maximum cost, take your kids shopping with you and give in to their whiney demands to purchase every food item they see. Do not take into consideration the price of the items or the plausibility that they will actually like said items. A full grocery cart is a happy grocery cart.

As you’re piling groceries into the car, marvel at the exorbitant cost of food these days. The cost of food alone makes this option a savory one for throwing your money away, but it gets even more delectable. Up to now, the assumption is that you’re actually going to eat all this food. While this would seem to make sense, it would not provide for maximum money wasting.

Toward that end, then, for each meal of each day, provide from your stock full refrigerator and pantry a hearty meal for your kids. When you notice that your kids aren’t eating one bite of the food you’ve put down in front of them, despite your cajoling and fruitless persuading, ask them in an exasperated tone what food item they want.  Then, you should promptly supply a plethora of that item adding to the number of other food items on their plate that they aren’t touching with a ten foot pole.

By now, each of your young children should have a mountain of food on their plate that could adequately supply an entire basketball team. This is good.

When your kids poke at this mountain and throw pieces of the mountain on the floor while looking cute in the process, and only after you’ve yelled and screamed “what’s wrong with you?” and “how can you not be hungry?” and it’s all come to no avail, you can proceed in one of two ways.

Both options provide for maximum money wasting.

The first is simpler, although admittedly the easier route, and coincidentally far less exciting. Scrape all the food off the plate directly into the compost bin. While this is extremely effective in achieving your goal of throwing your money away, you might prefer to elongate the process.

If you’re one of those creative people, we suggest dividing up all the different food items on your child’s plate and putting them into tiny Tupperware containers, which you will then put into the far corners of the fridge. Do this for every meal of every day. Wait approximately two to three weeks or until the smell of rotting food makes you want to puke each time you open the fridge. Then dig through all the new food that you’ve just bought on your most recent run to the grocery store and find the dozen or so Tupperware containers containing rotting fruit, rotting vegetables, rotting meat, rotting cheese, and, well, anything that is rotting, and dump into the compost bin.

Beginning with going to the grocery store, repeat this entire process with the new food you just bought until it, too, is rotting in the back of your fridge and needs to be dumped into the compost.

This method is intended as a viable alternative to the money shredding method.

Pros: More entertaining, greater variability, more stimulating, more interactive, greater chance of hurling.
Cons: Is it really worth the hassle?

It is not our goal as the conductors of this study to determine the better option for throwing away your money. That is for you to decide.

We would, however, love to hear from you which option you prefer, or if you have other viable money wasting options that we could incorporate into future studies.