A great many families recognize the limited opportunities for their high school graduates and prefer to go into debt financing a college education as a socially acceptable alternative to working at McD’s part time and living at home with their parents. And for the young adults who have no great aspirations for a future career the time in college is just something to endure like a bad job so they make the best of it and major in ‘fun’ majors that are not demanding so they can enjoy themselves as much as possible. That seems to be the situation with several families I know. The grand parents are my age and they are the most significant bankers in financing the education.
Liberal Arts majors have to be creative. My daughters husband received a BA in English Literature, and he has a great job selling on-line education packages to colleges and universities. I suppose he could have gotten a job as a grade school English teacher, which is a good use of your life, but he found a different way to use his skills. Maybe Liberal Arts majors have to be more creative.
My brother graduated with a Bachelor’s in English from a very good school
Because he’s always been very tech-savvy, he was able to get successively better jobs after graduating.
Right now, he’s the IT department head of a very well known company
I usually was not heavy handed with my son but when he wanted to major in Psychology (isn’t everybody interested in that and sociology?), I told him I wasn’t going to pay $100,000 for a psych degree. He could double major and that was fine but not just psych. So he majored in biology and psych. The psych helped him with work in the psych ward and the biology got him into med school. When he wanted to buy his BMW, I shut up but just said he should trade it when the warranty runs out. Sometimes parents just gotta step in.
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“People who bought passenger cars when gasoline prices were higher are now wanting to trade up to crossover wagons, pickups or sport-utility vehicles, confident that today’s lower gas prices are sticking around.”
"The number of new-car purchases to buyers underwater on previous loans reached 31.3% of all trade-ins last month, the highest in a decade, according to J.D. Power. The average amount of negative equity hit a record of $4,832 per vehicle earlier this year, according to Edmunds.com.
The rising number of indebted buyers is being driven in part by auto lenders offering longer terms on loans to keep monthly payments lower. Used-car prices are starting to fall after hitting highs in the years following the recession, and that upsets the loan-to-value equation."
People do not learn I guess.
As has already been said, you can’t fix stupid
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I don’t care how low gas prices are today, I’m holding on to my 40+ mpg economy car. This dip in gas prices may be temporary and I have always preferred fuel efficient vehicles out of a matter of principle. Just because gas is cheap, it doesn’t mean we should squander it.
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I have a cash paid 03 bought used vehicle, 4wd on demand, but can tow my boat, I go through 5 gal per week, sure only getting 15/21 but at $6 a gallon vs $2 a gallon 20 bucks a week is not going to break my budget. It is the ones on the edge,
“Jan 31, 2016 - Approximately 63% of Americans have no emergency savings for things such as a $1,000 emergency room visit or a $500 car repair, according to a survey released Wednesday of 1,000 adults by personal finance website Bankrate.com, up slightly from 62% last year.”
Throw in
"The average U.S. household with debt carries $15,675 in credit card debt "
What a hell hole, then be upside down in your house!Thank whatever deity I am not in that situation.
I have one credit card for emergency use only and with a 300 dollar limit. Anytime it gets used the bill is paid before it becomes due.
On the other hand, about 5 years ago I discovered my better half went on a spending binge with credit cards and credit accounts behind my back; all the while denying that anything was going on and with my name on a few of them.
To the tune of 30 grand…
So.
Option One. House was paid off so borrow against the house to clean this mess up.
Option Two. Head to bankruptcy court embarassed and POed.
I chose Option Two and I’m still stewed over it to this day.
The sad part is that she can’t tell me where it all went. One would think that 30 grand worth of bric-a-brac would fill up a few rooms in the house.
Even sadder is that she is a very accomplished bookkeeper and auditor who is a whiz at straightening company financial problems out. Under our roof though…common sense exit stage left.
Sad story, but not uncommon it seems. Course wife has reached the medical limitations of the insurance for the guy that rear ended her, step fracture, pain, recommended surgery, what happens next I do not know.
I almost always found a way to have what I wanted at a fraction of the cost of what the object cost new. When I wanted a record player back in 1959, most of what was in my price range was junk. It finally dawned on me that I had an amplifier and speaker in my clock radio. I did a little research and figured out how to put an input jack on the radio for a record player. I bought a record changer for less than $30. A couple years later I bought an amplifier, preamp and speaker for about $40. I found plans in Popular Electronics for a speaker enclosure that could be made from celotex for $3. I plugged the record changer into the preamp and had a high fidelity system. When I was in graduate school, I bought a portable television from one of.my profs for $25. The sound would cut in and out. He had had it in a repair shop a couple of times and the shop didn’t find the problem. I found a cold solder joint on the volume control. I had the set fixed in 20 minutes. We used that tv for years. I made table lamps from wine bottles and a $4 cord and socket kit. Thirty five years later, one of these lamps is still in use on the night stand in our bedroom. I bought our first power mower for under $20 used and I got 5 years of use from it.
I think if a person look around, they can have a lot of things they need or want without going into debt.
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I was at Home Depot last weekend . . . one of our lamps stopped working, and Lamps Plus did NOT have any parts. The salesman looked me straight in the eye and said “We don’t sell parts.” Pathetic, IMO. A place that calls themself “Lamps Plus” does not sell any parts.
So I headed to Home Depot, which was just a few miles down the same road
They had exactly what I needed, for about $6 . . . the part where the bulb screws in, with the twist on/off switch
I also noticed they had just about every imaginable part needed . . . cords, switches, sockets, brackets, lamp shades, etc. They even had plenty of “make it yourself” lamp kits
One thing I have learned over the years is that if I buy a car or anything else and work to maintain it, I don’t feel the need to replace it with something new. I have something invested in the car or whatever and I am less apt to want something newer or better. I think back to the 1947 DeSoto I mentioned earlier that my dad bought when I was in eighth grade in 1954. I didn’t like the car until my dad had me spend a.couple of days restoring the finish so it shined. In fact, I was proud of my work and didn’t mind the fact that that DeSoto was a pre WW II design. It looked no more.out of date than many 1954 models did when the 1955 models came out. A lot of my parents’ furniture were old pieces my dad bought at estate auctions for next to nothing and refinished these pieces. My wife and I have some of these pieces of furniture and still use them and would never get rid of them for something new. I cringe when I have occasionally watched House Hunters on HGTV and the couple walks into what looks to me like a fine kitchen and then say that the kitchen is “outdated” and all the appliances need to be replaced and the countertops which look fine need to be replaced because they aren’t granite.
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I was planning on paying cash for my previous car. The dealer met my offer and when I discovered financing was zero down zero interest for 60 months I took the free money.
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I will never finance a car
I’ll be brutally honest . . . it’s all about NOT having those payments hanging over me
The free money part is worth less to me, versus peace of mind
For me, it’s an emotional decision
Yup, I’m one of those guys that would rather have a paid off beater, versus a new(er) car that’s being financed
That said . . . my 11-year old car is in great shape, and is not a beater in any sense of the word
Yeah I’ve replaced quite a few of those sockets. For whatever reason the bulbs in the bathroom seem to degrade the sockets after a few years and the bulbs either flicker or go dark. I stock a couple of them usually. Also done some for the kid and at the cabin. All candelabra. Actually Lowes has a better selection of replacement sockets but I’ve still had to go to several stores to get the dozen I needed. If I could get the porcelain ones instead of the Chinese plastic ones, I’d buy those.
I also frequently cringe when watching that show. I could understand that type of reaction if the cabinets were knotty pine and everything in the kitchen looked like it dated from the Eisenhower administration, but most of the “outdated” kitchens that these prima donnas bitch about are not at all outdated, and are probably more up-to-date than what the vast majority of folks have in their homes.
If folks knew what a financial boon DIY can be to your bank account, more people would do it rather than “call the guy”. @Triedaq examples are exactly what I mean. I started working on cars because I had worked on my bikes. It was fun and I saved money. I remodeled the kitchen in my first house because we didn’t have much money and the kitchen was awful. I have done this my whole life.
The savings was put into perspective years ago by a co-worked when I told him I got a bid to replace the exhaust on my car because I hate rust falling in my eyes. The bid was $250 which I thought was just too high so I replaced it myself for the parts cost of $130. I was happy to save $120. He pointed out that I didn’t save $120, but more like $200 considering I’d have to earn $200 at work to net $120 so I really saved $200. The extra $80 was tax avoidance. That is a huge financial lever not considered by the folks who just “call the guy”
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I like Lowes myself
That said . . . there’s a lot of Home Depots in my general area, but only a few Lowes, and none of them is particularly close
OK Then. I guess if they owed on the SUVs, that means they were making payments on them, which could have been used to pay off the mortgage. Duh.