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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (38773)	8/22/2005 12:05:49 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

HAHA - what's in your wallet? dailysouthtown.com Actually, the most entertaining thing on the tube right now is still a LendingTree.com ad. It never fails to make me (and anyone who's seen it) laugh. It's the one with the well-to-do suburban homeowner who drones on about his new boat, expensive SUV, big home and country club membership. He then asks, "How can I afford all this? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs. (Pause) "I can't even make my finance charges. Somebody, please help me." It's drama, comedy and reality all in one. news.enquirer.com Savings plummet as U.S. borrows Experts warn bubble burst could ruin us By Robert Tanner The Associated Press You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day. That's how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor. And it's not even taking into account credit card bills, mortgages - all the debt we've racked up personally. Savings? The average American puts away barely $1 of every $100 earned. Our profligate ways at home are mirrored in Washington and in the global marketplace, where as a society America spends $1.9 billion more a day on imported clothes and cars and gadgets than the entire rest of the world spends on its goods and services. A new Associated Press/Ipsos poll finds that barely a third of Americans would cut spending to reduce the federal deficit and even fewer would raise taxes. A chorus of economists, government officials and elected leaders both conservative and liberal is warning that America's nonstop borrowing has put the nation on the road to a major fiscal disaster - one that could unleash plummeting home values, rocketing interest rates, lost jobs, stagnating wages and threats to government services ranging from health care to law enforcement. David Walker, who audits the federal government's books as the U.S. comptroller general, put it starkly in an interview with the AP: "I believe the country faces a critical crossroad and that the decisions that are made - or not made - within the next 10 years or so will have a profound effect on the future of our country, our children and our grandchildren. The problem gets bigger every day, and the tidal wave gets closer every day." More than two centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin warned: "He that goes aborrowing, goes asorrowing." Now, a laugh-till-you-cry commercial portrays a man with a beautiful home and car declaring: "I'm in debt up to my eyeballs. I can barely pay my finance charges. Somebody help me." Americans used to save, but no longer. Back in the 1950s, a generation of Americans who had survived the Depression and Second World War saved roughly 8 percent of their income. The savings rate rose and fell slightly over the decades - it went as high as 11 percent and as low as 7 percent during the "greed is good" 1980s - but now those days are only a memory. In the charge-everything start of the new millennium, savings have plummeted: to just 1.3 percent last year, nearly to zero in the last few months and even to negative numbers in the latest estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The lack of savings is mirrored by a rise in debt. In 2000, household debt broke 18 percent of disposable income for the first time in 20 years, meaning debt eats almost $1 in every $5 American families have to spend after they get past the bills that keep them fed and housed.

To: John Vosilla who wrote (38773)	8/22/2005 12:09:55 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

gimme - I don't want to work - I am lazy - hehe phillyburbs.com College parents should back off phillyBurbs.com In coming weeks, as millions of college kids arrive on campuses across the land, professors, deans and other college educrats will receive huffy phone calls or tersely worded e-mails. These calls and messages will bear bitter complaints about dorm living conditions, the quality of cafeteria food, burdensome class rosters and other problems college kids typically encounter. The complaints won’t come from the students, however, but from meddling moms and dads who’ve earned the derisive nickname “helicopter parents.” Like helicopters, these middleaged baby boomer buttinskies hover over their kids, diving down to help them when their child experiences a problem or is less than completely comfortable in his campus surroundings. Reporter Marion Callahan, who works for our sister paper, The Intelligencer in Doylestown, chronicled the existence of such parents in Sunday’s newspaper. Callahan quoted a college counselor who said she is “shocked” at the number of parents who intrude, interfere, badger, complain and otherwise worm their way into their kids’ college life. One parent griped to college officials that her kid’s schedule is a burden because class begins at 8 a.m., which is too early for her son to rise. “Students can’t make a decision without flipping open their cell phone and calling Mom and Dad,” the counselor told Callahan. Frankly, I didn’t know such noxious parents existed in large numbers and, after reading the piece, would be embarrassed if I had parents like that. That kind of parental behavior is creepy to me. Alien, too. I recall my old man’s approach to parenting, which wasn’t so much like a helicopter as it was airplane jumpmaster. That is, he’d push me out at 10,000 feet with some advice: “Don’t forget to pull the ripcord, son.” People need to walk to the beat of their own drum, he’d say, adding that no one need apologize for living his life on his own terms — within reasonable limits, of course. He never tried to control any aspect of my life, except to occasionally gripe that my hair was too long. Today, parents like that would be labeled “old school.” Unlike helicopter parents, they respect their kids enough to let them figure out their own lives, choose their own battles and make their own foolish mistakes. Want a car, son? That’s nice. Get a job and pay for it. How badly do you want a college degree, son? Enough to pay for it yourself ? In my case the answer was yes, I wanted to go to college. I spent 5½ years working full time and going to school full time. (No sweat. When you’re 20, the hours don’t seem that long and it’s helpful to work at jobs you enjoy.) After college, in debt up to my neck, my father offered to pay off my student loans. I turned him down. I told him to spend the money on a new car (which he did). Today, a parent who tests her kid’s resolve to get through college like my old man tested me would be considered an oddball. But I learned more about myself during those tough years of work and school than I ever learned from someone picking up the tab for me. If you’re a parent with collegebound kids, here’s some advice. The first day of school drop your kid off on campus, kiss him goodbye and say, “You’re on your own, now. Feel free to fall on your face as often as you like. Builds character.”