Comments on: The article everyone is talking about today

By: How To Control Unconcious Spending

How To Control Unconcious Spending — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:33:36 +0000

[...] don’t think most people intentionally sabotages their finances. It’s more likely that they spend and not keep track of income and bills. I had a problem [...]

By: j

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:44:57 +0000

HA! I love responding to old posts!

I am self-un-employed, and save every penny i make! of couse i have 20k savings, own my house, and have old cars. of course they are porsches and an audi, but they are neat, cheap, and paid for.

kill your tv,
stop collecting junk, even if its new.
if its new, its junk.
if you didnt need if last year, you dont need it this year, so dont buy it.
oh.
and eat paste

By: gjt

gjt — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:02:53 +0000

Whats up, Im 47 yrs old not young, and saddly enough this hits home with a resounding thud! I have a laptop that I otherwise wouldnt have if not for the giving of a thoughtful mom and dad. I am sober for over a year and desperately trying to come back. As long as I have a pulse I wont give up, but there are times I want to. I read and study hopeing I will catch up. I think I can but it really doesnt look too good. Makes you wonder why you even want to stay in the game at all. I guess its better to die trying than to die with people thinking you didnt.

By: reader

reader — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:52:38 +0000

I read nickel and dimed. The woman in that book never stuck with one job for very long. She never actually tried to see if her hard work would allow her to move up the corporate ladder. She never attempted to take college classes while she was working, to see if that was possible. The only thing I learned from that book is that being poor sucks.

Her attitude about everything also annoyed me. For example, she repeatably said she was surprised that no one could tell how educated she was. She often got angry at costumers, and she made a huge deal out of the drug tests. I don’t understand why she insisted on only working with poor white people, purposefully avoiding the other races.

Overall I felt the book was patronizing and looking down on me. As if I don’t already know poor people exist, and the best way for me to learn that they exist is for some journalist to move into their habitat and study them like animals.

By: Evan

Evan — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:22:56 +0000

Let me toss this in because it’s something to watch out for if you have student loans. I graduated college in 2005 and promptly started making payments on my loans. Recently, I took some courses at a local community college and paid cash for them. I noticed that my auto-payments for my loans stopped. I went to my account website and there it was- next payment due: 2012. WTF? I called the loan company and they told me since I was back in school I didn’t need to pay any more. I asked if I had enabled that somewhere and she told me that loan payments are automatically deferred when you are in school. Then she went on trying to sell me that I was crazy for making payments when I didn’t have to. Of course those next four years the interest would still be accruing. I made sure this was corrected and that it would never happen again. Just a reminder to watch out.

By: Sara

Sara — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:17:12 +0000

I’ll add another book recommendation: Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine.

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Buying-Year-Without-Shopping/dp/0743269357

I read it a year ago and I have been much more mindful about where my money goes ever since.

By: MoneyBlogga

MoneyBlogga — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:59:28 +0000

The woman in the video,Ms. Mcleod, hit the nail on the head when she stated that she should’ve learned to deal with her emotions rather than shop. Emotions are at the root of self destruction. I know because I’ve been down that road and have made the choice to deal with my emotions rather than continuing to deny them. Before I got to this point, however, my financial impulses were uncontrollable and had already led me to bankruptcy.

By: Pierre

Pierre — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:05:14 +0000

Dear jsweez, et al;

Regarding the lender appetite: “The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God-fearing Christian men (and women) among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.”
More Maxims of Mark, by Mark Twain

Regarding the lendee appetite: You may be interested to see how this does / does not alter the financial education of children (at home or in school). As per Mike, “…kinda like maturity. Some of us figure it out before others. Some of us never get there at all.”

By: jsweez

jsweez — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:28:16 +0000

To Robert’s question: – “Sligthly off-topic, but here’s one aspect of this whole topic I still don’t understand: who is buying all these terrible loans and why?” I covered this whole mess as a real estate and mortgage reporter. What predicated the credit crunch was an extreme run-up in subprime mortgage lending in early 2000s. We’re talking about a market that barely existed in the late ’90s skyrocketing to a substantial chunk of mortgage lending by 2004 and 2005. Wall St. figured out that investors could bank high returns on subprime loans because the interest people pay on these loans is so high and the underlying asset – homes – were seeing values rise at jaw-dropping rates (10-20% increases in some cases). This all worked as long as real estate values were rising. But then came a point when appreciation had to stagnate because prices were way out of reach for entry-level buyers. When that happens, the real estate market begins to slow down and suddenly those surefire assets aren’t able to give a defaulting borrower a quick way out. It was some time in late 2006, early 2007 when Wall St. investors started seeing loans go bad. Banks had to buy them back in some cases. As investors started losing their appetite for buying these loans in the securitized debt market, liquidity started to slow for the banks and lenders who’d been writing the loans and selling them off. Enter credit crunch.

It’s complicated so I hope I did it some justice. For me, it was fascinating to watch because I remember thinking the same thing: why would a lender write a loan to such a risky borrower? The mortgage banking industry always answered these questions by saying “the risk is underwritten into the loan so there’s really no problem.” Yeah, we see how that worked out.

By: ekrabs

ekrabs — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:13:40 +0000

Did I ever tell you you’re my hero, Kimberly?