I’m not laughing
Filed under: Banks, Credit, FICO, Finance, Interest Rates, Politics
There’s dozens or hundreds of stories about the bail out package in the news and it seems like you can’t open the paper, turn on the news or surf the web without reading about it. This blog wasn’t started to cover this type of stories, it was started to rant and go nuts over so called experts who give vague, generic advice to unsuspecting people who believe they are looking out for the public.
However, since I started Financial Comedy the whole system went down the tubes and I’ve been scrambling to keep up.
The thing that comes to mind for me is why not reset every man and woman’s credit score to perfect so that everyone who has been screwed by the banking and credit system get’s a mulligan or a do over? The system has become so complicated that we need help managing our scores and although I haven’t read the new plan, the old plan would actually lower your score if you tried to pay an old collection account. You can also have rates raised if you were late on an unrelated bill. For example, your credit card could raise your rates if you were late on the electric bill regardless of if you were ever late on a credit card payment.
On top of how confusing the rules were, you couldn’t get the most important number in your credit life, your score without paying or joining a monitoring service and there were 3 different companies with 3 different scoring systems all of which were private.
Ok enough about this. I’m probably going to go back to my original plan and only touch on the bail out insanity from time to time but in the mean time, here’s a couple of stories I found interesting.
Senate Democrats promise to change stimulus bill
Why the bank bailouts are doomed
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I’m not blaming Democrats or Republicans, actually I’m blaming them both. They both are to blame and I don’t know which party is more at fault. I am optimistic that President Obama has good ideas and can improve the situation and hope that I’m proven correct.
What does this year hold?
There’s plenty of reasons to be pessimistic today and plenty of reasons to rant, like the banks not explaining where the bail out money went or or it taking until July 2010 for the consumer protection from credit card companies to go into effect, but I don’t feel like it. It must be the weather.
I am working on my New Years Resolutions and I’m kinda stuck. Most of the things I should get rid of, I don’t want to.
I am working on my time management and started rereading Successful Time Management: A Self-Teaching Guide, 2nd Edition
It really helped the last time I read it and I still use some of the tools I learned but I’m hoping to find something I missed or didn’t need at the time.
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.