ActiveRecord Type issue -- What am I missing?

Hey everyone,

First, apologies for the crosspost, I meant to post this to this group, my previous post was a mistake.

I'm having a frustrating ActiveRecord issue. Maybe what I'm trying to do will not work, but if that's the case, I'd like to know why. Otherwise I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.

My goal is to store prices (numbers with exactly two decimal places, always) in the db as INTs to save space and avoid precision errors. I've done this in PHP with no problem -- just store the actual value