People with poor credit have
Submitted by Guest on May 20, 2009 - 11:55.
"People with poor credit have no business having credit cards or other loans. Hard to feel sorry for irresponsible folks. Why should the banks subsidize these people? Although the fees and interest rate charges of late are ridiculous and are robbery at best, last I knew, this is USofA and banks and other companies are in the business of making money. They are not in the business of "helping" people who can not afford credit, nor should they. Of course, with the new rules, those of us who have great credit and carry no balances will probaly have annual fees now imposed for the priveledge of carrying a credit card. We are being penalized."
I disagree with what you said. Some people have bad credit not by their choosing. My husband and I have had excellent credit but becuase of the way the ecomomy is and my husband having to have surgery on his knee our credit is going to go downhill real fast. So how can you say that you can not feel sorry for irresponsible folks. My husband will be laid-off from his job in a month and had to have surgery on his knee back in April. We had a savings account worth about 4 months income, but because of his knee and short term disability only giving us $200 a week we have gone through that already. Doctor bills are not cheap even when you have insurance. We are paying $30 a visit for physical therapy...he goes 4 time a week. So once he is laid-off we will only have my income and his unemployment to pay our bills and it will not be enough. So to say that we are irresponsible folks makes me mad. We have never missed a payment on any of our bills but because of things out of our control we probably will. I am sure that we are not the only ones out there like this. There are so many people that have lost their jobs...I am sure that they would rather be working paying their bills then getting phone calls everyother minute. So maybe you should think before you make comments.
Arvin: I'm not the author, but there are several cultures that practice endocannibalism (eating dead members of one's family/group). One of the most notorious previously endocannibalistic tribes were the Fore of Papua New Guinea---kuru, a prion disease, resulted from eating the brain and nervous tissue of the dead. Luckily in that case, the practice stopped and the disease was eradicated. Google kuru or endocannibalism for more info.
I'm with the rest of you on this. There are several religious groups in the US (Muslims, for example) who practice simple funerals as part of their faith---family or community members prepare the body, etc; I think they have the right idea. Actually, I'd prefer a simple shroud over an unnecessary box, if regulations permit.
While it's not cheap, or DIY, there is a company in the Chicagoland area that manufactures diamonds from carbon. You can use creamated remains or hair (from the living).
It doesn't take a lot, so one could satisfy the last request of an individual to be scattered in a special place and also generate some lasting memorial items for immediate family, etc.
There seems to be a growing interest in alternative uses of cremated remains with artists and artisans using the material in glass blowing, painting, and even tattoing.
One artist mounted a show (not using the real thing) wherein she showcased ceramic orbs, hung by thin twine in an abstract garden setting in a gallery. Conceptually, the orbs would contain creamated remains, be hung outdoors in a real garden setting and act as a decorative knetic element in the landscape until the weathering finally wears out the twine, and it falls to the ground, breaking open and allowing the remains to settle into the earth.
Also, NPR did a series on the end of life which included this program on the increasing interest in DIY.
It is true that the key to surviving on less is planning ones finances well.It is amzing how we can save so much by careful planning . Great post,. Thanks
The fact is, the incentive isn't enough to cover the first year's depreciation on most new vehicles. The clunker driver would be better off to sell his or her vehicle to a salvage yard and then to buy a 2-4 year old vehicle with better gas mileage.
Of course, on the environmental angle, one would say that ditching a working older car would just pass it on to someone else, not get it off the road. That is, in fact, my ultimate point. The "deal" offered for clunkers is not good enough. If they (the government) thinks it is its job to save the ozone or the polar bears, then they need to get serious about it. This program should enable people to turn in clunkers for late model used vehicles as well, not just new.
Bottom line, it is less about the environment and more about GM (a government owned company) selling some more cars.
I think that funerals, as generally conducted in the United States, are incredibly wasteful and entirely unnecessary. Should my family pay $10k for me to embalmed and have my face painted up so I look as "natural" as possible? Sorry, but I've never worn blush nor eyeshadow so that's going to be quite a trick. Also, don't look now but my eyes have been replaced by glass balls, etc.
Also, instead of sending $100 flower sprays, send the money to my family. They'll need all the money they can get to pay the guy for stuffing me and preparing my grave to hold a preserved corpse for decades.
Dust you are and dust you shall return... or not.
I think people who pay for elaborate funerals have bought a bill of goods. I think many people do it because they view it as a sign of respect to the dearly departed. Not sure how though. For one, if you wanted to show respect to someone, it helps that they are alive when you do it. For another, unless that person's mission in life was to waste money, I don't see how you doing so honors them.
Give your respect, and you flowers, to the living.
After I'm dead, please don't dress me up in a suit and slap makeup on me then let everyone walk by and have a look. Bury me simply or burn the body; it really doesn't matter to me at that point and it shouldn't to you. I'm gone.
After I read "Stiff", I realized there is a great need for medical students and researchers to have human bodies, so I signed up to have mine donated to UCSF (the nearest medical school). If you are within 100 miles, they will pick you up free of charge, and will cremate your remains after use (without anyone getting them back). My family is not funeral-oriented, though we've had a few memorials that were little more than gatherings with family and friends.
Can you please submit proper attribution to your assertion that there are cultures for which eating the cooked flesh of their dead is a ritual? While being vague in this case is actually better than saying "In Africa, they eat their dead," it's still slightly irresponsible to claim that this ritual is currently practiced by certain cultures without further attribution.
I'll admit, I'm curious and provoked, which is what that line in the article aimed to do to the reader. Now I want to make sure it's true.
I am gathering information regarding living on less because after reading many articles about how much a person needs in order to retire have scared me to death.
I have worked full time my entire adult life and have had a terrible chronic illness to deal with the last 20 years. I still have 10 years left to go before age 62. I hope and pray I can keep working 10 additional years.
I will have Social Security.(According to some that will be gone but I don't go there mentally) Not a lot of SS and even less retiring at 62. At 65 I will have an additional 600 per month from 2 pensions. ( If they don't find a way to steal that money as so many companies do)
I have never made over 16 dollars an hour and am making less than that currently. Except for contributing to my 401K I have been unable to save money. Each time I save I need dental work or medical care or repairs to my 17 year old car. At one time I had good medical insurance paid for by my employer. Now the insurance is still paid for by my employer but the deductible is very high.
I cannot get health insurance on my own due to pre existing conditions but it doesn't matter as I could not afford it if I could get it.
I enjoy simple things. I am rarely bored, there always seems to be something I am interested in doing or learning that is not expensive. I am lucky in this respect.
I keep telling myself that I have always managed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach so don't worry as I will be fine. However some days I do become frightened of how I will manage.
Thank you for articles such as this. They do give me hope.
Ah yes, what a great point to bring up. Both Person A and Person B have one more commonality, and that is being born into a life of relative privilege in comparison to how so many others in the world live.
At least we have the choice to decide how we want to live. That is worth far more than anything else.
Are they only for new cars at dealers, or can they go to old cars or individual sellers?
My neighborhood is just *littered* with old SUVs and minivans people can't afford to drive and can't afford to sell. The worst thing that happens to them is teenagers buy them for $1000 or less and drive around as a menace to everyone. Some of them have been parked on the street marked For Sale for a year or more.
So if people can trade them in for a few thousand and get a newer, more energy-efficient used car that they can afford, that's awesome. But if it's only to get people to buy new cars I don't see how it does any good - a new car costs $15,000 or more, if you can't afford it at $15K you can't afford it at $12K.
I found this out on accident. My daughter's friend brought her MacBook to the house to spend the night. She wanted to have a videochat with her mom or something and her camera (isight) stopped working. She had it in her bag and her book broke it or something. The only webcam I have the is not built into a laptop is the Xbox 360 Live Vision Camera. It was a USB camera so I plugged it in. It just worked. Flawlessly. Just as crisp as it is on my Vista machine. It cost me $40 bucks. My daughter's friend bought one herself to replace her "like, $130 dollar" iSight. She claims the Live Cam works just as well, but I never saw the iSight. If you have any USB webcams that work with Windows, plug them into your Mac. They may work.
Boy, do I know where you're coming from. After the site where I'd worked closed down, my severence package included cheap health insurance for almost a year. It was a pretty anxious year. Using the cheap insurance saved us several hundred dollars a month, so we didn't want to give it up. But we also knew that we were taking a risk--if either of us had become seriously ill during those months, it might have made it impossible to find affordable insurance.
Frankly, I'm not worried about this message tempting people to save less--you can retire on less than you might think, but if you want to retire early, you're still going to have to save a lot (or else earn quite a bit of money, even after you retire).
Isn't it just horrible? They use a solution of 100 PPM chlorine and of all the terrible choices, Vitamin C at 79% to clean vegetables. that's almost as bad as some bottled water, and even comes close to the amount of pollutants present in 'pure organic' foods. Never mind that Vitamin C is already present in carrots, and that washing them in most tap water will subject them to a higher concentration of chlorine, we should be outraged. How dare the food industry make carrots healthier? They should be natural and just as they come out of the ground. (Providing the ground is unfertilized and free from pollution) We're going to have to kill off about a third of the world's population so the rest of us can have an environment where we can have carrots that don't need to be washed. Or maybe we could all just get over it and quit worrying about a tiny bit of disinfectant in a world where people spray practically every surface with chemicals that could kill an elephant.
One thing you have to consider is health insurance. I was laid off last year, and I thought I had budgeted pretty well. But I had assumed that I'd be able to buy health insurance without a problem - I'd always been healthy, and I calculated how much it would cost to buy insurance. But then I got sick, completely unexpectedly. Although my prognosis was good, I was almost completely uninsurable, and I had to pay for COBRA - 8 times as expensive as the health plan I had expected to use. If my COBRA had run out, I would have been stuck with the state "high risk pool", which is also insanely expensive. That really threw off my budget. Unfortunately you never know when you might get sick, even if you have always been healthy.
The only problem storage solutions fix is the problem of genuinely not having any place to put the stuff. If that's not the case, it won't help at all.
Buying a file cabinet was a great idea for me. Why? Because I didn't have one at all. The only place for papers to go was in a giant stack on my desk so that's where they went. Buying a large corner desk with cubbies to hold stuff on the other hand was a horrible idea. I got it because it was the same one my fiance had and he loved it. Except I didn't have anything that needed to go in those cubbies. So I found stuff. Hello clutter. I'm currently planning on replacing it with a simple desk. Four legs, flat surface, keyboard tray, and maybe a couple of drawers to hold spare computer parts, cables and manuals.
People with poor credit have
Submitted by Guest on May 20, 2009 - 11:55.
"People with poor credit have no business having credit cards or other loans. Hard to feel sorry for irresponsible folks. Why should the banks subsidize these people? Although the fees and interest rate charges of late are ridiculous and are robbery at best, last I knew, this is USofA and banks and other companies are in the business of making money. They are not in the business of "helping" people who can not afford credit, nor should they. Of course, with the new rules, those of us who have great credit and carry no balances will probaly have annual fees now imposed for the priveledge of carrying a credit card. We are being penalized."
I disagree with what you said. Some people have bad credit not by their choosing. My husband and I have had excellent credit but becuase of the way the ecomomy is and my husband having to have surgery on his knee our credit is going to go downhill real fast. So how can you say that you can not feel sorry for irresponsible folks. My husband will be laid-off from his job in a month and had to have surgery on his knee back in April. We had a savings account worth about 4 months income, but because of his knee and short term disability only giving us $200 a week we have gone through that already. Doctor bills are not cheap even when you have insurance. We are paying $30 a visit for physical therapy...he goes 4 time a week. So once he is laid-off we will only have my income and his unemployment to pay our bills and it will not be enough. So to say that we are irresponsible folks makes me mad. We have never missed a payment on any of our bills but because of things out of our control we probably will. I am sure that we are not the only ones out there like this. There are so many people that have lost their jobs...I am sure that they would rather be working paying their bills then getting phone calls everyother minute. So maybe you should think before you make comments.
Arvin: I'm not the author, but there are several cultures that practice endocannibalism (eating dead members of one's family/group). One of the most notorious previously endocannibalistic tribes were the Fore of Papua New Guinea---kuru, a prion disease, resulted from eating the brain and nervous tissue of the dead. Luckily in that case, the practice stopped and the disease was eradicated. Google kuru or endocannibalism for more info.
I'm with the rest of you on this. There are several religious groups in the US (Muslims, for example) who practice simple funerals as part of their faith---family or community members prepare the body, etc; I think they have the right idea. Actually, I'd prefer a simple shroud over an unnecessary box, if regulations permit.
HaR!
While it's not cheap, or DIY, there is a company in the Chicagoland area that manufactures diamonds from carbon. You can use creamated remains or hair (from the living).
It doesn't take a lot, so one could satisfy the last request of an individual to be scattered in a special place and also generate some lasting memorial items for immediate family, etc.
http://www.lifegem.com/index.aspx?BannerType=GoogleText&BannerMessage=ce...
There seems to be a growing interest in alternative uses of cremated remains with artists and artisans using the material in glass blowing, painting, and even tattoing.
One artist mounted a show (not using the real thing) wherein she showcased ceramic orbs, hung by thin twine in an abstract garden setting in a gallery. Conceptually, the orbs would contain creamated remains, be hung outdoors in a real garden setting and act as a decorative knetic element in the landscape until the weathering finally wears out the twine, and it falls to the ground, breaking open and allowing the remains to settle into the earth.
Also, NPR did a series on the end of life which included this program on the increasing interest in DIY.
http://www.npr.org/programs/death/971208.death.html
It is true that the key to surviving on less is planning ones finances well.It is amzing how we can save so much by careful planning . Great post,. Thanks
Overall I wouldn't recommend it with the zombie uprising so close at hand, but it would save a few bucks if you remember to destroy the brain. MFZAR.
Z.F.
The fact is, the incentive isn't enough to cover the first year's depreciation on most new vehicles. The clunker driver would be better off to sell his or her vehicle to a salvage yard and then to buy a 2-4 year old vehicle with better gas mileage.
Of course, on the environmental angle, one would say that ditching a working older car would just pass it on to someone else, not get it off the road. That is, in fact, my ultimate point. The "deal" offered for clunkers is not good enough. If they (the government) thinks it is its job to save the ozone or the polar bears, then they need to get serious about it. This program should enable people to turn in clunkers for late model used vehicles as well, not just new.
Bottom line, it is less about the environment and more about GM (a government owned company) selling some more cars.
I think that funerals, as generally conducted in the United States, are incredibly wasteful and entirely unnecessary. Should my family pay $10k for me to embalmed and have my face painted up so I look as "natural" as possible? Sorry, but I've never worn blush nor eyeshadow so that's going to be quite a trick. Also, don't look now but my eyes have been replaced by glass balls, etc.
Also, instead of sending $100 flower sprays, send the money to my family. They'll need all the money they can get to pay the guy for stuffing me and preparing my grave to hold a preserved corpse for decades.
Dust you are and dust you shall return... or not.
I think people who pay for elaborate funerals have bought a bill of goods. I think many people do it because they view it as a sign of respect to the dearly departed. Not sure how though. For one, if you wanted to show respect to someone, it helps that they are alive when you do it. For another, unless that person's mission in life was to waste money, I don't see how you doing so honors them.
Give your respect, and you flowers, to the living.
After I'm dead, please don't dress me up in a suit and slap makeup on me then let everyone walk by and have a look. Bury me simply or burn the body; it really doesn't matter to me at that point and it shouldn't to you. I'm gone.
1. leave your body to science (the medical center will take care of picking your body up, assuming you're close enough)
2. have a memorial service rather than a full-on funeral (I'm having a Quaker service, so no flowers, minister, viewing, etc.)
We've turned death into a profit-making concern. Time to focus on the memories and the living.
After I read "Stiff", I realized there is a great need for medical students and researchers to have human bodies, so I signed up to have mine donated to UCSF (the nearest medical school). If you are within 100 miles, they will pick you up free of charge, and will cremate your remains after use (without anyone getting them back). My family is not funeral-oriented, though we've had a few memorials that were little more than gatherings with family and friends.
That's not a bad idea. I don't see the problem, once you're gone you're gone so why spend thousands on a funeral if you can help it.
Isn't the guy on the compost heap an urban myth? This is interesting though.
Can you please submit proper attribution to your assertion that there are cultures for which eating the cooked flesh of their dead is a ritual? While being vague in this case is actually better than saying "In Africa, they eat their dead," it's still slightly irresponsible to claim that this ritual is currently practiced by certain cultures without further attribution.
I'll admit, I'm curious and provoked, which is what that line in the article aimed to do to the reader. Now I want to make sure it's true.
Yes it is for new cars only right now. I'm not sure if the amendment to include old cars made it in or not
I would love this..
I am gathering information regarding living on less because after reading many articles about how much a person needs in order to retire have scared me to death.
I have worked full time my entire adult life and have had a terrible chronic illness to deal with the last 20 years. I still have 10 years left to go before age 62. I hope and pray I can keep working 10 additional years.
I will have Social Security.(According to some that will be gone but I don't go there mentally) Not a lot of SS and even less retiring at 62. At 65 I will have an additional 600 per month from 2 pensions. ( If they don't find a way to steal that money as so many companies do)
I have never made over 16 dollars an hour and am making less than that currently. Except for contributing to my 401K I have been unable to save money. Each time I save I need dental work or medical care or repairs to my 17 year old car. At one time I had good medical insurance paid for by my employer. Now the insurance is still paid for by my employer but the deductible is very high.
I cannot get health insurance on my own due to pre existing conditions but it doesn't matter as I could not afford it if I could get it.
I enjoy simple things. I am rarely bored, there always seems to be something I am interested in doing or learning that is not expensive. I am lucky in this respect.
I keep telling myself that I have always managed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach so don't worry as I will be fine. However some days I do become frightened of how I will manage.
Thank you for articles such as this. They do give me hope.
Ah yes, what a great point to bring up. Both Person A and Person B have one more commonality, and that is being born into a life of relative privilege in comparison to how so many others in the world live.
At least we have the choice to decide how we want to live. That is worth far more than anything else.
Are they only for new cars at dealers, or can they go to old cars or individual sellers?
My neighborhood is just *littered* with old SUVs and minivans people can't afford to drive and can't afford to sell. The worst thing that happens to them is teenagers buy them for $1000 or less and drive around as a menace to everyone. Some of them have been parked on the street marked For Sale for a year or more.
So if people can trade them in for a few thousand and get a newer, more energy-efficient used car that they can afford, that's awesome. But if it's only to get people to buy new cars I don't see how it does any good - a new car costs $15,000 or more, if you can't afford it at $15K you can't afford it at $12K.
I found this out on accident. My daughter's friend brought her MacBook to the house to spend the night. She wanted to have a videochat with her mom or something and her camera (isight) stopped working. She had it in her bag and her book broke it or something. The only webcam I have the is not built into a laptop is the Xbox 360 Live Vision Camera. It was a USB camera so I plugged it in. It just worked. Flawlessly. Just as crisp as it is on my Vista machine. It cost me $40 bucks. My daughter's friend bought one herself to replace her "like, $130 dollar" iSight. She claims the Live Cam works just as well, but I never saw the iSight. If you have any USB webcams that work with Windows, plug them into your Mac. They may work.
http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Live-Vision-Camera/dp/B000GCGB3M/ref=dp_c...
Hello All, I found this on the Washington State Tourism site and its great! Top 10 Things to do in Seattle WHen it Rains . Really terrific ideas and most are within walking distance of downtown. Seattle is such a great city!
http://www.experiencewa.com/top-10-things-to-do-in-seattle-when-it-rains...
No, the only way to get cash back is to selcet "Debit".
@Karen:
Boy, do I know where you're coming from. After the site where I'd worked closed down, my severence package included cheap health insurance for almost a year. It was a pretty anxious year. Using the cheap insurance saved us several hundred dollars a month, so we didn't want to give it up. But we also knew that we were taking a risk--if either of us had become seriously ill during those months, it might have made it impossible to find affordable insurance.
I've written a post on exactly this topic: Not free to be poor.
@J:
I've actually written a review of Retire on Less Than You Think.
Frankly, I'm not worried about this message tempting people to save less--you can retire on less than you might think, but if you want to retire early, you're still going to have to save a lot (or else earn quite a bit of money, even after you retire).
Isn't it just horrible? They use a solution of 100 PPM chlorine and of all the terrible choices, Vitamin C at 79% to clean vegetables. that's almost as bad as some bottled water, and even comes close to the amount of pollutants present in 'pure organic' foods. Never mind that Vitamin C is already present in carrots, and that washing them in most tap water will subject them to a higher concentration of chlorine, we should be outraged. How dare the food industry make carrots healthier? They should be natural and just as they come out of the ground. (Providing the ground is unfertilized and free from pollution) We're going to have to kill off about a third of the world's population so the rest of us can have an environment where we can have carrots that don't need to be washed. Or maybe we could all just get over it and quit worrying about a tiny bit of disinfectant in a world where people spray practically every surface with chemicals that could kill an elephant.
One thing you have to consider is health insurance. I was laid off last year, and I thought I had budgeted pretty well. But I had assumed that I'd be able to buy health insurance without a problem - I'd always been healthy, and I calculated how much it would cost to buy insurance. But then I got sick, completely unexpectedly. Although my prognosis was good, I was almost completely uninsurable, and I had to pay for COBRA - 8 times as expensive as the health plan I had expected to use. If my COBRA had run out, I would have been stuck with the state "high risk pool", which is also insanely expensive. That really threw off my budget. Unfortunately you never know when you might get sick, even if you have always been healthy.
The only problem storage solutions fix is the problem of genuinely not having any place to put the stuff. If that's not the case, it won't help at all.
Buying a file cabinet was a great idea for me. Why? Because I didn't have one at all. The only place for papers to go was in a giant stack on my desk so that's where they went. Buying a large corner desk with cubbies to hold stuff on the other hand was a horrible idea. I got it because it was the same one my fiance had and he loved it. Except I didn't have anything that needed to go in those cubbies. So I found stuff. Hello clutter. I'm currently planning on replacing it with a simple desk. Four legs, flat surface, keyboard tray, and maybe a couple of drawers to hold spare computer parts, cables and manuals.