Getting out of debt one kitten at a time
Happy New 2008 Year!!
This was a great month for the net worth, mostly because of my yearly bonus.
The Retirement account didn’t do so great, mostly due to me futzing with it when I should not have. From now on all index funds and ETFs - no more individual stocks!
What a crock:
“In an economy humming along in part because of consumers’ happy embracement of debt, those who are debt-free can find themselves viewed more as pariahs, rather than role models. Most lenders consider a consumer with no credit history only slightly less risky than one with bad credit, says Craig Watts, a spokesman for Fair Isaac, the company that creates the almighty FICO score. “Consumers have proven time and again to be creatures of habit,” he explains. “Without some kind of track record, the consumer is a cipher.” “
I’d take being a “pariah” over having to get out of debt any day, any time. As Dave Ramsey always says, “If being normal is being broke, then I don’t wanna be normal”.
The country-wide housing price declines don’t begin to capture the magnitude of the saddest stories where people bought houses last year for twice what builders are now selling them for.
Even Cramer is now saying, “Trying to game short-term movements in stocks [is] almost impossible”.
Hell is getting chilly for sure…
Four Pillars on the Entertainment Return on Investment (EROI):
Say I go see a 2 hour movie and I pay $12. My “EROI” is 0.17 (2 hours/$12). You watch an hour of TV each day, and cable costs you $50 / month, your EROI is 0.6 (30 hours / $50). So if someone was trying to save money, and enjoyed both watching TV and seeing movies, they’d probably be better off keeping the cable and stop going to movies for a while (even though cable costs far more then a movie ticket).
A very intereting analysis of Suze Orman’s advice over the years from the lesbian angle at Queer Cents:
In lesbian culture, there’s no currency in being sexually virtuous. No one cares if you have slept with “X” number of women before you sleep with them— not because they’re so open-minded, but because there’s no economic basis. There’s no “finding out whose baby this is.”
Lesbian sexuality is not designed to answer any notion of virtue; it doesn’t answer a patriarch’s need. This is why Suze Orman is incredulous that straight women keep getting taken to the cleaners financially— she is oblivious to the “call of virtue,” not matter how many New Age platitudes she espouses.
Sad, but funny too. Iowa Hawk:
“Adjustable rate mortgage, A-R-M,” he says. “After the first 6 months, it adjusts up to the prevailing interest rate. You should have realized that, because it’s all there in your contract.”Who am I, fucking Oliver Wendell Smallprint? I thought ARM meant “always ready money.” I told the dude there’s no way I could pay.
Some Good Investing Advice: “If you can have the discipline to invest in a safe fund and it ignore it for years and years, you will be a success at investing.”