23 posts
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/106490/Stimulus-101-What's-in-the-Bills
I'll bring up the first one. This country is spoiled as fuck. Any "individual" making $40 grand a year doesn't need a fucking tax cut. Second, any family making $80 to $100 grand doesn't need a TAX CUT. I think reality has left the fucking building and spending is fucking uncontrolled and imature....just fucking ignorant of the REAL AMERICANS life. If an individual makes $100,000 a year and lives in a $300,000 home and has problems, so fucking what. He created them. Let him fix them.
Point being.....what we have determined as needed in America, is shameful. We have exceeded our needs to the point of killing our own economy. Bush is only half at fault. Look in the mirror, your the other half. $50,000 cars being the norm, $1500 plus T.V.'s, it's fucking crazy.
I'm the perfect example.
I pay $75 bucks a month for HD channels to watch o a $1700 T.V. I have a 4 wheeler....I don't hunt. I just like to ride them. I have a boat, that's just a luxury item. I have a motorcycle, another luxury item. I have to pay for gas to even start either one. I pay insurance on them both. In addition.........to the cars that I have to have to get to my fucking job.
I have guitars that I don't use to make money that cost more than $1500. Actually only one, but that's enough. A computer that I don't use to make money period at home. My wife has a laptop, I have one to. I have 4 pair of amost $100 headphones, 2 headphone amps that cost more than $150 bucks each.
See the stupidity? It's our fault, mine personally. Our greed and lack of disipline with money will fucking kill us as a country. I'm doing my part for sure. Any problem I have with money isn't caused by anyone else but me. What about you? I'm damn sure not bragging, I'm saying I'm careless with money. I use to be. It's reality check for Americans. Nothing more.
I'm a bitch tonight! ;D
I make over 100k a year, I live in a 600k house, and I don't believe I need a tax cut.
I have a 20-something inch, non-plasma TV (but would like an LCD or plasma, they save a crapload of energy). My main recording guitar cost me $150, and I have another one that is my main gigging guitar that cost me $200. I do make money gigging, but not much, maybe $1-2k a year. I also play a lot of charity and benefit gigs for free. I also have an $1800 guitar that I widely credit with being the reason I never spend money like that on guitars any more. But it is in the studio, and it gets plenty of use, on paid sessions. My car cost me $8500, used, gets decent mileage, and I plan to drive it for another 100k miles. We do pay $100 a month for cable, internet, and phone combined, but I consider that reasonably frugal in these times. I have a $750 computer that I put together myself, and I do use it to make money (I work from home 2 days a week). My laptop belongs to my company.
I am always amazed to see these people living on 30-40k a year that own amazingly expensive stuff like TVs and cars... stuff I could never afford, I don't think. But I am also a big believer in living within my means. I have no debt except for house loans.
America's wake-up call, long overdue, has arrived, I think. I hope we come through chastened, but somehow I doubt it will happen.
our economy is based on spending money. so if you want to help out go buy something!
I just bought a new laptop. ;D
So I'm suppose to sacrifice by spending all my money? ;D ;D Yeah, that will help. :-/
Hookbender — Jan 28, 2009I just bought a new laptop. ;D
So I'm suppose to sacrifice by spending all my money? ;D ;D Yeah, that will help. :-/
not all of your money just what you can afford.
But that's kinda the problem right now. Who knows what I can afford right now? My business may tank in the next few weeks, who knows?
I'm keepin my money. I ain't spending shit. I'm trying to get my house ready to sell as we speak. Probably won't make shit and will be damn lucky to sell it in the first place.
I think kinda differently. I think the thoughtless spending habbits Americans have added to the problem.
thoughtless spending is ok as long as its not on credit. credit is the problem. sub prime loans killed the economy!
Thoughtless spending is not o.k. Are you crazy? What happens when your out of wor and you have no money? What happens when your air goes out and you have to fix it or replace it on credit? What happens when you car breaks down and needs a new transmission? Credit, because you have no cash. I'm not even gonna waiste my time looking up the average Americans credit card debt for you, or how little the average American has in a savings account in case of emergency.
You don't get it. Thoughtless spending leads directly to credit. Just because you have the cash to buy a $2000 dollar T.V. doesn't mean you can afford it and should spend, spend, spend. You need to look at Dave Ramsey's site and like Fingers says.....Read his fucking book you ignorant cunt. ;D ;D ;D ;D
Yes! DO NOT thoughtlessly spend your money! Send it all to me right now (so I can thoughtlessly spend your money)! :D ;D
You can't thoughtlessly spend money right now you broke dick fucker. ;D ;D ;D ;D The only thought you'd have is how to keep a roof over your head and how well do I want to eat this week. ;D ;D
The — Jan 29, 2009thoughtless spending is ok as long as its not on credit. credit is the problem. sub prime loans killed the economy!
Sub prime loans didn't "kill" the economy. Greedy bankers killed the economy, by packaging up loans and selling them for quick cash over and over, with no thought to the actual value of them, or their future worth. Real estate is NOT a short-term investment... pretending it was a legitimate short-term investment killed that market. I still can't believe the idiocy of those who believed that real estate could never be worth LESS money.
Sub prime loans were a very small portion of the loans made on the market. I know a lot of people who have lost tons of money on their houses, and not one of them has a sub-prime loan.
Neither of my loans were sub-prime. Both were fixed rate around 6.25%, however the backlash on people borrowing using those sub-prime loans is what made it impossible for me to get to my equity. When everything is finally done, over $150k of my losses will be of money I had put into my houses plus another $35k to $50k of unrealized equity gains that I had at one point last year.
One thing that still burns me though is that my situation isn't covered in any of the bailouts and other financial aid packages. However, if I had been dumb enough to get a sub-prime loan with a variable rate after putting nothing down on a house I knew I could never afford, well, then the Government would have helped me out.
$72k of my losses came from a capital gain tax that I really don't owe, but I lost my battle with the low-brows at the IRS. Gee, guess where my money has probably gone to? Yeah, some dumbfuck sitting in a house they should never have bought...
charger — Jan 30, 2009[quote author=The Assman link=1233111343/0#6 date=1233251393]thoughtless spending is ok as long as its not on credit. credit is the problem. sub prime loans killed the economy!
Sub prime loans didn't "kill" the economy. Greedy bankers killed the economy, by packaging up loans and selling them for quick cash over and over, with no thought to the actual value of them, or their future worth. Real estate is NOT a short-term investment... pretending it was a legitimate short-term investment killed that market. I still can't believe the idiocy of those who believed that real estate could never be worth LESS money.
Sub prime loans were a very small portion of the loans made on the market. I know a lot of people who have lost tons of money on their houses, and not one of them has a sub-prime loan.
Most of which is a direct result as craig said of sub-prime junk loans in combination with GAS prices. I used to design subdivisions and the market was so over exaggerated in this area it was pathetic! The companies I used to work for put all their eggs in that subdivision market and are now hurting big time. One of them was at 300+ employees, they are down to 110 ish and falling. Which makes me wonder if gas wouldn't have risen so much would the economy be in such bad shape?
CraigBert — Jan 30, 2009One thing that still burns me though is that my situation isn't covered in any of the bailouts and other financial aid packages. However, if I had been dumb enough to get a sub-prime loan with a variable rate after putting nothing down on a house I knew I could never afford, well, then the Government would have helped me out.
How? All the government has done is allow people with bad interest rates to get into good, fixed interest rates. You are already there. The bottom line is that you assumed or projected that you could afford to pay off your loans when you took them. How has the situation changed since then? And why is that everyone else's fault? If you can't afford to sell the houses without taking a loss, then keep them, and sell them later, when you CAN make a profit.
I see a lot of feeling sorry for yourself in your posts, but I also see that you, like millions and millions of other people, bought something overvalued, that then lost value. Now, how is it any better for you to have done that than for anyone else to have done it? Why is your situation so unique? I am seeing people lose their homes, outright, left and right. Foreclosed, credit shot, money they can't pay, totally fucked. Meanwhile you still have two houses at fixed interest rates and decent payments. I can't for the life of me figure out why you could afford them when you signed the loan papers, and now you can't, and somehow that is the fault of subprime lenders and the government. Your payments haven't changed. Your loan terms haven't changed. But someone else is to blame, right?
The sub prime debacle kicked off the credit crunch, it detonated it.
But the deeper problem has/is supplying the main payload.
A huge speculative housing (and other Assets) bubble hyped up by recycling money soaked up from a huge global trade/consumption imbalance.
This situation has been going on for decades, but it accelerated out of control since around 2002 - i.e. coming out of the last mini recession after the dot com crash.
It is not sustainable and would have hit a wall at some point anyway.
The export countries with huge trade surpluses have built up trillions of dollars of reserves through this imbalance. so they do the only thing they can with the money, which is to lend it back into the US and other Western economies to allow them to run up even bigger surpluses and causing asset price inflation through enforcing the easy money and bubble mentality.
It is treated like a perpetual motion machine - a fantasy.
Countries like China are not to blame for this, that is far too simplistic, like blaming Bankers for all the ills.
Hook is actually correct, the problem was/is with the whole system globally.
But the primary fault is with arrogance in the West
That westerners somehow have a right to prosperity they are so credulous as to believe in the impossible.
And that goes for everyone as a voter, consumer, borrower, investor.
No politician would get voted in for delivering the bad news, let alone expect people to do anything about it.
No top banker would stay in his job if he went against the prevailing attitude of the perpetual motion machine creating paper wealth.
The result of which is this credit crunch, which will force the adjustment of the reality controls.
The West is being forced back into balance with the rest of the world.
Which means the West gets poorer and the East richer in relative terms.
This balance can't be be corrected by protectionism, that will simply prop up the crap industries in domestic against superior imports at the expense of those that actually have a good enough product to export into foreign markets.
i.e Saving jobs at GM at the expense of jobs at Boeing and Microsoft.
That will just make the shit even worse and lead to even more job losses and economic decline in the long run.
There is simply no quick fix.
Banking bail outs ARE in a different class, it is not about bailing out an industry from failure.
It is about stopping complete systemic collapse globally - something that could happen overnight if it was left to fail.
An event that would be only short of nuclear war in it's social repercussions.
The financial system is at the heart of a functioning money system globally,
The capitalist system simply ceases to be in that scenario.
Once it collapses it would take decades to resurrect again.
It would have to be replaced with extreme authoritarian communist style government action in the short term to keep a society functioning at all.
Bailing out the financial system is simply about holding a dam together till we can fix it sometime down the line once the crisis has passed.
I don't think people worldwide understand how truly horrific a financial collapse scenario is today.
It would be far far worse than the Great Depression.
Global finance is so interlinked now that the failure of the banking system in say, Belgium, would be catastrophic
(for example only , there is nothing especially wrong with Belgium)
This seems very remote to an Alabama or Ohio resident, or one from Liverpool, Paris, Frankfurt or Beijing.
But that failure would start a fire that would spread quickly through the weakened financial system, a bunch of dominoes collapsing and it would happen very quickly, in a few days.
Right from the start of this crisis, it has been the outcome that worried me most - by far.
Recessions are tough, but eventually they pass in a few years.
A collapse of the global financial system would be disaster = total destruction of wealth, poverty and war and take several decades to recover from.
I think it would make a great movie in fact, someone in Hollywood should consider a production.
Take away a functioning money system, what happens.
I would love to contribute to the script.
Ironically the people who would survive best would be the subsistence farmers in remote parts of Africa, who don't use money anayway.
Truly the meek will inherit the Earth. :)
But even they would be fucked by roaming gangs of people from the urban areas looking for food.
It would be Mad Max - except the population hasn't been killed by nukes, they are all still alive and desperate.
More like a global Zimbabwe scenario :)
charger — Jan 30, 2009[quote author=CraigBert link=1233111343/0#11 date=1233316471]One thing that still burns me though is that my situation isn't covered in any of the bailouts and other financial aid packages. However, if I had been dumb enough to get a sub-prime loan with a variable rate after putting nothing down on a house I knew I could never afford, well, then the Government would have helped me out.
How? All the government has done is allow people with bad interest rates to get into good, fixed interest rates. You are already there. The bottom line is that you assumed or projected that you could afford to pay off your loans when you took them. How has the situation changed since then? And why is that everyone else's fault? If you can't afford to sell the houses without taking a loss, then keep them, and sell them later, when you CAN make a profit.
I see a lot of feeling sorry for yourself in your posts, but I also see that you, like millions and millions of other people, bought something overvalued, that then lost value. Now, how is it any better for you to have done that than for anyone else to have done it? Why is your situation so unique? I am seeing people lose their homes, outright, left and right. Foreclosed, credit shot, money they can't pay, totally fucked. Meanwhile you still have two houses at fixed interest rates and decent payments. I can't for the life of me figure out why you could afford them when you signed the loan papers, and now you can't, and somehow that is the fault of subprime lenders and the government. Your payments haven't changed. Your loan terms haven't changed. But someone else is to blame, right?
Simple. I could afford them until the Government hit me with the $72k tax (plus another $51k spent to bring my house up to code thanks to the previous owner being very unethical). When I went to get to MY money to pay for these things, I was told I couldn't and THAT was because of others.
As for having two houses, I probably won't. If my Mom's house isn't sold at the huge loss before the 4th of next month (or we get another extension), then it's gone.
Two years ago I DID have enough money to pay all my expenses without using any credit cards, I DID have lots of money saved in equity and was training for a new career. Thanks to those "others" I mentioned, I no longer have any of that, my credit is shot and I'm struggling to find work in my old career for which I'm no longer as qualified to be in.
Good to know that now it's my fault, or was I just being a good socialist and redistributing my wealth?
What was the equity - houses ?
The loans for equity market died in August 2007.
The tax things is a bit rough though, what's the story behind that - what did they hit you with ?
fingers — Jan 30, 2009
The tax things is a bit rough though, what's the story behind that - what did they hit you with ?
if i remember correctly it was the excessive Gear Tax that did Craig in ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
My whole planning changed the day after I moved up here because that's the day my father passed away. Since I've supported my parents for many years (I'm an only child), I was on title for their house in San Diego. When we sold the house a few months later it naturally went for quite a bit, but had been refinanced several times (including to help pay for my dad's brain surgery). Therefore, after paying off the liens there wasn't a huge amount left. However, the way capital gains work, the IRS went all the way back to the original price of the house and said I'd made about $530k of profit so my portion of that (after removing my Mom's deduction) had me owing $72k. Since I had already used my deduction on my condo right after I moved up here, I couldn't even lie and say I had lived there even if I had wanted to. I disputed it, but they came back with that's what you owe and, if you don't pay right away, there will be penalties (and TONS of headaches I'm sure).
Since I know that the IRS can be complete pricks I had to find some way to pay them right away.
As for when the new regulation about equity loans that hurt me started, I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure it was in 2007. I started looking for work again in June of 2007. It took me 13 months to finally get some (with the help of a friend). From July of last year until mid-November when we lost funding, I was only able to average 13.3 hours per week (hours I'm getting paid for - the rest of the time I was scrambling to try and learn all of the new stuff I was supposed to already know). We were right in the middle of negotiating to save my Mom's house when the funding was cut so that's why it's a goner.
I never looked for a handout and have never received one before. In 20 years of working as a software consultant, I only worked for four companies and only had one real interview during that time. Everywhere I went they already knew what I could do and were asking me to work for them. What killed things for me was when Intel bought DEC's computers (from Compaq who bought them first) and Oracle bought DEC's databases. They bought them to bury them, not to continue to use and support them. Suddenly, I'm no longer an expert, I'm a dinosaur. I had two choices: Learn the new stuff and start over or learn a new career. Since I was so burned out I picked the new path. That ended up failing for several other reasons so I was forced to go back to the old career. I'm now starting completely over and have lost just about everything I worked all those years to get. I'm not giving up and I will be back in an advantageous position, but I do need to vent somewhere.
Fair enough about venting, the rug has been pulled from underneath you by this crisis.
Job wise you'll need to plan/prepare for the situation in a few years time - when (hopefully) the recession comes to an end.
Opportunities for high paid jobs in the IT industry will be hard to find in the middle of a recession even for those with the experience and a proven track record in current skills.
Which basically means that hoping for a top dollar job is unlikely.
So you will have to try to start something yourself, using the skills you want/need to learn.
It may not work out as a business but even if it doesn't, you will be very employable in a few years.
Need to finding a way to survive until the upturn, it is going to be tough and realistically two years.
I only mentioned Aug 2007 as that is when the credit crunch became public.
At that point, banks internal rules would have been rewritten and equity loans would be off the cards.
I've been fighting for over a year (which is why my credit cards got maxed just buying time).
I'm no longer trying to get the pay I used to of course, the going rate is actually around half of that amount. I'm very optimistic for the future and just need to survive until then!
I wish I knew more about business so I could really do my own stuff. I think I'm more paralyzed about it because I don't even know what I don't know!
Hey Mark, what's your take on running a business? How much crap do you really need to know?
You must first state if your a racist or not for him to answer. ;D ;D
Yes, I'm a human racist. ;)