our economy is fundamentally strong, friends

[Diddlez]

so, HP is going to be cutting about 25,000 jobs pretty soon .. but that aint shit considering the 43 million lost jobs over the past 16 years in the US with outsourcing and cuts because the company cant afford to pay their employees anymore .. Unemployment has never been this bad ..

oh, and the value of the US dollar has decreased something like 40% in the past 6 years .. The Euro is now worth over 50% more than the US dollar ..

the US deficit is well over 10 trillion dollars now thanks to the landmark housing bill ..

The US housing market is about to fail because too many people bought houses they couldn't afford ..

The government has taken over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two largest mortgage companies in the US before they go bankrupt and ruin what is left of our housing market ..

AIG has taken an 85 billion dollar loan from the government so they don't have to file bankruptcy, which couldnt possibly be a good thing considering they underwrite for the majority of US insurance companies .. anyone wanna see every insurance company in the country go under in a day?

There have been twenty six bank failures so far this year .. expect about 100 more (no joke) ..

Lehman brothers went bankrupt, one of the biggest investment banks in the world ..

Citigroup, Wachovia, HSBC, JP Chase Morgan, Bank of America are all on the list of problem banks, soon to fail ..

IndyMac failed this year, the 2nd largest bank in the country ..

In the past two days the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 812 points, the most since 9/11 .. It's going to drop another 400 points tomorrow .. The Nasdaq also dropped 7% in just two days and will continue to fall as well ..

China and Japan WILL pass us in economic growth, we WILL hit a recession, and inflation WILL rise .. It's inevitable at this point ..


BUT HEY, AT LEAST OUR ECONOMY IS FUNDAMENTALLY STRONG, RIGHT JOIN MCCAIN? Fuck you.

[MasterOfPuppets]

So what's the verdict, we all writing in ron paul?

Our economy is a shithole, I cbf getting a job when I'm going to be paying such high prices for all kinds of shit, fucked up interest rates and all that. Even just saving it all, wouldn't the value of the dollar now make what I earn and save a fixed value? Not sure how any of that works but it doesn't seem like it makes much sense. (I am an idiot, fyi.)

BASICALLY: Looking for reasons not 2 get a job after I move, but I will have to anyway. My parents will be working full time to afford all of the new goddamn furniture they bought for the house, utility bills, and $2200 mortgage payment on top of that. Jesus, my fucking mother always says she regrets getting into debt - she still is, like 10k or so - and then she goes and pulls stupid shit like convincing my dad to get a new house, buy ALL brand new furniture, we are keeping like one bed, some endtables, and our bookcases, but she bought like two new couches, a recliner, 2-3 new beds and mattresses and shit. Getting herself back into the mess thinking everything will work itself out. You know, I really cbf either of my parents.

[Diddlez]

BASICALLY: Looking for reasons not 2 get a job after I move, but I will have to anyway. My parents will be working full time to afford all of the new goddamn furniture they bought for the house, utility bills, and $2200 mortgage payment on top of that. Jesus, my fucking mother always says she regrets getting into debt - she still is, like 10k or so - and then she goes and pulls stupid shit like convincing my dad to get a new house, buy ALL brand new furniture, we are keeping like one bed, some endtables, and our bookcases, but she bought like two new couches, a recliner, 2-3 new beds and mattresses and shit. Getting herself back into the mess thinking everything will work itself out. You know, I really cbf either of my parents.

That's not so bad. My parents have two houses, three vehicles, something like 28k in debt, and I have another 12k in debt and a vehicle I cannot afford because its near impossible to get a job with a felony record. The really gay thing about all of it is together my parents make $180k a year, how in the fuck can those idiots be in debt?

[Spyder]

Yeah, shits broke fellows. At the same time I'm not real sure that the government getting involved is the right thing either. We can't save people because they made retarded decisions - they need to pay the price. You guys should be putting your money into credit unions NOT banks. The credit unions answer directly to you - banks like Bank of America answer to their principle investors and their own interests. Most good credit unions knew those interest-only loans were a terrible idea and did not offer them. Since they're member-only (typically you have to live in the area for awhile or be a direct family member of another member), it wasn't like some redneck from another state was coming in to pick up a cheap interest-only loan off of your investments. Anyways, right now credit unions have some of the best interest rates on savings/checking/CD/etc accounts and great loan rates. I put savings in a credit union (where I have my car loan too) but I have a checking account with Bank of America (because it's local - my credit union is a bit of a drive away in the valley) and they don't have control over a lot of my money like a bunch of savings. My paycheck goes into it - and I immediately pay bills with that and then put whatever I can into savings. Most of you are probably just getting started financially, so it's an easy transition to get into a good credit union.

DIDLZ: yeah cbf that. There's a lot of women that do that - they get tired of their current environment and decide that things should change. I have a good friend at work who is a millionaire (literally the most down to earth, badass, programmer millionaire ever) and they had a real nice house on like 20 acres - she wanted to build a better house but also fix up the house they were in so they could sell it or rent it. So they build a friggin huge awesome house. I mean, they even have a marble tabletop in their laundry room, ffs. In the last year and a half, she's been busy with their restaurant (which is 169% awesome - but it's taking a long time to become profitable, partially due to bad business partners in the beginning that turned out to rack up a ton of debt + the economy lately has been tough to get tourists to the area) - so like a month ago, she was saying that she wants to move to a place where the landscaping is all done. LAND-FUCKING-SCAPING. He drives like 40 minutes to an hour to get to our office and never says "we should move closer to my work" - but she wants to leave the house they JUST built because of landscaping.


ANYWAYS, good times ATM. I have a bit of credit debt with BofA, I wonder what would happen if they tanked (not saying they would or that they wouldn't be saved by the government). Besides that bit of debt (which a lot came from fixing my old Jeep until I just decided it was costing me more than just getting a newer car - plus I just got a new laptop lately) I have a car payment ($15k) and that's it. The only difficult thing is rent. I make good money for the area, but goddamn...it's not enough to buy a decent house (would be nice to buy a fixer-upper house on an acre in a nice area for 200k) and there are no good apartment complexes out here, so I have to pay a lot to rent a house. Other than that, I haven't really been impacted by the economy yet...and my job is pretty much safe because we still have a ton of international clients.

[Diddlez]

Wasn't even my mom tbh, was a collective decision between both of the idiots. This was in in 1994 when they decide to go buy a lake house, two boats, three jetskis and some bullshit because my dad had just been promoted to a $200,000 a year COO position at my uncles company. Seriously not even two months after, only making 40k so far they feel they can afford another goddamn house. Shit was cool for awhile until the company went under because of poor financial management, and their main client (coca-cola) went elsewhere.

Long story short in 1997 my dad has to find a new job and takes a 100k a year paycut, my mom at the same time is also getting laid off, so they decide to take out some substantial loan on the equity of all of their bullshit so they can afford to pay their mortgage payments rather than selling the lake house and boats that nobody fucking uses anyway.

Anyway by now shit is good, and I think they just owe something like 28k on that loan and have three new car payments which doesn't even really add up to much since they had some big down payments. Hopefully once they get their bullshit straight they can pay off my shit (12k debt with creditors/lawyers/state of Missouri, and like only 6k left on my envoy).

EDIT: After reading what I had just typed, one would assume the "poor financial management" of this company would be partly my dads fault as "chief operating officer", however when the CEO (my uncle) and his wife (who just happened to be the CFO) has gambling problems and hides things from the COO of course there is going to be some mismanagement. Not to mention this company's main income coming from coca-cola producing all of their can lines, and then coca-cola pulling the plug on the whole deal kind of set them back.

[Spyder]

Hopefully once they get their bullshit straight they can pay off my shit (12k debt with creditors/lawyers/state of Missouri, and like only 6k left on my envoy)

Aren't you an adult?

Duno, but speaking of poor financial decisions ... if that is YOUR car how come you aren't paying for it. If it's because you can't get a job, that's definitely your own fault. If I was laid off and couldn't pay for my car, I'd just sell it off and use any extra money to buy a little cheap car until I can get another job. Plus, my parents would never pay for my legal fees if I got into trouble with the law - I know I wouldn't if I had a son that did that. Duno, just seems as though you're more upset with their financial decisions due to you wanting them to pay off YOUR debt rather than taking personal responsibility. That's just my view, perhaps you have a different perspective on it (well, you'd have to in order to expect your parents to pay off $18k of your debt)

[Diddlez]

I wasn't being serious about them paying for my shit. Believe me Fellow they've already offered and I told them no. I've already payed $13,000 in legal fees and $10,000 on my Envoy. I'm really in no huge financial difficulties, and If I was I'd just flip a few pounds of that green stuff real quick and have it all paid, but really cbf with breaking the law again when it doesn't really matter ATM.

Plus the state doesn't charge me interest and neither does my lawyer, and I'll have enough to pay off my vehicle before the end of next month through a few investments I've made so really cbf.

[Spyder]

Well that's good to hear

[Diddlez]

Plus I've been selling off my old shit I dont use such as my Nintendo 64, Nintendo GameCube, my PS2, my Xbox, dvd players, a brand new in box blu-ray player, hundreds of games I dont play, hundreds of dvd's I dont watch, etc. I got about $1400 from that bs putting it on a friends ebay account because the fuckers decided to ban mine for no reason.

I also purchased an ipod (probably stolen) from a guy on craigslist for $20 and resold it for $110, purchased some n64 shit for $30 and resold it all for $170, i got dozens of sealed dvd sets from a guy on craigslist for $600 (entire collection of star trek, charmed, sopranos, and like three other entire collections) and resold all of that individually for about $2000. And then I started buying up cables at wholesale prices and returned those to bestbuy for store credit and then sold said credit on ebay. I turned about $160 into 2k with that scam .

And then on the less than legal side I came across a scrip of thirty 80mg oxycontin's for $500 and sold them at $40 - 60 a piece, used that money to buy two pounds of green and resold them at $100 an ounce.

This all took place in the past month, made enough to fully pay off my vehicle and pay my insurance for the next 6 months. You don't need to work a real job to make money. I've also got my 73 inch Mitsubishi television I need to sell as well, since nobody really watches anything on it and I don't have any video game systems anymore to play on it.

[NinjaGator]

Yeah, job situations with a record does blow cock. Still, I'm not as much in debt as you are Andrew, mostly because I don't own a new car I guess. I still owe like a little under 1000 to my lawyer and like 800 or so for restitution. I recently got a 95 grand prix at a used car lot and owe around 1300 or so for that; been paying 80 bucks a week since the guy gave us a good deal. (My dad pretty much educated the guy in our political situation right now, kind of converting the guy from a liberal to a conservative. I honestly don't really care, both candidates are garbage imo.)

So in about a year I'll be caught up in what I owe, although, my parents still owe around 5k towards their bullshit that I don't even care to hear about and since I'm still working for my dad, our financial problems are linked for the time being.

I just want to get a full time job somewhere, save up enough to move out and not have to worry about my parent's shitty job at being financially stable. Due to lack in money, I only took one class this semester since I REALLY don't want to pull out a student loan for a community college; I'll wait for an actual university to do that if I need to because this college is basically high school all over again.

When are you planning on pursuing your education again, Mr Andrew? Or are you already in something?