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Jastiger posted:I totally get the hesitance to trust an agent, I totally get it. I'm not talking about a snakeoil "sign here now and SAVE SAVE SAVE!" I'm talking about having an hour long conversation with someone, explaining in detail what it is, how it works, doing the math and people saying: "nah, no thanks. I'd rather pay an extra $40 a month because I am conditioned to say no". I think its less about trusting me personally and more about a conditioned response to refuse anything that you're offered. Is there a reward for the insurance company? Absolutely, in the form of retention since if you have the discount you're less likely to leave. Does it save money with no strings attached? Absolutely. Like I said, its closer to a Costco membership than anything else. The savings are real, but primarily if you sit down and do the math and make smart purchases. When I first read your description of this discount, my thought was that it sounds like a corporate version of the Nigerian prince scam. Give us money now and we totally promise to give you more back later! Now that you have mentioned hour long phone calls, it sounds like a high pressure version of the Nigerian prince scam.
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Apr 25, 2014 15:54
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My wife is a member of this facebook group for local moms. After about 3 minutes of being a member, she realizes it is a garbage group full of garbage people, but we keep it around for the comedy factor. Here's one. Bolded emphasis mine. Random question but my hubs and I were just doing budget and we figured we need about $2223 a month for bills, rent, food etc a month to barely survive and we just would like to know if that seems really high or is about what everyone else spends. We don't have kids but we do have 4 dogs. If you don't mind sharing it would be appreciated!! and a few replies later asking for more details. So that number is a give or take. So this is our budget: Rent $500 Electric $150 (but every month is different. ) Doterra $150 but every month is different. ) Internet $52.90 Car insurance for 2 cars and renters insurance $160 Netflix $8.63 My car payment $277 Credit card paying off $120 Phones $160 Dogs $85 Food $200 Gas $300 Once he credit cards taken care off that will save some and the car paid off but still I just don't know if we have it easy or we are ridiculous.  $500 rent? A 1 bedroom apartment in a good neighborhood here is about $800, so they are likely living in a hovel somewhere with 4 dogs worth of dog hair floating around. And news to you BFC: you need Netflix, MLM scheme "essential oils", ~$300/mo car payment on a new car and $160/mo phone plan in order to "barely survive"
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Apr 25, 2014 16:05
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Having 4 dogs is being a mom now?
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Apr 25, 2014 16:13
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What is doterra? Google told me "dōTERRA is a company committed to sharing the life-enhancing benefits of therapeutic-grade essential oils", and I'm really hoping that's not what it is. EDIT: Oh you said that it is...yeah...  Spending $737/month on two cars when you spend $500 in rent is apalling. (Though I guess some of it is renter's insurance)
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Apr 25, 2014 16:20
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Jeffrey posted:What is doterra? Google told me "dōTERRA is a company committed to sharing the life-enhancing benefits of therapeutic-grade essential oils", and I'm really hoping that's not what it is. EDIT: Oh you said that it is...yeah... Whether you get a bigger place or a better car is a matter of value, if they can get cheap rent more power to them. Maybe they're renting from their parents or something. Excepting the "barely surviving" comment and MLM, that budget doesn't look too insane on its face; I mean $300 is a lot of gas but heh. We'd need to know how much they make and how much they own on their CC to really be able to call them bad with money.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:23
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Have your wife buy her an account so she can post here and ask us for advice. Also, I love that they seem to have been doing this for months or maybe years but just now sat down and decided to do a budget. My own bad with money story is my own: When I was 21, I got my own car. I decided to buy new which yes is dumb, but I didn't do anything crazy like get some fancy Nissan Altima for 40k. Because I had plenty saved for a down payment, my monthly payments were 180 dollars for about 5 years. The bad part is my dad had a great idea: he would own the car, so we could take advantage of his good credit score. Turns out, this was a bad idea. His credit was not as good as he thought and my credit would have actually saved me money, plus I of course miss building my own credit with my routinely overpaid payments. On top of all that, I live in a different state now, and let me tell you: there are few things more wonderful and lovely than having to do an interstate title transfer without the original owner present. I essentially bought my dad a gift, repaired his credit for him, and was rewarded by having to sign so many damned forms in triplicate, I'm starting to feel like the Andersen Sisters.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:25
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FrozenVent posted:Whether you get a bigger place or a better car is a matter of value, if they can get cheap rent more power to them. Maybe they're renting from their parents or something. There's a new reply. Someone asked how much is left over at the end of each month, and it's less than $200 for anything discretionary
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Apr 25, 2014 16:29
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canyoneer posted:There's a new reply. Someone asked how much is left over at the end of each month, and it's less than $200 for anything discretionary That's not too bad either. Maybe you took the "barely survive" comment seriously but their budget doesn't look terrible minus the essential oils and $200/month for discretionary in their situation seems pretty good. Story-wise, I have a friend with a 9 month old who is a little cash-strapped. This doesn't prevent her from signing up for classes designed for babies though, the ones that I know of are music and chinese classes. For a 9 month old. As a goon with no kids maybe I just don't understand, but that kind of seems like throwing away hundreds in cash every month.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:58
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Knightmare posted:Story-wise, I have a friend with a 9 month old who is a little cash-strapped. This doesn't prevent her from signing up for classes designed for babies though, the ones that I know of are music and chinese classes. For a 9 month old. As a goon with no kids maybe I just don't understand, but that kind of seems like throwing away hundreds in cash every month. No, you understand. Their brains literally are like a (not terribly clever) animal's at that point.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:12
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Knightmare posted:. . .a 9 month old . . . kind of seems like throwing away hundreds in cash every month.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:18
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Nail Rat posted:No, you understand. Their brains literally are like a (not terribly clever) animal's at that point. No, YOU don't understand. My X month old child is ahead of the curve and is doing (milestone) way earlier than other kids. We need to keep him/her stimulated with ADVANCED things because my X month old baby is so much smarter than every kid out there. Why, at 3 months of age he/she said MAMA/DADA nevermind it was never repeated again. Thus, the reason to spend 300/mo on "classes".
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Apr 25, 2014 18:17
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"IF YOU DON'T ENROLL YOUR SPECIAL LITTLE BUNDLE IN MY CLASS HE'S GONNA BE AVERAGE! You want to give your kids all the chances in life, right?" Some people respond way too much to emotional marketing.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:19
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Knightmare posted:Story-wise, I have a friend with a 9 month old who is a little cash-strapped. This doesn't prevent her from signing up for classes designed for babies though, the ones that I know of are music and chinese classes. For a 9 month old. As a goon with no kids maybe I just don't understand, but that kind of seems like throwing away hundreds in cash every month. Teaching other languages early does wonders for learning them as young children are information sponges that poop themselves, but 9 months seems kinda early. So a friend of mine talked to me a few days ago saying the local power company had cut his power from him not paying. He had some medical issues last year that really hammered his finances, but he never said anything about having problems paying bills before. What's dumb is that I'd have been glad to help him, and he didn't ask.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:46
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If/when I ever have kids, foreign language immersion elementary schools are definitely something that I am going to look into. I have two older coworkers who each have their kids in foreign language immersion elementary schools - one in Spanish, and one in Mandarin - and their kids pick up the languages so quickly and intuitively at that age it's incredible. There's tons of evidence that you start to rapidly lose your ability to intuitively learn foreign languages by the time you're 10-12. And there are a number of scientific studies that show measurable benefits of being a polyglot, plus, you know, the practical advantages of speaking Spanish or Mandarin. 9 months old is a little early to be dropping a bunch of money on that, though. Guinness fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 18:51
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CitizenKain posted:Teaching other languages early does wonders for learning them as young children are information sponges that poop themselves, but 9 months seems kinda early. The sponge part of that is a myth that's only just now being disproven. Your brain is, in fact, a very plastic organ at just about any age, barring any sort of major trauma. Your capacity to physically learn a new language at 30 is very similar to that of a 3 year old. The reason why 3 year olds who learn languages grow up into much more fluent speakers is because they have a massive head start on it and have very little extraneous information to compete with it. I mean, if you're 3 years old, you need only focus on eating, relieving yourself, and talking. If you're 30, you've got the rent, your own 3 year olds, and the usual relieving yourself and eating to concern yourself with.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:53
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pathetic little tramp posted:The sponge part of that is a myth that's only just now being disproven. Your brain is, in fact, a very plastic organ at just about any age, barring any sort of major trauma. Your capacity to physically learn a new language at 30 is very similar to that of a 3 year old. The reason why 3 year olds who learn languages grow up into much more fluent speakers is because they have a massive head start on it and have very little extraneous information to compete with it. I mean, if you're 3 years old, you need only focus on eating, relieving yourself, and talking. If you're 30, you've got the rent, your own 3 year olds, and the usual relieving yourself and eating to concern yourself with. I'm with this idea. This is just speculation on my part, but if I had a small army of people speaking French slowly at my face while demonstrating what each word means for 5 years with no other life responsibilities I'd probably have a pretty good handle on the language.
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Apr 25, 2014 20:38
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pathetic little tramp posted:If you're 30, you've got the rent, your own 3 year olds, and the usual relieving yourself and eating to concern yourself with. So the secret to being a genius is living in your parents' basement, making GBS threads into socks, and eating easily accessible frozen dinners and bags of Doritos?
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Apr 25, 2014 20:42
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pathetic little tramp posted:The sponge part of that is a myth that's only just now being disproven. Your brain is, in fact, a very plastic organ at just about any age, barring any sort of major trauma. Your capacity to physically learn a new language at 30 is very similar to that of a 3 year old. The reason why 3 year olds who learn languages grow up into much more fluent speakers is because they have a massive head start on it and have very little extraneous information to compete with it. I mean, if you're 3 years old, you need only focus on eating, relieving yourself, and talking. If you're 30, you've got the rent, your own 3 year olds, and the usual relieving yourself and eating to concern yourself with. Cite your sources because I have never heard about this.
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Apr 25, 2014 20:44
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Boris Galerkin posted:Cite your sources because I have never heard about this. Sadly I don't have the book around that had some good studies cited in it, but it was called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. In it, he really goes into detail about how malleable our brains are and how the old notions of "this region of the brain is for language, this is for motor control" are being thrown out and we're finding the brain is very adaptable. Here's a systematic review by Kueider, et al that goes into some of the effects of brain training for older adults: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040588, but it's a really prelim systematic review. Most of those studies are very pilot, but it may give you an overview. I also do remember reading... I want to say it was Rüdiger Grotjahn (but googling him doesn't really lead to the quote I'm thinking of), who was saying that while you can pick up a language at any age, learning it young is still definitely advantageous for one reason: As you get older, it's very very difficult to adopt an accent native to that language, because you're so stuck in your own. pathetic little tramp fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 25, 2014 |
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Apr 25, 2014 21:05
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Why do people even bother with insurance agents when you can buy insurance direct from a company online? What value are you getting there? I've been with the same insurance agent for about a decade and it's been worth it for me. Not only was it one of the cheapest rates I've been able to find, but the convenience is worth it as I'm in the military and move every few years. Even got to keep all my discounts after an international move too which was pretty cool, and when I was getting dicked around by the actual insurance broker over a bullshit claim the agent made it go away. It's one of those YMMV things. Nail Rat posted:No, you understand. Their brains literally are like a (not terribly clever) animal's at that point. They're like less capable puppies that you can dress up  My wife and I have a 9 week old and bought next to no toys, figuring (correctly) that most people who buy gifts for babbies get toys instead of actual useful stuff. As it turns out, the thing he's interacted most with to date was a plastic bag because it makes a cool crinkly sound when you kick it.
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Apr 25, 2014 21:16
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pathetic little tramp posted:Sadly I don't have the book around that had some good studies cited in it, but it was called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. In it, he really goes into detail about how malleable our brains are and how the old notions of "this region of the brain is for language, this is for motor control" are being thrown out and we're finding the brain is very adaptable. I don't know man. My wife has a PhD in psycholinguistics and she's always gone on about a "critical period" or something where it becomes much harder to learn language after it has passed.
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Apr 25, 2014 22:20
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I think it becomes much more difficult to hear/learn different tonalities as an adult if you didn't grow up exposed to them, but I heard an interview on NPR not too long ago that supports what pathetic little tramp is saying (ie it's not as hard as everyone thinks to learn a new language as an adult).
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Apr 25, 2014 22:25
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Ghostnuke posted:I don't know man. My wife has a PhD in psycholinguistics and she's always gone on about a "critical period" or something where it becomes much harder to learn language after it has passed. That's about acquiring language, period, not about acquiring additional languages thereafter. Please see the depressing Wikipedia article "feral children"
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Apr 25, 2014 22:41
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fork bomb posted:I think it becomes much more difficult to hear/learn different tonalities as an adult if you didn't grow up exposed to them, but I heard an interview on NPR not too long ago that supports what pathetic little tramp is saying (ie it's not as hard as everyone thinks to learn a new language as an adult). If you just want a new hobby I'd take up cooking first, the gains are much higher for 95% of people.
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Apr 25, 2014 22:42
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Kids learn languages easier because at that age there's a critical need to lean them in order to express oneself. The brain doesn't stop creating and linking neurons, which was previously thought to be the case, hence the belief of early sponge-brain. It's taking pop-science a while to update itself.
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Apr 26, 2014 02:26
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When I first saw this thread, I figure I was going to get some great stories. Then I had a solemn moment of reflection when I realized I had something to contribute. I apologize if this rambles, but there is a lot to describe here. Also, my God you people love to derail. My sister has never been good with money. The best earliest example I can recall is her going off to college for a year or expressly against my parents wishes (she was a C student at best, with terrible study habits). The expected results occurred with her raking up a lot of debt and returning home. This in itself isn't so awful, at least compared to some of the stories here. Where it takes a turn for the worse is after she got married. While she isn't great at money, my brother-in-law operates on another dimension as far as I can tell. His skill at finances seem to fall into a binary state: "I have money", and "I don't have money". Mind you, the "I have money" state isn't a quantitative number to him; it's a number greater than zero and slightly less than infinity. I've seen him straight-up give away money, which would be noble if it weren't for the fact they're often is less than great financial situations. One example of which was when we were out to eat as a family (parents and them). He was laid-off at the time (at frequent occurrence), and I had made it clear I was going to be picking up the tab for everyone beforehand. At some point during the evening, the waitress had goofed something trivial up, and we jokingly made comment about, "well there goes her tip". It was clear this was a joke, and when it came time to pay the bill, I was clear to him that it wasn't affecting her tip (20%). Despite this as we're leaving I see him sneak off and pass her some cash.  I stress he was on unemployment at the time.I could on about other bizarre incidental stories, but it all leads up to one that's just masterful. They've managed to be able to survive in spite of their poor money skills, but several years ago things took a turn for the worse. My sister was diagnosed with MS and rapidly deteriorated in the course of a few years to the point where she can't walk. During this time, they acquired a dog (just prior to her being diagnosed, and it's another story I won't get into here), and the proceeded to be evicted and move from two houses. The lack of homeownership, employment, and savings started to come to a head*. Eventually they end up moving into the house of my brother-in-law's uncle who was not living there at the time. This is in a very bad neighborhood (Their house has been broken into, neighbor shot, sex-offender mailings, etc). My brother-in-law has almost been perpetually unemployed this entire time, working just enough to keep his insurance benefits and unemployment going. He's union, and we suspect blacklisted (due to drinking). It's Christmas time and his unemployment is running out. He tells my sister he was going to do a favor for this kid (friend of the family?) and that the kid would be stopping by for a while to get out of the cold. As time goes on, he mentions that the kid is going to be doing a sales pitch, but he has no intention of buying. It turns out that the kid is hawking Kirby vacuums. Whatever; the kid does his sales pitch and leaves. Later on my sister discovers that a check is missing from the check-book and when confronted my brother-in-law admits he had purchased one! This was to be a gift for my sister for Christmas. My sister, who due to her MS cannot walk. He also stated that the kid had a chance of winning a trip to New Orleans (or wherever) if he makes a sale, and my brother-in-law wanted him to have a chance to win. For those who don't know, Kirby's are thousand dollar vacuums, and one has just been purchased by a man who is a couple weeks from running out of unemployment, for a person who can't walk. The kicker on this story? He had already bought my sister a thousand dollar vacuum (non-kirby I believe) three years prior.  There is at least some good news in that my sister was able to get the transaction cancelled, but the whole story is an incredible "bad with money" spectacular. There's other stories, but none as magnificent as the above. I could honestly go on about their situation but this isn't e/n. The whole situation is sad. My brother-in-law is in his fifty's with no savings and no home to his name. For comparison, I'm roughly twenty years younger, I just bought a home a couple of years ago, and I just recently purchased a new car for which I paid for in cash. The sad thing is when you have to deal with such a train-wreck on a regular basis, you really want to distance yourself from the whole situation and ignore them, which makes you feel absolutely lovely when it involves your own sister.  *My sister applied for disability immediately after she was diagnosed. It would take roughly two years for her to be approved. Another sound financial decision they made was after a year-or-so of being denied (This in itself is an adventure in crazy. Hint: if you want to scam disability, say you have depression, there's no physical symptoms to prove and you'll be approved easier) was to call one of the television injury/disability lawyers. My parents told my sister not to do this, as all they typically do is handle resubmitting the same paperwork she was already submitting, and take roughly a third of the disability payment once approved (you do get back-paid from when you first start applying). They had to make a court appearance before she was finally approved, and the appearance was her pretty much walking (I use this is a loose term, as this was before she completely lost mobility) into the courtroom and the judge agreeing she qualified. The entire court appearance was less than fifteen minutes.
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Apr 26, 2014 05:23
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Not owning a home isn't, by itself, a sign of being bad with money - in many case it's the opposite, really.
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Apr 26, 2014 05:36
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FrozenVent posted:Whether you get a bigger place or a better car is a matter of value, if they can get cheap rent more power to them. Maybe they're renting from their parents or something. The cost of rent varies greatly from place to place. The price of a new car does not (as long as you're staying within one country).
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Apr 26, 2014 05:51
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VideoTapir posted:The cost of rent varies greatly from place to place. The price of a new car does not (as long as you're staying within one country). True, but what I meant was that someone might place a greater personal value on having a nice car than on having a nice place. If someone decides to spend 10% of their income on rent, and 25% on their car, that's a value decision on their part; they could do the opposite.
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Apr 26, 2014 05:54
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TerminalRaptor posted:Kirby When I was 21 and just out of college I briefly "worked" for Kirby (never made any sales that weren't cancelled later). They told us to straight up lie about how you only needed one more sale to win a trip, or a scholarship, or a bonus, or any loving thing. None of that stuff was real. You could win some sort of trip by making a massive number of sales in a quarter, I think, but its a pretty safe bet to assume that any statement like that is bogus. That makes the story even sadder.
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Apr 27, 2014 21:46
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It sounds like your BiL has a mild case of this: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26888280
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Apr 28, 2014 02:54
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Knightmare posted:Story-wise, I have a friend with a 9 month old who is a little cash-strapped. This doesn't prevent her from signing up for classes designed for babies though, the ones that I know of are music and chinese classes. For a 9 month old. As a goon with no kids maybe I just don't understand, but that kind of seems like throwing away hundreds in cash every month. If anything the Chinese classes are probably going to slow the kid down in learning to speak English, while not being enough to teach them to speak Chinese, and even if they DID learn Chinese they'll lose it almost completely if they don't use it.
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Apr 28, 2014 08:14
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My grandfather passed without much to his name. His will was to sell his car to pay for the funeral and then split the remaining money among his three grandchildren. It was not a good car. I got 10 bucks 
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Apr 28, 2014 09:31
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VideoTapir posted:If anything the Chinese classes are probably going to slow the kid down in learning to speak English, while not being enough to teach them to speak Chinese, and even if they DID learn Chinese they'll lose it almost completely if they don't use it. Nope: http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/Bilingualism-in-Young-Children--Separating-Fact-fr.aspx https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/biling2.cfm http://www.multilingualliving.com/2010/05/31/does-bilingualism-multilingualism-cause-language-delay/
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Apr 28, 2014 10:03
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Strong Sauce posted:It sounds like your BiL has a mild case of this: You don't have to be missing a chromosome to want to help way too much. My now wife's uncle died shortly after I started dating her. He was super into the "give your money to the poor for Jesus" stuff. We discovered after his death that he had a credit card that he used to pay for things to help people that he couldn't actually afford.
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Apr 28, 2014 11:08
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VideoTapir posted:If anything the Chinese classes are probably going to slow the kid down in learning to speak English, while not being enough to teach them to speak Chinese, and even if they DID learn Chinese they'll lose it almost completely if they don't use it. Look how wrong you are.
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Apr 28, 2014 13:27
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Boris Galerkin posted:Look how wrong you are. I'd ask you to elaborate if this was the "Tell us about teaching baby" thread instead of the bad with money one. Since it's not: I have a buddy who's never been very responsible. He's coming up on 25 and has always lived with his mom, has a tough time holding down a job because he randomly decides to miss shifts, and was recently caught stealing money from another friend. He complains constantly that he doesn't have enough money, he wants to move out on his own, can't afford gas to get to work, etc. I recently found out after talking to his drug dealer (another big drain on his account) that he's spent ~2k on the phone game Clash of Clans. It boggles my mind how he can complain about anything when his priorities are so backwards. Any attempt to get him to not throw his money in a pile and burn it is met with 'I spend my money on things I want', and suggesting that maybe he'd enjoy his own place more than phone pixels is met with an angry stare. There's just no helping some people.
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Apr 28, 2014 16:26
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Sokani posted:I'd ask you to elaborate if this was the "Tell us about teaching baby" thread instead of the bad with money one. Since it's not: How the gently caress can you spend 2000 dollars on a phone game? That's bizarre. I mean, I've spent 500$ on Hello Kitty Café, but now I have all the rarest foofy foofy bun bun rolls, so even if I wanted to spend more money, how could I?
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Apr 28, 2014 16:52
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pathetic little tramp posted:How the gently caress can you spend 2000 dollars on a phone game? That's bizarre. Sounds like the hello kitty cafe folks are leaving money on the table...
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Apr 28, 2014 16:53
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Gold and a Pager posted:Nope: Read the post to which I was replying, what I actually said, and the articles you posted. Those are about bilingual homes. The post was about language classes, I presume a couple hours per week. Unless the parents are really loving disciplined about keeping it up at home it isn't going to matter. It IS possible to forget a language learned early in childhood. I have a friend who no longer speaks his first language (one which I DO speak, so I don't just have his word for it). The only point on which I may be wrong is language delay; regardless, the way I heard it was that kids learn slower but better. The second link confirms everything else I was saying. It's irrelevant, though, as the posted situation probably isn't going to result in the kid learning poo poo. PERHAPS SOMETHING WENT WRONG WITH YOU GUYS' LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. The point is: This is probably an example of someone wasting money. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 17:03
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