As if one trip to a luxury spa resort wasn't enough for American International Group (AIG) following its taxpayer-funded bailout, the company had plans to do it all over again.

50 AIG managers were scheduled to do a deluxe retreat at the Ritz-Carlton resort in Half Moon Bay. The company said it was going to host 150 top-producing agents for educational purposes.

The cost of this "educational opportunity?" Ritz Carlton rooms go for $300 to $1,200 a night, plus high costs for meals, drinks, and entertainment. If the earlier trip is any indication, this whole extravaganza could cost the company around $500,000.

Outrage from taxpayers has led management to cancel this outing, and lawmakers are relieved. Some defended the trips as standard fare for high-level producers for insurance companies. The independent agents win these trips by selling a lot of insurance products. Yet it seems excessive in light of the taxpayer assistance required by AIG.

With taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of loans made to AIG to help keep them in business, the company needs to find another way to give incentives to the sales force. Standard industry practice or not, these trips don't go over well during a time when belts are being tightened by the little guys. The cancellation of the trip is good news for now. Let's see what AIG comes up with next.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

My favorite line in Fiddler on the Roof goes like this:

A young revolutionary tells Tevye, "Money is the world's curse." Tevye, the poor, beleaguered milk man, pushes him aside and, raising his finger to the sky, announces, "May God strike me down! And may I never recover!!"

That's sort of the feeling I get when I read items like this. Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at NY University who had studied race and class extensively, wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times over the weekend claiming that it's the rich who are more stressed out these days.

In a new article on compulsive shopping, there is discussion about including this behavior as a "mental disorder" in the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Considered the diagnostic bible of mental health professionals, the new edition is due out in 2010, and there is discussion about including the so-called "behaviorial disorders." This group of disorders includes internet addiction, compulsive gambling, hypersexuality and compulsive shopping.

As a psychotherapist, I have treated compulsive shoppers for many years. All describe the cycle of exitement (buying), remorse (second thoughts), and guilt (low self-esteem) that is common with compulsions. Like a dopamine squirt to the brain, the shopper seeks out the next high with purchases that they don't need, purchased with money they don't have.

It's not all that uncommon to hear about once wealthy athletes on the brink of .... gasp.... Budgeting. Evander Holyfield became a recent poster child for wasting a ton of money, and who doesn't know about crybaby Latrell Sprewell who (sob) lost his yacht and is losing his house?

Holyfield's $10 million house is in foreclosure. How sad that he'll lose the 109 room mansion. And he's not the only one suffering. He's supposed to pay $3,000 for the support of one of his children, but he's not paying that either. He's got nine children that the public knows about, so you can bet there are others going without child support too.

During Holyfield's boxing career, one fight brought in $34 million. There were surely many millions from other fights and endorsements. Where did it all go?

Blogger Brian Cuban details other financially-challenged athletes, including quarterback Johnny Unitas, boxer Mike Tyson, and figure skater Dorothy Hamill. So what makes celebrities so prone to ending up in financial ruin? Cuban says that for the most part, it's not stupidity or scams.

In the book, Are You Normal About Money?, author Bernice Kanner outlines responses from a public survey posted on the Bloomberg Web site. According to respondents, sixty-five percent would live on a deserted island for a year for $1 million dollars. Sixty percent would even admit to a crime that didn't do and serve six months in jail for that amount--and 10 percent would lend their spouse for a night. For $10 million, most of us would do just about anything: one-fourth would abandon our friends, our family, and our church. And for that amount of money, 7 percent--one in every fourteen of us--would even murder.

Part of the problem with money is that people want more. Thanks to fifty plus years of mass media pushing merchandise at us, we are convinced that more will make us happier. For decades, Lewis Lapham has been asking people how much money they would need to be happy. "No matter what their income," he reports, "a depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. The man who receives $15,000 a year is sure that he could relieve his sorrow if he had only $30,000 a year; the man with $1 million a year knows that all would be well if he had $2 million a year"..."Nobody," he concludes, "ever has enough."

Everyone knows that money can't buy happiness, but numerous studies have shown that people who are financially secure tend to be happier than those who aren't.

But Jean Chatzky reports that, like most good things, too much happiness can be bad for your wallet.

University of Illinois psychology professor Ed Diener looked at the question of whether happiness reaches a point of, literally diminishing -- or even reversing -- returns. Indeed it does. Chatzky sums up the results of his study: "Diener and his colleagues used data from the World Values Survey, which measures the happiness of respondents on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 the happiest). They found that income did indeed increase along with happiness but not at the very top. The 10s earned significantly less than the 8s and the 9s. The latter were also more likely to have gone to college, have engaged in the political process and have saved money."

What to make of this? I'm not really sure -- if you're jubilantly happy and that prevents you from increasing your net worth, is that a bad thing? I don't think so. It's only a problem if your optimism leads you to feel overconfident in your less than adequate financial position. If you worry that your good mood is interfering with your work ethic, try watching the talking heads on CNBC blabber about our impending economic doom.

This is the part of a new series of columns called "The Naked Truth," by retirement expert Dan Solin. Please bring him your questions, in the comments box, and he will answer as many as he can.

What is the biggest threat to your retirement savings?

You may be surprised to learn that it is the securities industry. Specifically, your "investment professional" to whom millions of investors entrust their retirement nest eggs.

A couple of days ago, Fidelity Investments released its second annual "Fidelity Millionaire Outlook" analysis. This report is, basically, a survey of 1000 people who have at least $1 million in assets to invest. The respondents were asked to plot their view of the U.S. economy on a scale ranging from +100 (very strong) to -100 (very weak). Last year, the average was +41, which translates to "strong." This year, the average was -50, which translates to "very weak."

Essentially, this means that even the wealthiest people in America don't really have a lot of faith in the economy. On average, the respondents were optimistic about the economy's potential for improvement in 2009, giving it a +18 score. In the meantime, however, the economy's downturn is making these investors feel exposed and endangered. In fact, almost 20% don't feel wealthy, in spite of the fact that they have a mean income of $270,000 and, on average, have at least $3 million to invest.

Fidelity's analyists have put a happy face on this data, stating that the millionaires' optimistic vision of 2009 suggests that they see "today's problem as tomorrow's opportunity." However, it's hard to get really chipper about an economy that's making the "Daddy Warbucks" segment of the population feel like they're hard up!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. He found ten bucks in the street a couple of weeks ago and still feels like Diamond Jim Brady.

Evelyn Nieves' Associated Press article has some really good news about a new breed of Gen Xers and Y's. The Sunday Telegraph of London coined the acronym, YAWN (Young And Wealthy Normal). These are young, successful men and women who have decided to do something different than shopping until they drop. Paris Hilton: you're going out of style.

Though the group has its share of high-tech success stories and dot.com millionaires, Nieves says that, "Yawns are actually a subset of a growing global movement of the eco-socially aware. The state of the economy and the state of the planet have inspired people to consider what they buy and how they spend in ways not seen since the 'Small is Beautiful' and ecology movements of the 1970's. "

YAWNS are young people who are choosing frugal lives and humanitarian projects. They choose normal sizes homes over McMansions, donate significant money to worthy causes, and drive energy efficient vehicles. Not only that but, "Second-hand stores are to Yawns what the Gap was to yuppies."

It sounds like the 60's - except that unlike hippies, yawns are financially savy.

Imagine.

Reuters is reporting that the 24th richest man in the world is planning on spending $150 million starting a magazine, web site and TV station called -- get ready -- Snob.

Snob has slightly a different meaning in Russia. They think of a snob as someone who has made a lot of money in life and is entitled to brag about it if they want. In America, of course, we see a snob as someone who looks down on others who aren't as rich or as classy, and thus, the rest of us tend to look down on snobs. At any rate, Andrei Shmarov, one of the billionaire creating Snob, told Reuters, "It's for people who are successful and those who want to be successful."

The web site will be out in June, the magazine in July, and it will focus on lifestyle, business and travel articles. The cable channel will follow shortly after that.

It's been widely reported that new car sales are in the toilet, but the carnage isn't limited to economy-priced vehicles. According to Autodata, Mercedes-Benz sales fell 3.7% compared with March last year, BMW and Lexus fared worse, dropping 8.7% and 13.6% respectively. Luxury vehicle sales are off about 13% year to date.

The USA Today speculates that "Purveyors of the finer things in life are finding their well-heeled customers are caught in the same economic riptide tugging at the less well-off."

But I would suggest that there's something else at work here. Easy credit and a consumer culture focused on conspicuous consumption meant that a lot of people were buying luxury goods who had no business doing so. There's really no way to tell whether someone is rich anymore, short of looking at their tax returns and bank balances. Anyone could buy a Lexus, provided he could make the monthly payments which were artificially low because the Federal Reserve was taking an ax to interest rates -- at the expense of retirees living on fixed incomes.

Now the posers are being flushed out of the luxury goods market as the credit markets tighten. As Warren Buffett has said, when the tide goes out, you get to see who's swimming naked. And there were a lot of people driving BMWs in their birthday suits.

There's an old saying that if you make a better mousetrap, then the world will beat a path to your door. While a new mousetrap has yet to surface, the tales of Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page demonstrate that changing the world can be the quickest path to fame and riches.

Most of the young people on Forbes' list of billionaires got there the old-fashioned way: They inherited their money. However, for those who are not lucky enough to be the offspring of insanely wealthy parents, there seems to be two major paths to fabulous wealth.

The first lies in knowing how money is made and figuring out how to generate some of your own. This was the route taken by the youngest billionaire in the Ukraine, Kostayantin Zhevago. Fifteen years ago, he began working as finance director of a bank; today, he holds a majority stake in its holding company. At 34, he is currently worth $3.4 billion and is a member of Ukraine's Parliament.

Studies have shown that what really matters is comparative wealth -- It feels better to be eating Alpo off the floor while your neighbor's eating store-brand kibble than it does to be dining on prime rib if your neighbor has caviar.

With that in mind, I found a great little calculator on CNNMoney. Here's how it works: You type in your annual income and age and it tells you how you stack up for net worth compared to your age, and how you compare based on income.

For instance, the median net worth for a 38-year old is $44,875. The median net worth for someone earning $50 thousand per year is $109,975.

One caveat: The CNNMoney calculator uses the median net worth and median income. Using the average figures would provide much higher results, as you can see in this story from AllFinancialMatters.

If you find that your net worth is lower than average for your age, consider that most Americans are not adequately prepared for retirement -- and you're below average. So get savin'!

Okay, I'm filing this under "reasons I'm glad I'm not really wealthy and famous"...

Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words. It's German for "the pleasure that you get from the misfortune of others." As much as we'd all like to deny it, everyone experiences a little schadenfreude from time to time. The joy is, of course, multiplied when the miserable thing happens to someone who is much richer and more famous than you are or will ever be. Schadenfreude is the little bit of smug delight that you get when staring into a picture of Paris Hilton in an orange jumpsuit or Lindsay Lohan wandering, sweaty-faced and drunk, across the pages of every tabloid in the country. Lest you start to get down on yourself (or me!) for this pleasure, keep in mind that it more or less provides Lindsay and Paris with careers. Neither has done much creative work of note for the past few months (or, in the case of Paris, ever). However, there they are, taking up a huge space in the public consciousness.

In this day and age, becoming a millionaire is a goal that most people have. With the fed printing money like Germany circa 1923, if your net worth is much lower than that when you hit retirement age, it could be a tough time.

So how are you doing on that quest? I found a really cool How long until you're a millionaire? calculator at www.mortgage-calc.com. Just put in your current savings, your expected monthly addition, your expected rate of return and hit enter -- They'll even take inflation into account for you!

What's cool is that you can toggle your savings rate back and forth to see how much sooner you'll be able to get to a million if you save an extra, say, $100 a month. You'll be surprised. It adds up. Another thing I like about the calculator is that it puts the emphasis on savings which is how you really become a millionaire. Remember: no matter how much you earn, you have to actually accumulate $1 million without blowing it on consumer goods in order to become a millionaire.