DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Our Sputtering Economy

You're right, Clay. There are a lot of people who do deserve what's happened to them. However, I think there are more people than you know that have had this stuff happen to them through no real fault of their own. I'm talking problems because of job loss, etc.

People are losing good jobs and there aren't the same type jobs to replace them. You lose a good manufacturing job paying 20 some bucks an hour and can only find a retail job paying 12 bucks an hour, you're going to run into problems.

The problems are systemic. If you think about it, capitalism, at its base, is geared toward attaining wealth. The heads of these banks and mortgage companies were doing just that. Companies are making money because they outsource for very cheap. Oil companies make a ton of money because, well, they can charge whatever the hell they want, and we can complain about it, but there's nothing we can do (outside of everyone stop driving until such time as supply outpaces demand, but that will never happen).

There should certainly be personal accountability. But, the problem is a lot bigger than just people making bad choices.

Fixed rate is certainly the way to go. When my wife and I start looking for construction loans for our new hours we're building, we are going to insist that the mortgage companies give us 30 year fixed.

Actually, we're going to benefit from the bad economy. We have a 15 year loan on our house, so we've been building up a lot of equity in it. Also, we live in a relatively good market.

With the interest rates going down like they are, we'll also be able to get good rates on our new mortgage.

On another note, I remember one person telling me how backwards the "home equity loan" concept is. Here is money that is yours, and the bank "allows" you to borrow it, but with interest. "Thank you for giving us $20,000. If you want it back, you have to pay us $30,000"

I agree to an extent Clay... the problem is that a lot of people are already in over their head before they have any money to manage and it spirals out of control from their.. the other problem is that a lot of companies prey on the people who are in over their head, promising them a way out... for $300.

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I think there are more people than you know that have had this stuff happen to them through no real fault of their own. I'm talking problems because of job loss, etc.

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I agree with you thats why I wrote at the bottom...

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I do realize it's not always the case,

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I was refering to health problems / doctor bills , job loss, other accidents, ect.

Reading can be fun! My bad, lol.

We can't even win our own tax dollar work anymore. The Air Force gives billions of dollars of tanker work to the Europeans and the Gov Printing Office outsources the making of our passports.We can't even make our own passports? That sounds secure! Daily more and more of our jobs dissapear to China and India. Maybe I'm a little to worried because I lost my manufacturing job to China but they made the whole part, assembled, finished and ship it here cheaper than we could buy the raw material( steel) Hows that possible? I'm really worried about where people are going to find jobs if this continues much longer.

I know we have some, and I am not making fun at all, but prison guard will become a major growth field over the next 25 years as people who normally wouldn't commit a crime will start resorting to desperate measures.

Invest in corrections like CCA or some of the others, their business should boom.

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Geez did you live next to the Cleavers? How are Wally and the Bev?

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Uh, no......



We were the Cleavers.

Which card is that? Are we talking that one from the commercials?

Also I use the Giant Eagle card that gets 10 cents off per gallon at Get-Go for every $50 spent at the store. Couple that with the 2% more off using my AAA Visa, and it makes a difference.

We were talking finances the other day some friends and I. I made the point that I am a capitalist and favor free market. But politicos have screwed it and it has limits. I agree with "whatever the market will bear" has been sound for my over 50 years. But what I had said over six months ago was that it is OK to see what it will bear, but NOT to the point where you wreck the market. We have done that with Enron, the mortgage abuses (I live in Clark County where it is horrific!), and even deregulation. See it in oil, cable, every utility, etc. Competition is helthy; collusion is the cure for fairness. Price fixing, etc. We need to start voting these sanctioned idiots out. And the net drain of a war that has already drained any Bush attempt at a social prioritized national agenda is evident in its loss, its neglect, and its callous refusal to acknowledge the need for national social priorities. Need a change. We are cattle at best, and victims of our own elections.
I am REALLY hot in Ohio for what has been done to our schools. Retired after 30 last year. I am voting my wallet; anybody who didn't fix it on their watch is losing my vote. Wife taught as well. We agree that we will A) always vote if able. and B) anymore we vote against people rather for people. But we see it as the first dutyt of a citizen.

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would withdraw it and melt it down. I heard the metal is worth two cents.

ahhhh!!!

Hey...I have an idea...

Think about it....withdraw the penny, melt it down, sell it for 2 cents. Take the 2 cents, melt it down and get 4 cents wash and repeat! I SMELL ARBITRAGE!!!

Do this 20 times and you'll have $20,971.52

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A penny is still federal property....it's a felony to melt a penny and you could do some hard time with bubba......hopefully they dont remember all those pennies we flattened on the railroad tracks as kids....I dont like bubba

I just looked this up. The law was put in place only a little over a year ago. I didn't know it existed. Oh well...Dec 2006:

U.S. Mint Moves to Ban Penny Melting
Soaring Prices for Copper Make Pennies Worth More Melted Than in Your Pocket By QUIANA BURNS
Dec 14, 2006


Find a penny, melt it, and you could get locked up.

Effective today, the U.S. Mint has implemented an interim rule that makes it illegal to melt nickels and pennies, or to export them in mass quantities.

With the soaring price of copper, a melted-down penny or nickel is now worth more than it would be in its regular state at face value.

Officials at the Mint say in recent months they have received numerous inquiries into whether or not it is illegal to melt coins.

"We are taking this action because the Nation needs its coinage for commerce," said U.S. Mint Director Edmund Moy in a statement. "Replacing these coins would be an enormous cost to taxpayers."

How big a cost? Moy told ABC News that if just 1 percent of all the nickels and pennies that are in circulation were melted down, taxpayers would have to foot a $43 million bill.

To avoid this costly coin shortage, the new regulations prohibit the melting or treatment of all 1- and 5-cent U.S. coins.

The rules also prohibit the unlicensed exportation of these coins, except that travelers may take up to $5 in pennies and nickels out of the country, and individuals may ship up to $100 in these coins.

Violators of these new regulations face up to a $10,000 fine, imprisonment of up to five years, or both.

This is not the first time the government has tried to put a stop to coin melting.

The Department of the Treasury implemented similar regulations prohibiting the exportation, melting or treatment of silver coins between 1967 and 1969, and 1-cent coins between 1974 and 1978.

"I'd be terribly surprised if there was melting going on right now," said coin expert and author David L. Ganz.

"Now, if you told me people were exporting [coins for melting] to China to make washers that wouldn't surprise me at all," Ganz said.

Rapid industrial growth in countries like China and India has dramatically driven up the price of scrap metal.

In fact, copper prices are up more than 180 percent since mid-2003, selling for just more than $3 a pound.

That means the modern penny (made after 1982) is worth 1.73 cents with production costs included. The nickel, which is made of copper and nickel, is actually worth 8.34 cents when production costs are included

You mean it's wrong to live in government assisted housing, receive food stamps and unemployment, and drive a 2009 Lincoln Navigator to the store to buy a case a beer daily?

I don't disagree that choices need to be solid...the problem is it is more and more a case of people who for the most part made good choices not getting ahead over time, and inflation finally catches them, the job ax catches them....any number of things.

I don't think peoples bad choices were simply choices made by them. Conditions in many ways forced the hand.

Wages didn't keep up with inflation....real inflation. To free up cash, people made refinance moves that worked for a while in helping cash flow, but then ended up killing them.

And that is just one example.

I am all for sound decision making....I just don't think the majority of our problems stem from individual poor decisions......unless we are talking about decisions made by morons in the congress.

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My parents handled pretty much everything for me all the way through college, my tuition, my car payments, insurance, everything....

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Well that explains everything!!

Did you mean to put a winky after that comment?

j/c

I thought this was relevant to this thread...

From $70K to food bank, one family's struggle
By Thelma Gutierrez and Wayne Drash
CNN

ALTADENA, California (CNN) -- When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.

It was Good Friday, and a woman helping her offered to pay her utility bill.

"It brought tears to my eyes, and I sat there and I cried. I was like, 'This is really where I'm at?' " she told CNN. "I go 'no way;' [but] this is true. This is reality. This is the stuff you see on TV. It was hard. It was very hard."

Guerrero is estranged from her husband and raising her two young children. She's already burned through her savings to help make ends meet, and is drawing unemployment checks. She has had to take extreme measures to pay for her interest-only mortgage of $2,500 a month. In fact, her mother moved in with her to help pay the bills.

Guerrero even applied for food stamps, but was denied.

"I never used the system. I've been working since I was 15-and-a-half. I needed it now and it turned me down," she said.

Stories like Guerrero's are becoming more common as middle-class Americans feel the pinch of an economic downturn, rising gas prices and a housing crunch, especially in a state like California that has been rocked by foreclosures.

On Wednesday, a key government report on the battered housing market found new home sales fell to their lowest level in 13 years in February, suggesting the nation's housing market is still struggling.

Americans also have been attending in large numbers foreclosure fairs where mortgage lenders, financial planners and counselors offer tips to hard-hit homeowners.

"Our economy is struggling, and families in the 'Inland Empire' and across the nation are hurting," California Rep. Joe Baca said, referring to an area of Southern California in his district.

"Our housing market is in a state of crisis due to rampant abuses of sub-prime lending, and unemployment is rising. At the same time, the cost of necessities such as gas, healthcare, and education continue to rise.

Daryl Brock, the executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank in California's San Bernardino and Riverside counties, said his organization supplies food to more than 400 charities in metro Los Angeles, from homeless shelters to soup kitchens to an array of food banks. While the majority of people they help are working poor families, he said they have seen some major changes.

In the last 12 to 18 months, Brock said, the agencies he supplies have begun seeing more middle-class families coming to their doors.

"Our agencies have said there is an increasing number of people coming to them for help," Brock told CNN by phone. "Their impression was that these were not people they normally would have seen before. They seemed to be better dressed. They seemed to have better cars and yet they seemed to be in crisis mode."

He added, "The only thing they can do is give us anecdotal evidence that they think it's because of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and the housing crisis."

A former loan processor, Guerrero knows all about that, although so far she has been able keep her house.

She used her tax refund to help pay many of her bills for the first two months, but now that money's gone.

She says she's now in a middle-class "no-man's-land."

"It just happened so fast. It happened in a matter of -- what -- two months," she said.

She's eager to get back to work and to hold onto her home until the market turns. But for this single mom, every day it becomes harder to hang on.

"It's just depressing," she said. "For me, I just don't want to get out of bed, but I have to. That's my hardest thing. I have to."

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Sad. It can happen to anyone.

I agree...what was she thinking paying $2500 a month making $70,000!? BAD decision.

Here's something for her...sell the house.

I just learned about something else that you can do if you hit hard times ... and it's what we're planning if one of us loses our jobs. It's called "selling-short". It's basically foreclosing, but you're selling the house yourself, rather than the bank taking the house and selling it. You list your house for well below it's appraised value, and when a buyer comes you get the bank to agree to eat the difference in the loan value for the price you are actually getting for your house.

The bank DOESN'T want to foreclose any more than you do, so they usually agree to sell-short and eat that difference. It ends up costing them less than having to forclose. Your credit will take a bit of a hit, but not nearly as bad as what would happen if you foreclosed. Plus you get completely out of your house loan.

Excl, you better check that.

If you do sell short, the amount the bank gives up is then considered income by the IRS and State tax authorities,, I believe you are liable for t hose taxes..

Think about it, you owe $120,000 on your home. You sell it for 80,000 leaving a difference of 40,000. That then becomes taxible income and depending on your tax bracket, you could be at 25 or 30%.. or 10,000 to 12,000 that you would owe.