Financial Comedy

I think you can figure out that I read all kinds of articles when I’m looking for something that is useful to write about. Today I was on MSNBC and found this article about easing the blows of bad credit. Since the news is full of doom and gloom about the economy and the credit crunch, I figure there’s a lot of people who might need this info. Jean Chatzky  wrote an interesting story called 5 tips to ease the blow of bad credit.

I still believe it’s important to have a Plan B and create multiple streams of income just so you’re prepared when life throws a monkey wrench in your plans. The Washington Post reported that payrolls dropped by 240,000 in October. I used to have a blog that just reported job losses until it became too depressing at about the time the count passed a million. Every time I read a story about massive layoffs, I have to wonder how many of them had a plan B and how many had been living paycheck to paycheck. I also have to wonder how many were blindsided by losing their job.

It’s been a while since I made a post and the reason is that not only have I been trying to figure out the bailout nonsense, but I had a computer crash that really set me back on research. Needless to say, I recommend you backing up your system and doing it often. The only thing that saved me was that I use Fox Marks to back up my bookmarks and have a 2nd hard drive in my laptop that I put most of my info on. I still had to restore the system and reinstall all the programs that I lost and I did lose some things that can’t be replaced, but it could have been much worse.

Ok, now for the bailout, I saw on the news that the government failed to put a simple rule in that prevented the banks from hording the money and some are planning on using it to buy other banks. Haven’t we learned that if a bank gets too big to fail, it is a bad thing??? Now they’re talking about giving people who are deep in credit card debt, relief. I’m a little torn on that, yes, Americans need relief but is it fair to reward people for not taking care of their own life? I’m looking forward to finding more details on that and finding out if it’s fair or if it’s rewarding bad behavior. If it turns out as I understood it, then I’ll regret not buying a plasma TV and a few other toys.

As you know, I believe in having multiple streams of income and one of my favorites is Traffic Wave. It’s a marketing system that has really helped my overall system. I did hear a good quote on Traffic Wave. “I heard there was a recession, I’m just choosing not to participate.” Of course I paraphrased the quote. But the idea is correct. For most of us, life goes on and maybe our investments are looking pretty scary but the value of stocks will go back up and things will return to normal before too long. I’m glad that I don’t depend 100% on a job and have other income coming in. It makes life less stressful.

Oh and I voted today. I live in Nevada and we get to early vote here. The votes don’t get counted till Election Day, but it’s done and it took about 15 minutes. Remember, if you don’t vote and your guy loses, you can’t complain. So vote.

I’ve been watching the news about the economy and still trying to figure out what is going to happen. I heard a newscaster mention the Fear Index so I checked it out and it turns out that there is an index that measures the fear in the market. That’s really what’s driving the markets down after all. People are freaking out and selling everything they can and when there are that many sellers and no buyers, the price plummets.

I started out against the bailout and then realized that something had to be done or we’d be in even more trouble. If there isn’t any credit then businesses can’t keep doing business and the economy gets another hit. I don’t think the package they passed is exactly what we needed, but at least it’s something and maybe it will help.

I did notice the story about AIG blowing about 440 grand for a retreat less than a week after being bailed out. They said it was for their top performers but I just don’t see how they could justify it after being bailed out. I’m thinking they should have postponed or cancelled the trip. I also find it sad that the people who were responsible for the crash and quit or got fired before the bailouts get to keep all of their bonuses and the poor idiots who came in and tried to do the right thing will be considered guilty when they weren’t there long enough to do anything.

I know that some people have been wondering when I’d do a rant on the bank failures and the bail outs after all, this is blog is Financial Rants, and to tell the truth, I’ve been in too much shock to really write. I mean, what the hell is the government doing and what does this mean really? OK, so the fed takes over these banks and AIG using tax payer money. I heard today that it could all cost a Trillion dollars of our money before it’s over. Does this mean we own it since we paid for it? When do we get our shares? Do we get dividends when/if they recover? I’m pretty sure that’s a no. When they sell all the assets of the banks, who is going to get to buy them? I wish I could say they will sell at a fair market value, but we know they will sell to their friends. I have no faith in the government. Where the hell is the money coming from? We are 9,667,305,947,089.83 in debt at the time I wrote this and it’s increasing at 1.84 Billion a day not counting the bank mess. So thanks to my curiosity and to get my mind off the bank mess, I decided to look up the deficit over the years and found this chart of deficits by president. And it pissed me off even more. I’m not an economist but I know that if we ran our bank accounts like Republicans run the budget, we’d be bankrupt in a month, and the Lambo would be repossessed.

Who’s to blame for all this mess? Is it the Republicans? Democrats? Greed? Stupidity? Corruption? Truthfully, I believe it was too big to be one thing. Yes, both the Democrats and Republicans could have done some things better, but to be fair, hind site is always 20/20. Right now, everyone is telling us what went wrong as if it was so damned apparent a blind monkey could have saw it coming a mile away.

So, what do you do if your bank is one of the unlucky ones? I found this article on MSN that has some handy info.

What to do if your bank is siezed

I do see one good thing coming out of this mess. There is no way that any politician will say it’s a good idea to divert Social Security to the stock market for a long time. At least I hope not.

I don’t want this blog to be about politics nor do I want to take sides on this blog. I created this blog to help people learn about money and to give people a few laughs along the way, not to promote my political views. But….

You know what else is pissing me off this week? Having my intelligence insulted by politicians. It’s one thing to screw up and put some incorrect info in an ad, but to have the media and factcheck.org prove it’s not just incorrect but a bald faced lie and to continue to claim it is true is just insulting.

I watched Dr. Phil the other day, because I was channel surfing and I saw that he was talking about money and I have to admit that I like his style. The whole Get Real idea fits with how I think and is part of what this site is about.

He made a point that so many people think of their income as static when it really isn’t. We all have options to create more income. He pointed out that people can start a home based business and generate extra income. I don’t remember him mentioning it but I read somewhere that a lot of people would be saved by about 500 bucks a month. I don’t know how many of the current victims of the mortgage crisis would be saved by an extra 500 but I’d bet that a large percentage of them would. The thing about a home based business is that once you learn to make 500 a month, you can make a 1000 or more. But even more important than the money you can make working from home is the knowledge you gain. You can learn a lot about business from working an online business and that knowledge will carry over to the off line world if you so choose. I know a lot of people who take the knowledge and start an off line business for a variety of reasons including it was always their dream to own that type of business.

It is important to note that the link to a home based business above is the one I use and no particular company was mentioned by Dr Phil. I’m sure you knew that, but wanted to make sure I’m completely honest with everyone.

I ran across this story over on MSN.

10 Things Your Bank Won’t Tell You

One of the things it talks about is something I’ve suspected for a long time, some (if not all) banks post the big charges first, then the smaller charges and this of course increases the likelihood that you will have more overdraft fees. They claim that they do it for your benefit because a mortgage payment is more important than other payments. Maybe it is, but so is the multiple fees to their bottom line. If someone is already running on empty, an extra 100 bucks a month like the mother of three in the story is going to make things even harder. 100 bucks sounds like a lot but remember it’s only about 3 overdraft fees. Granted, we shouldn’t be running that close to empty, but things happen especially in today’s economy.

Another thing the article talks about is how banks can change the terms at any time. Take for example Bank Of America jacking the rates from 10%-12% to 27% or more even though the affected customers had done nothing wrong. They claim 94% had no increase last year. So just how many customers is 6%??? Well, their website says they serve approximately 53 million consumer households and I’ll guess some of those households have multiple people/accounts, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s go with 50 million which gives us 3 million affected customers. So you have better odds of having your rates tripled than you do at winning the freaking lottery even if you do nothing wrong. I wonder if the way they choose who gets nailed has anything to do with my paranoia from a few days ago when I asked if you were feeling paranoid yet.

So for crying out loud, keep your checkbook balanced and don’t count of the float time that we used to have. With the advances in technology, there isn’t much time left. Postpone buying whatever shiny new toy that is calling your name and build up a cushion.

If you must use credit then Compare Credit Cards and get the best rates you can.

I try to keep politics out of this blog because I’ve always heard you don’t talk about religion or politics.

But I have to call BS on a news story. I heard Sarah Palin say that she put the state Westwind II jet on eBay and decided to find out the story. I was a little curious.

Seems she listed it 3 times at 2.5 million in 2007 after the state paid close to 2.7 million in 2005 but it didn’t reach the minimum and had a broker sell it for 2.1 million.

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_10385036

Not to say that Obama hasn’t misrepresented McCain’s quotes, but McCain has done it more and worse. At least as far as I can tell.

Here’s a site to keep an eye on if you want the facts. As a matter of fact, read some of the info and prepare to become more cynical.

http://www.factcheck.org

There’s no wonder why Americans are apathetic to politics. If they really want to reform it, how about making a law that all quotes are true and they have to keep all those promises they make. Now that would be true reform.

We’ve heard all our lives that education is important. I think most people look at education as a structured school activity that ends when they graduate, but I believe it’s much more. I tend to think of education as a daily activity. I also think education comes from many different places. We can also learn from some pretty unlikely places.

The important thing to keep in mind is that not all you’ll learn is correct and the world is changing really fast. This is not to say that there’s no point in learning if it’s going to change soon, what it means is that education is a life time activity.

I watched a finance show recently that gives advice to callers and was amazed that some of the advice was so shallow that it was worthless. It didn’t take into account the whole story. One caller wanted to know about investments and instead of saying learn how they work, and know how to protect yourself, the advice was buy and hold. I fell for that thinking a few years ago and watched my stock go from 30 a share to 4 bucks a share. I should sell them but I keep them as a reminder to not fall for so called experts’ bad advice. It was an expensive lesson but well worth it.

Another caller asked about buying a piece of art and was told not to buy. She treated it like he was blowing more than 20 grand without taking into account if it was undervalued and/or likely to increase in value over the next few years. Granted art is unpredictable and it could lose value, but to not even mention it, was enough to make my blood boil.

Some things don’t change, like spend less than you make or you’ll eventually pay dearly. I was looking over an article I wrote a long time and was pleasantly surprised that it was still 100% true. Granted that I wanted it to be valuable for a long time, but things change and the economy has been really changing lately.

Here’s one of the articles I wrote

7 Easy Ways To Save Money

I’m going to track the rest down and bring them into Financial Comedy over the next few weeks.

When I read this article on MSN, I felt sick, then angry and then decided to share it with everyone.

The idea that we are so analyzed that everything we buy can be used in such a manner is upsetting.

Have you ever went to the store to pick up a few things and got to the checkout and realized that it’s a strange combination? For example, electrical tape to fix that wire, hand lotion because your hands are cracked, those little potting tools, a feather duster and cat food? Well instead of just freaking out the cashier with this very unusual combination, it has the potential to affect your credit score if you forgot to bring cash.  Did the shopping visual make you laugh or just disturb you?

This may sound like a paranoid rant but considering that most of the criteria these companies use are secret, we can’t be sure. I’d like to think I’m overreacting,  but read the full article and judge for yourself. Personally I feel like Bob Seger was right in Feel Like A Number.

Lenders track every last detail of your spending habits, then use the data to estimate not just how big a risk you are but how profitable a customer you might be.

By Liz Pulliam Weston

This is August right? Isn’t it too early for Christmas?

Maybe I’m just getting really old but I can remember when Christmas didn’t get advertised until after Thanksgiving. Then it was the Monday after Thanksgiving. Then it was around Halloween. I just looked at the TV guide and The Count down to Christmas is on QVC. What’s next? 4th of July, May 1st?

It’s not that I have a lot against ( actually I hate it) a holiday that forces us to buy useless crap that means little to give to people so we feel better about ourselves. I mean REALLY. Is it just so we don’t look like cheap skates? I think it’s 90% to look good. The only people who should get presents on Christmas is children, and that’s only because they believe in the magic of Santa and haven’t been brainwashed by corporate media.

Do me a favor and give to charity, give to the homeless person on the corner, donate to save the planet, anything but going into debt just to buy a bunch of cheap useless crap. If you really have to buy a present, buy something that means something, and that the recipient actually needs. If they really really want a novelty singing fish, they can buy it themselves.

Wouldn’t it be better to give to friends, family and loved ones all year instead of making them wait 364 days to get loads of stuff? I can bet your gift and mine would really stand out if it showed up on August 25th.

Think of the fun of dropping hints all year and actually being able to find that perfect gift for your family and friends. Better yet, think of the insanity of a Ground Hogs day present…think of the wrapping paper.

Even better, Think of having Good will toward men 365 days a year.

Viva La Revolution!!! Chri$tma$ Anarchy!!! Who’s with me?