Who Is Going To Pay For The Bank Failures?
Filed under: Banks, Finance, Politics, Rant, Uncategorized
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.
Your Income Is Not Static
Filed under: Education, Finance, Getting Started, Money, Uncategorized, Work From Home
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.
The Banks Aren’t Telling You Everything or We’ll Change The Rules When We Feel Like It.
Filed under: Banks, Credit, Fees, Interest Rates, Rant, Spending
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.
Don’t Believe Everything You Hear
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.
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.
The Value Of Education
Filed under: Education, Investing, Rant, Saving, Spending, Uncategorized
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
I’m going to track the rest down and bring them into Financial Comedy over the next few weeks.
NAKED RETIREMENT
Naked Retirement strips down the old traditional models of retirement planning and replaces the it with a more creative and intuitive one that helps people take control of their retirement planning, saving, and investing.
The book details the evolution of retirement and uses it to help baby boomers and retirees understand why they are behind in saving and what they can do about it.
"Retirement planning can no longer be one-dimensional, focused exclusively on merely providing information such as how pensions or a 401(k)’s work. It needs to extend beyond financial planning to include aspects of health and social issues that will impact future retirees," according to author, Robert Laura.
Billed as the ultimate defense against the scary, anxious, and stressful feelings people get on their first day of retirement when they have only a financial plan full of numbers and charts to guide them, Laura simplifies the mental and emotional aspects of retirement planning with thought-provoking questions about your definition and approach to retirement as well as important retirement conversations that foster strong relationships in retirement.
The book culminates into a one-page Naked Retirement plan that will help people as well as planners successfully estimate retirement preparedness and future success.
Book is available at NakedRetirement.com and is emailed in pdf format directly to participants.