Personal Finance Grammar and Usage, Part 2.1

Very much like the last usage issue, what's wrong with the following real personal-finance blog sentence?

I wasted .98 cents.

Much like last week, the issue is redundancy. Here, though, more than last week, we run into an actual comprehension issue. The dollar sign and the word "dollars" don't interact to cause confusion--they're just redundant and silly. The decimal point and the word "cents," though...that's a whole different story. What this sentence actually says is that the waster wasted an amount we might transcribe as point ninety-eight cents--a little less than a penny. In fact, the waster (wastrel, even) wasted ninety-eight cents--a little less than a dollar.

To say what you mean with a mimimum of confusion try it one of these ways:
I wasted $0.98.
I wasted ninety-eight cents.
I wasted 98 cents.

Writing is like balancing your checkbook the old-fashioned way--you have to be careful with those decimal points!