This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Following on from Part One of this three-part series on beliefs. Here is part two: Catholic Craig Growing up in a Catholic home which was regularly
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
I am just going to say it, though I know it will make you angry: There is no point in sending Ashley Truitt to prison.
When the Solon teenager pleads guilty next month to killing her newborn daughter in Florida last year, she’ll likely be sentenced to a decade or more behind bars.
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
When you don’t have enough in savings, emergencies can put you in debt or deeper in debt. An emergency fund helps protect your finances.
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
This video for bike virgins runs through all of the parts and nomenclature of a 10-speed bike. The soundtrack to the video was done by bangin’ and clangin’ bike parts. It reminded me of that classic Frank Zappa appearance…
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Shared by NoyzSource
Are your kids learning to save and not go balls deep in credit card debt? How do we help them not follow in our credit card habits?
I wonder what the tweens and teens think of money. How many parents ask their kids what the kids themselves want to know? i.e. Goal-setting with your kids from a kid’s point of view, no matter what age the discussion starts.
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
DIY Security systems @ NYTimes… via /. WHEN Ken Jongsma built his new house, he found that the builders had already installed a basic security system — sometimes called a prewire. A tinkerer and engineer, Mr. Jongsma, 50, decided…
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
[youtube TuKYBb9wPDs&NR=1] So a good friend of mine, recently asked, in a group email: Tony tells the story (and better than me) of how at an auto
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Many people vote for self-interest. Construction workers vote for the president they think best understands construction workers (e.g. pro union), Venture capitalists vote for the president they think best serves venture capital (e.g. low taxes), and Star wars fans vote for the president most likely to ban more bad star wars movies
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
I had lunch with my accountant the other day. Sabino is more than a financial advisor to me — foremost, he’s a close friend. I told him about my current circumstances, about how I’m now making more as a writer than I did when I worked at the box factory, about how I’ve been saving money, about how Kris and I are beginning to contemplate paying more on our mortgage.
“How does it feel to be rich?” he asked me. “Has it changed you?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m not rich.”
But then I paused and thought about it. “Oh,” I said. “Maybe I am.”
I’ve repaid my consumer debt. I’ve saved $10,000 for emergencies. I’m setting aside money for retirement. I live in an 1800 square foot home on half an acre of land. My wife and I are paying more than the required amount on our mortgage. Though my income is variable (and has dropped significantly in the past month), I make enough to support myself while doing something I love. Kris has a stable job that she loves. We own a lot of Stuff — so much Stuff, in fact, that I sometimes feel oppressed by it. By any objective measure, I am rich.
“Well,” I said. “I guess being rich doesn’t feel much different than being poor. I still worry about having enough to pay my bills. Despite the fact that I have a huge cushion in savings, Kris and I strive to be frugal. We’re always looking for new ways to save money.”
I thought for a moment. “What about you?” I asked. “Do you feel rich?”
Sabino smiled. “You know how I’m always joking about being a ‘poor migrant worker’? There’s some truth to that. When I imagine myself, I’m still the boy who came here from Mexico, still the boy who worked in the fields. I’m not the man who owns an accounting firm. When I think of myself, I think of how poor I was, even though I’m not poor any more. It’s the same with my wife.”
I was fascinated. When I considered it, I realized I agreed with him. I, too, was raised in poverty, and now that my economic class has risen, I still have that mindset. On some level, I know I’m wealthy, yet I still think of myself as poor all of the time.
The truth is, I live in a nicer home than my parents ever owned. I’ve saved more money than they ever saved. I earn more money than most people earn. I have more Stuff than I’ll ever need. I am rich.
Later, I told Kris about my conversation with Sabino. “Do you really feel poor all of the time?” she asked.
“I do,” I said. “I know it’s irrational. I know I have more than 99% of the world’s population, but I still feel poor. It makes me wonder: What does it mean to be rich?”
“Exactly,” Kris said, and she told me about a conversation she had with her friend Rhonda today. Kris had mentioned in an offhand way that she and Rhonda were rich.
“I’m not rich,” Rhonda said. “I still have to come to work every day.”
When pressed, Rhonda elaborated, “I have this concept of what it means to be rich. Rich people keep buying Stuff. They don’t think about what it means to consume in the way they’re consuming. When I think of rich people, there’s a negative connotation. That’s part of why I don’t want to be called rich. Rich people are selfish. The rich don’t care about other people.”
Kris and Rhonda tried to decide: Does being rich mean having a large income? Does it mean having a certain net worth? Are the rich selfish? Is being rich only a state of mind? Or is it something else entirely?
Are two people with equal $100,000/year incomes rich? What if one has $100,000 in credit card debt? Is he still rich? What if one has higher expenses because she has four children? Is she still rich?
I think most of us would agree that a person with a $20,000 income and three kids is poor. But what if somebody earns $20,000 a year, lives a frugal lifestyle, and is able to save $5,000 each year in a Roth IRA? If you have a small income but you’re a good saver, does that make you rich? Is this a bad thing?
“All this makes me think that money isn’t the answer,” I said after Kris told me her story. “It makes me think that being ‘rich’ doesn’t have anything to do with how much money you have. But what then does it meant to be rich?”
Ostensibly, the aim of this blog is to get rich slowly. My goal is to build wealth. But what is wealth? What does it mean to be rich? If becoming rich is a goal, what does that mean to me, and to the people around me? Is it all about money? Or is there something more to the equation, some sort of social capital?
Although I don’t write about them often, I ask myself questions like these all the time.
—
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. For years now, Republicans and Democrats have been leading the country in the same basic direction: toward bigger and bigger government; more and more socialism, globalism, corporatism, and foreign interventionism; and the dismantling of constitutional liberties. Yet, voters continue to think that they are voting for “change” when they vote for a Republican or Democrat. This is truly insane!
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Stuck in a $14,300 debt hole, reader Trixare4kids was able to dig herself out using tips she learned about on Consumerist.com. Let’s learn how she attacked her personal finances and learned to live frugally, and did it all in 20 months.
She writes: “This morning I made my very last payment on $14,300 in credit card debt and a personal line of credit for a home improvement project that was completed a few years ago. I paid it off over the last 20 months thanks to applying some of the stuff I learned at consumerist.com. It was tough. It took discipline, but I did it!
Instead of making a bunch of changes at once, I did things a little over time. It looked something like this. It’s maybe not in the order that makes the most sense to a financial planner or in the order that someone else would do things; I just know that it worked for me.
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
September was a sort of unofficial “credit card education month” around here. I tried to share information about how to use credit responsibly. (Now maybe it’s time to move on to debt reduction themes!) Most of all, there were some great conversations at GRS in September. Here are a few of my favorites:
Best of the Forums
Though I didn’t have time to hang out there, the Get Rich Slowly discussion forums were active again this month, spawning several interesting conversations:
The forums are a great place to chat with your fellow readers. Have questions about emergency funds? Ask! Want to chat about cheap vacations? This is the place to do it. (Since opening last year, the forums have 2175 registered users and nearly 26,000 posts.)
Subscribe!
You may subscribe to Get Rich Slowly via any of the following methods:
Join over 9,250 people who receive Get Rich Slowly via e-mail by supplying your address:
This weblog is a success because of you and your support. As always, I welcome reader contributions, either as ideas for stories, or as guest entries. If you have any comments or requests to improve this site, please feel free to pass them on.
—
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:
This is not an original post by Eric and may not contain all the text. Click here for the full article.
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”
Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
Political Advertisement paid for by Committee to Re-Elect Ron Paul
You are currently browsing the archives for the Misc category.
