CNBC: Nearly 25% of Americans are going into debt trying to pay for necessities like food

[tshile]

10 hours ago, PeterMP said:

(And I'm not the only one and some think the Fed is simply lying.)

what would be the incentive to lie?

 

to keep rates low so the banks can justify not loaning money back out to the people? (the FDIC change you mentioned)

 

[PeterMP]

28 minutes ago, tshile said:

what would be the incentive to lie?

 

to keep rates low so the banks can justify not loaning money back out to the people? (the FDIC change you mentioned)

 

 

There is a possibility that they don't want to publicly admit that they can't affect inflation like the used to and probably won't for the foreseeable future.  That might cause some panic.

 

The markets won't like the idea that we might be looking at a Japanese like situation.

 

They don't want people to panic over an asset bubble.  If they can deflate it slowly/quietly that might be better.  If they come out and say you've actually experienced a lot of inflation just in terms of assets (stocks and real estate), they might cause a panic.

 

It is possible with the way that Trump has politicized the Fed, they don't want to pulled into a political argument over these other things that are affecting inflation that are beyond their control that would put them at odds with Trump (e.g. immigration/population grwoth and tax/economic policy that affect wage growth vs. asset costs).

[Elessar78]

Stuff like the price of new cars and college tuition has grown in a way that doesn't make sense—other than the car companies and universities make as much, if not more, money from the financing than the actual product. The thing the car companies have over universities is that car companies keep you coming back for maintenance. Wait till the Universities find a way to make continuing ed a necessity. 

 

All the industries have gotten smarter and they have so much data. What have they done with that data? I used to work for a regional ISP, we had a very good idea of the household income of people. We could segment that data and you could create price points that would basically convince 80% of the people it was something they couldn't do without for that price. We were small time compared to, say, Time Warner or Verizon. The big companies have so much data and psychological studies. 

 

People ARE undisciplined but a lot of it is also gamed against them. Consider yourself lucky if you are immune from marketing pitches. A lot of people think they are immune, but are not—which explains a lot of the findings. We're emotional creatures. There are many studies in behavioral economics that show we don't act in our best financial self interest. 

 

Face it, humans have hacked how to make everything sooo addictive (except the stuff that's actually good for you).

[Vilandil Tasardur]

I mean let's just do the math. You're a 22 year old kid fresh out of college and you win the lottery sweepstakes and land a job making 40,000 a year. 

 

Take of 20% for taxes --> 32,000 remaining

Housing varies widely depending on the area, but I think a fair number is 1500 for a one bedroom apartment (1500*12 = 18000 a year)

18,000 in housing --> 14,000 remaining

Need a car? Let's guess 400 monthly for a car payment and insurance (I think that's an underestimate)

4,800 in car expenses --> 9,200 remaining

 

We're under 10,000 dollars a YEAR left. 9,200 for 12 months is 766 per month remaining for utilities, groceries, and other expenses. And we haven't even touched whether there are any student loans or medical bills. 

 

Sure, people can find ways to cut (room mates, going without a car), but there are plenty of reasonable expenses that I'm not including here yet (we haven't even talked about saving for retirement). 

 

 

No one is perfect. Literally every single case study will have something that an asshole can look at and say "well, you don't NEED organic peppers, or internet, or a cell phone". But that's a red herring. The point is that the math just doesn't add up.

 

 

For me, a measure of society is simple: how common is it for people to stay in abusive, unhealthy, or otherwise unwanted domestic partnerships because it's literally unaffordable to make it on your own. I think many of you over 30 would be utterly shocked at how common this is among young people. And it should scare you.

[China]

5 hours ago, Vilandil Tasardur said:

 

For me, a measure of society is simple: how common is it for people to stay in abusive, unhealthy, or otherwise unwanted domestic partnerships because it's literally unaffordable to make it on your own. I think many of you over 30 would be utterly shocked at how common this is among young people. And it should scare you.

 

As a parent, the thing that scares me is my kids being able to make it on their own financially.  My retirement plans don't include subsidizing them until they are 40.

[twa]

22 minutes ago, China said:

 

As a parent, the thing that scares me is my kids being able to make it on their own financially.  My retirement plans don't include subsidizing them until they are 40.

 

I hope mine can subsidize me time they are 40.....or at least the wife since I'll probably check out by then. 

[PleaseBlitz]

29 minutes ago, China said:

 

As a parent, the thing that scares me is my kids being able to make it on their own financially.  My retirement plans don't include subsidizing them until they are 40.

 

I am grooming my 4 year old to be a hedge fund person (there is no word for a female hedge funder person). 

 

Edit:  not a joke. 

[China]

2 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

I am grooming my 4 year old to be a hedge fund person (there is no word for a female hedge funder person). 

 

Edit:  not a joke. 

 

Well, my financial guy/broker now has his two sons working for him so he has them set up well.  Not a bad plan.

[PokerPacker]

Just now, PleaseBlitz said:

 

I am grooming my 4 year old to be a hedge fund person (there is no word for a female hedge funder person). 

Hedge Womanager?

[PleaseBlitz]

7 minutes ago, China said:

 

Well, my financial guy/broker now has his two sons working for him so he has them set up well.  Not a bad plan.

 

My father worked for Morgan Stanley for 30 years. I work for arguably the country’s most high powered banking law firm.  My 4 year old will have plenty of connections  for JPM or Citi or Morgan Stanley. 

 

I hope she wants to be a doctor. Or a vet. Or a nurse. Or a teacher.  But id also love for her to be one of the first women hedge funders. 

5 minutes ago, PokerPacker said:

Hedge Womanager?

 

Rolls off the tongue. Lol

[China]

The Rise of Coffee Shaming

 

Suze Orman wants young people to stop “peeing” away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials’ squandered resources.

 

Orman’s not alone in this view. The old guard of personal finance has spent years turning the habit of buying coffee into a shorthand for Americans’ profligacy, especially that of young Americans. Dave Ramsey, a finance personality who hosts a popular radio show on getting out of debt, says that forgoing lattes is one of four keys to saving thousands of dollars. Kevin O’Leary, one of the investors on the entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank, once told CNBC, “I never buy a frape-latte-blah-blah-blah-woof-woof-woof.” Even the official Twitter account for Chase Bank has gotten in on the fun, intimating via meme that a failure to brew at home is why young people don’t have any money.

 

In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation’s instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits. Nonetheless, coffee endures as a personal-finance flash point because it provides such a tidy intersection of generational tensions. A cup of coffee embodies changes in everything from how younger Americans eat to where they live and how they approach their finances. For young people who buy one each morning, the walk up to the barista can be a shame-tinged tug of war.

 

Finance media has seized on coffee in part because, in the space of a generation, how Americans drink coffee has changed dramatically. In 1994, Starbucks had fewer than 500 locations in the United States. Today, it has more than 14,000. With this expansion, the Seattle-based coffee chain pioneered a more European approach to coffee throughout the country, replacing the mediocre-at-best cup of mud many Americans were accustomed to with espresso-based drinks and beans sourced from far-off locales.

 

Americans under 40 have only known this brave new world of relatively good, premium-priced coffee. Frappuccinos and flavored lattes were much more pleasurable bridges to the world of adult caffeination than what most young Americans’ parents had, and their generation’s consumption numbers reflect it: Millennials make up less than a quarter of the overall U.S. population, but in 2016, they drank an estimated 44 percent of the nation’s coffee.

 

......

 

As a love of fancy coffee has lost its status as a unique demographic marker, refutations of its stain on financial stability have become far louder. Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post–Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans’ personal stability—student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy—are actually the fault of modernity’s encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in.

 

“There’s a reason for this blame-the-victim talk” in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. “It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves.” That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books. (Orman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

 

That’s not to say that keeping an eye on your day-to-day finances is a bad idea, or that buying everything that catches your eye is a solid plan for your financial future. But when it comes to money, Vanderkam says, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It’s the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.

 

Personal-finance gurus obsess over buying coffee not because it is unsustainable, Vanderkam suggests, but because being a personal-finance guru is. “The strongest finance advice can be summed up in a couple sentences,” she explains.  Maximize your income. Limit your big monthly expenses. But if your job depends on doling out financial wisdom, Vanderkam notes, “you have all this real estate you have to fill on your blog, your podcast, and your books. That’s where all this little stuff winds up coming in, but in the larger scheme, it’s kind of irrelevant.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

[Elessar78]

37 minutes ago, China said:

The Rise of Coffee Shaming

 

Suze Orman wants young people to stop “peeing” away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials’ squandered resources.

 

Orman’s not alone in this view. The old guard of personal finance has spent years turning the habit of buying coffee into a shorthand for Americans’ profligacy, especially that of young Americans. Dave Ramsey, a finance personality who hosts a popular radio show on getting out of debt, says that forgoing lattes is one of four keys to saving thousands of dollars. Kevin O’Leary, one of the investors on the entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank, once told CNBC, “I never buy a frape-latte-blah-blah-blah-woof-woof-woof.” Even the official Twitter account for Chase Bank has gotten in on the fun, intimating via meme that a failure to brew at home is why young people don’t have any money.

 

In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation’s instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits. Nonetheless, coffee endures as a personal-finance flash point because it provides such a tidy intersection of generational tensions. A cup of coffee embodies changes in everything from how younger Americans eat to where they live and how they approach their finances. For young people who buy one each morning, the walk up to the barista can be a shame-tinged tug of war.

 

Finance media has seized on coffee in part because, in the space of a generation, how Americans drink coffee has changed dramatically. In 1994, Starbucks had fewer than 500 locations in the United States. Today, it has more than 14,000. With this expansion, the Seattle-based coffee chain pioneered a more European approach to coffee throughout the country, replacing the mediocre-at-best cup of mud many Americans were accustomed to with espresso-based drinks and beans sourced from far-off locales.

 

Americans under 40 have only known this brave new world of relatively good, premium-priced coffee. Frappuccinos and flavored lattes were much more pleasurable bridges to the world of adult caffeination than what most young Americans’ parents had, and their generation’s consumption numbers reflect it: Millennials make up less than a quarter of the overall U.S. population, but in 2016, they drank an estimated 44 percent of the nation’s coffee.

 

......

 

As a love of fancy coffee has lost its status as a unique demographic marker, refutations of its stain on financial stability have become far louder. Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post–Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans’ personal stability—student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy—are actually the fault of modernity’s encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in.

 

“There’s a reason for this blame-the-victim talk” in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. “It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves.” That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books. (Orman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

 

That’s not to say that keeping an eye on your day-to-day finances is a bad idea, or that buying everything that catches your eye is a solid plan for your financial future. But when it comes to money, Vanderkam says, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It’s the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.

 

Personal-finance gurus obsess over buying coffee not because it is unsustainable, Vanderkam suggests, but because being a personal-finance guru is. “The strongest finance advice can be summed up in a couple sentences,” she explains.  Maximize your income. Limit your big monthly expenses. But if your job depends on doling out financial wisdom, Vanderkam notes, “you have all this real estate you have to fill on your blog, your podcast, and your books. That’s where all this little stuff winds up coming in, but in the larger scheme, it’s kind of irrelevant.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

Seriously. You. Need. To. Shut the **** up. 

 

In in the past 5 years my Starbucks stock has returned 128% as of today. 

 

Not serious btw. Just keep it on the hush hush.

[PleaseBlitz]

Suze Orman is the ****ing worst. 

[tshile]

4 hours ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

I am grooming my 4 year old to be a hedge fund person (there is no word for a female hedge funder person). 

 

Edit:  not a joke. 

 

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/19/743521272/women-men-and-hedge-funds

[tshile]

Also I recently discovered the ice brewed caramel cloud macchiato  and that woman can shove it