|
Barry posted:So hobbies are bad with money? If you throw money at your computer instead of paying bills or whatever, sure, but what if your financial house is in order and that's what you enjoy doing? That isn't the point at all. Do anything you want if you can afford it. Maybe I just don't understand the culture of having a gamin' rig that you can't use for literally anything else (which appeared to be the context of his story).
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 00:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 04:06 |
|
|
Didn't the subtitle of the personal finance thread use to be "DON'T loving COSIGN ANYTHING EVER DUMBASS!" or something along those lines?
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 00:56
|
|
|
Barry posted:So hobbies are bad with money? If you throw money at your computer instead of paying bills or whatever, sure, but what if your financial house is in order and that's what you enjoy doing? Not being willing to install a printer on your  GAMING COMPUTER is being an idiot who doesn't understand how computers work, not necessarily an idiot who is bad with money.Content: Reddit, where else? posted:Bought a used car for my aunt. Both of our names are on the title. She just filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy. :/ Don't loan money to family ever. Do not cosign for anything ever. Unless you are OK with never seeing that money again and your relationship with that person can handle it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 00:57
|
|
|
Guinness posted:Oh, you mean like this? canyoneer posted:Not being willing to install a printer on your
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 01:03
|
|
|
nickutz posted:That isn't the point at all. Do anything you want if you can afford it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 01:04
|
|
|
canyoneer posted:Don't loan money to family ever. Do not cosign for anything ever. Unless you are OK with never seeing that money again and your relationship with that person can handle it. For me, it was a cell phone contract for a girlfriend who then proceeded to rack up $100+ bills on a $30/mo contract and couldn't pay them. Thankfully, this was in the early 2000s and I didn't have a phone of my own so just "repossessed" it. Lesson learned, and relatively cheaply in the grand scheme of things.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 02:10
|
|
|
blackmet posted:Tells my friend about this. She says "I have a printer we haven't hooked up. Why don't we hook it up to your computer and just print it off...?"He goes off on a tirade about how you don't hook up a printer to a gaming computer, and says he'll print it off at work. Wow, I'll bet he gains one whole frame per hour by not doing that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 02:42
|
|
|
Barry posted:So hobbies are bad with money? If you throw money at your computer instead of paying bills or whatever, sure, but what if your financial house is in order and that's what you enjoy doing? Often people who spend insane amounts on gaming PCs don't have their life together. Not all, of course, but most. Take my friend/roommate/tenant, for example. At 26, he's got 10k in credit card debt, has $14k in student loans (doesn't seem like much, but most of it was unnecessary spending while in school and he has defaulted on his payments many times), and has no savings. He's not working on any of these debts at all. His credit card was cancelled. How he got such a high limit to begin with is predatory. Anyway, his top of the line EVGA video card broke recently. He figured it was out of warranty, so he asked to use my credit card to buy a new one (his credit card was cancelled). I obliged because I know despite his shaky financial situation, he will pay me back. Turned out the card was $600, and as a result he couldn't make rent the next month. He gave me the money for the video card, but then had to borrow another $100 back so he could buy food until payday. To top all of this off, I found out his old card came with a lifetime warranty. I said if he RMA'd it, I'd buy it off him. He has yet to call EVGA, and I know it's because if he did it would psychologically invalidate the purchase of his new one. Rick Rickshaw fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jun 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 02:43
|
|
|
Rick Rickshaw posted:Often people who spend insane amounts on gaming PCs don't have their life together. Not all, of course, but most. Take my friend/roommate/tenant, for example. *calls credit limit predatory* *enables awful spending with a personal loan* Sounds like you're pretty terrible with money yourself.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 02:57
|
|
|
Zo posted:I think you use them to play games, but that's just my guess. nickutz posted:Maybe I just don't understand the culture of having a gamin' rig that you can't use for literally anything else. My point being that he apparently has a pretty decent PC, why not print from it if you need to?
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 03:48
|
|
|
nickutz posted:That isn't the point at all. Do anything you want if you can afford it. I bought the automotive equivalent of a gaming rig (a Miata) but I still use it for grocery runs, to take my mountain bike to the trail head, etc. I can't imagine having a computer dedicated solely to gaming.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 04:00
|
|
|
This is a story about being bad with money in a way that is also bad at life in a uniquely Chinese way. Also, while I have some numbers, they don't quite add up to trouble (yet), so they must be pissing away money some other way. (I presume giving money to elderly relatives is a big one.) I live in a room in an apartment shared with a Chinese family. There is the father, the mother, a 2 year old son, a 5 year old daughter, and the father's mother. The father has a stable job which provides him with a moderate cash income by China standards, and a lot of side benefits such that the family will never be homeless and/or starving. Those benefits include an apartment provided by his job, and frequently receiving gift cards redeemable at supermarkets (I get those too, but he gets way more)...if they shopped carefully they could save probably 10,000 RMB of his (AFAIK) 12,000 RMB per month. Well, they could if it wasn't for the legal status of the kids. If they'd had kids in accordance with the one-child policy, even having two kids and paying a fine, they'd be okay, but what they did instead caused them money problems that are tearing their marriage apart. Their first child was born in Hong Kong. They do not now, nor have they ever lived in Hong Kong. The mother went to Hong Kong so that her child would be a Hong Kong citizen. Consequently they have to travel to Hong Kong every year or two in order to renew their daughter's visa. That's a good few thousand RMB right there. The Hong Kong passport may be worth it. Maybe it won't be. She's five years old, who the gently caress knows. Anyway, the real problem this causes is that it complicates her going to school. I don't quite understand all the details (I'm not sure the parents do, either, and they're the ones who explained it to me...they didn't understand what they were getting into when they went to Hong Kong in the first place), but I was told at one point that it means she can't just go to any public school in Beijing. They're possibly looking at 100,000 RMB to get her into school (for which they will take out a loan), and thousands of RMB per year to keep her there. This is in addition to the about 20,000 per year that they had been spending on English classes and dance classes and math classes for her. (She's 5 years old and she knows as much math as I did at 7, and I was "gifted.") They've dialed that expense down a little by having me teach her and two other girls at something like half what they had been paying going to a school. That 100,000 RMB school expense might not happen, though, because I am like 90 percent sure that despite the daughter being really smart, she is going to get severe test anxiety from the father riding her so hard, so she might not get into that one. The money they're spending on their daughter is already causing stress in their marriage, because the wife is upset that her husband isn't giving her as much money to spend as he had been. He isn't doing so because he's spending so much on his daughter. (And she really is HIS daughter, the mother has repeatedly said she never wanted to have kids, and only sporadically shows any interest in her kids.) Let's take a break from the kids and talk about the apartment. We're living in a very nice location, in a really convenient neighborhood. Apart from the roach infestation I can't quite eliminate, it's one of the nicest places I've ever lived. It also costs a bit more than they get from renting out his work apartment. They would have trouble affording it if I wasn't living here. It's not all bad-with-money, because it's close enough to the father's workplace that he can come home every day to eat lunch. However, the lease is up in a month and a half. I don't know how much their new place is going to cost, but it's probably not going to be less than this place, and they probably won't have a lodger. Back to the kids: They never actually intended to have more than one kid, despite the HK anchor baby. The mom wanted to have an abortion. She procrastinated about it, then went to a doctor at 4 months, who told her that there might be greater risks since she'd waited so long. She got scared and decided not to do it. I was like  when I heard this. But it totally shows in the way she acts toward her son. Anyway they didn't have him in China, either. Rather than keeping things simple and going for a HK passport for him, too, the mother went to the US to give birth. They took out a loan to do this, one which they've only just paid off. Now he has to travel to the US every year or two for the rest of his life in order to renew his visa. If they're lucky he'll just have to travel to leave the country, so they might just go to HK, Japan, Korea or some other cheap-ticket location at some point. But for right now, it's the US. That's probably a minimum of 25000 RMB each time after the first (where he might still be able to fly free), because he isn't going alone. I have no idea how much the visa itself costs, because I don't know exactly how illegally they're doing it, but it could be anywhere between about 150 and 2000 dollars. The visa trip thing gets even better in one respect. It's more a life-disaster thing than a money thing. The parents are considering a divorce. The father would take the children. He was going to take his son to get his visa renewed. Thing is, he is an employee of the central government...not a prominent or powerful one, but he works directly with prominent and powerful people. So his US visa application is pretty much guaranteed extra scrutiny both on the Chinese and US side. So far China hasn't given him any hassle. But apparently the US state department is denying his visa application this time, because he lied about having been denied before. He was denied before because his doctoral thesis was on a sensitive topic that I guess got them thinking maybe they shouldn't let him in. He got that sorted out, then denied there'd been a problem to begin with. WTF. So if this doesn't get fixed, the non-custodial I-wanted-to-abort-you mother is going to be the only one able to take the child to his country of citizenship (a country where he has no close friends and no family). But that's not all. Due to his visa status, the son may not be able to attend public schools in China at all. If he is going to attend school in China, he may have to go to a private international school. Those cost between about 100,000 and 250,000 RMB a year in Beijing. His school is going to take almost the entirety of his father's income. They may end up having to get their son Chinese citizenship, which can itself be expensive depending where they want his hukou (your citizenship is tied to where you are from inside China, and your rights vary from place to place based on that) to be; and this after all the trouble and expense they went to in order to get him US citizenship. Oh, and to get Chinese citizenship you have to renounce any other citizenship, so no dual-citizen status for him. I don't know what the gently caress they're going to do, but I'm glad I am not them. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Jun 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 04:34
|
|
|
Uh if the kid's a US citizen what visa do they need to go to America for annually? You can't lose birth citizenship like that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 05:14
|
|
|
Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:Uh if the kid's a US citizen what visa do they need to go to America for annually? You can't lose birth citizenship like that. my guess is that because hes a US citizen, he's in china on a visa, and that's what expires and needs refreshing by leaving china
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 05:15
|
|
|
Am I bad a person for wishing some American couple would adopt the son so he has a loving chance at an education, dad divorces the woman who clearly doesn't love and actively resents him, and just dotes on his daughter which seems to be all he wants to do?
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 05:37
|
|
|
DuckConference posted:my guess is that because hes a US citizen, he's in china on a visa, and that's what expires and needs refreshing by leaving china
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 06:07
|
|
|
Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:Uh if the kid's a US citizen what visa do they need to go to America for annually? You can't lose birth citizenship like that. He has a visa to be in China. He cannot be in China without a visa. I think the new permanent resident rules MIGHT help him when he gets older, but like any visa change in China it'll be a year or two before everyone can agree on what the rules are.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 07:11
|
|
|
Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:Uh if the kid's a US citizen what visa do they need to go to America for annually? You can't lose birth citizenship like that. It's them definitely being bad with money as: Chinese Nationality Law as per Wikipedia posted:It is still possible for a person to have dual nationality of China and another country at birth in some circumstances. For example: Unless there is something else going on. Total Confusion fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Jun 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 08:56
|
|
|
Cicero posted:Ok, but surely there are much cheaper countries to visit than the US, coming from China. It isn't that pricey to go from China to Guam or Saipan, and Chinese visitors can go to either island without a U.S. visa. (Which is why Saipan's hospitals have lots of Chinese women giving birth at them.)
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 08:58
|
|
|
VideoTapir posted:He has a visa to be in China. He cannot be in China without a visa. I think the new permanent resident rules MIGHT help him when he gets older, but like any visa change in China it'll be a year or two before everyone can agree on what the rules are. This is a super interesting story and I'm glad you posted it. Sounds like their life is a mess, this is drama better than TV. Despite how hosed up these kids are going to be from the lovely parenting, horrible financial situation, issues from never being good enough to please their parents (and man, even regular chinese parents are crazy!), assuming kid doesn't have to renounce his citizenship to go to school, I do think it will be beneficial to their lives in the future to have a US and Hong Kong passport. China passports are not convenient, as demonstrated by the efforts of Dad getting back into the states. Being able to walk over borders without stacks of travel documents and visas is pretty cool, and it'll recoup at least 0.04% of the cost of this ridiculous scenario. So at least there is that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 09:01
|
|
|
canyoneer posted:Don't loan money to family ever. Do not cosign for anything ever. Unless you are OK with never seeing that money again and your relationship with that person can handle it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiji_%28manga%29 Gold and a Pager posted:It's them definitely being bad with money as: Yeah, if they take Chinese citizenship they have to renounce the US citizenship. I'm not sure, but I think maybe if they just had him be a Chinese citizen, never applying for a US passport or anything, he might be able to take US citizenship by birth later on if he wanted. He'd have to choose one or the other if he returned to China on a US passport or on a Chinese passport that didn't show his arrival overseas (which would mean he used some other travel document). I guess in that instance he could say "uh, I lost it," but then there could be an investigation. It's hard to say whether 20 years from now a US or Chinese passport will be the one to have. They might find some other way to send him to school. Like maybe he goes to live with grandma and they bribe some Jiangxi school principal to let him in or something; I mean unless he's going to the top few Chinese universities it doesn't really matter WHERE his school is. The impossibility of their initial plan, though...drat. I figure the second worst case, after spending 100k a year on school, would be dad home schools the kid. His hours are flexible and not particularly long, and he's better qualified than most people who do that. The only value a Chinese passport has is that it's the only easy way to stay in China. That might end up being important to this kid in the future; who knows. But right now for the family it would be pretty convenient. Oh, and let's add a little more drama: The kid was calling me "baba" (daddy) for a month or so. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Jun 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 09:33
|
|
|
Back when I read the Goons-Living-In-China thread, those guys would just fly to Hong Kong to get their visas renewed, flying to the states seems excessive.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 12:24
|
|
|
NancyPants posted:Am I bad a person for wishing some American couple would adopt the son so he has a loving chance at an education, dad divorces the woman who clearly doesn't love and actively resents him, and just dotes on his daughter which seems to be all he wants to do? The Woody Allen Experience
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 13:35
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:Back when I read the Goons-Living-In-China thread, those guys would just fly to Hong Kong to get their visas renewed, flying to the states seems excessive. Yup. I lived in China for 2 years and we'd have to border-hop at least once every 6 months, but it's definitely doable.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 14:45
|
|
|
canyoneer posted:Not being willing to install a printer on your But in this case it cost him hundreds of dollars he could have avoided spending. Even if he had printed it at work and shipped back the Kindle, he would have saved hundreds. He also was the type that would do all the dumb bachelor crap with money. Instead of doing laundry because he didn't have clean pants for work, he'd buy another pair of khakis (I'm guilty of doing this a couple times myself, though not in years). Lots of fast food, unnecessary computer poo poo, little things that added up. My friend has kind of forced him to straighten up somewhat, though he does still struggle. She's generally pretty thrifty, mostly due to years of frequent unemployment and 40k in student loans she wants to pay down. Her mother, however, had mortgaged and leveraged her home to the point that the monthly payments were $3,000 a month, due to her losing her job and not being able to find another. This is a house that had mold and structural problems due to yearly floods in the basement and was just kind of unrenovated and falling apart in general. She eventually sold it for 250k, just enough to pay off the amount owed, and probably only got that much because it was located in one of the best parts of the suburb she lived in. Her brother then bought her a small house in a low COL area, in return for her using her CPA skills to help him get a tax writeoff for doing so. Social security kicked in just as she went through the last of her 401k, and she's doing about as well as can be expected at this point. blackmet fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jun 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 15:10
|
|
|
nickutz posted:My point being that he apparently has a pretty decent PC, why not print from it if you need to? The people who get really, really, really into PC gaming get kinda nuts about what is running on a computer.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 15:50
|
|
|
blackmet posted:But in this case it cost him hundreds of dollars he could have avoided spending. Even if he had printed it at work and shipped back the Kindle, he would have saved hundreds. No, I get it and agree. I was responding to the "is spending any money on hobbies bad?" poster. Reddit posted:Newly Married- Husband has ENORMOUS student loans- what are our options? There are some really stupid suggestions, including flee the country and live in China!
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 15:53
|
|
|
$250,000 for law school is really a lot of money. Outside of a few select law schools, I don't think anyone would be in their right mind taking on that much debt. And even with a Yale J.D. you don't have an automatic six-figure salary. Maybe he thought he'd use his engineering degree to become a patent attorney. What a disaster.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:01
|
|
|
Finding out I'm out >500k considering interest on a 50k salary seems like a perfectly appropriate time to seriously research fleeing the country, and I'm curious what you think he should do if not that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:03
|
|
|
You can get student loans discharged on bankruptcy because of undue hardship though I'm not certain what the standards are. You can also get the payment changed under a chapter 13 plan.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:19
|
|
|
You essentially need to be permanently disabled to get them discharged under undue hardship, IIRC.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:21
|
|
|
I can't find in that thread where it says he makes 50k. Where does it say that? Does the wife work? (she should) If they could get a combined 100k and live an MMM-style life for a few years they could get free. Otherwise yeah if he's really making 50k and she can't get a job of any kind, something drastic might be in order. Bankruptcy won't help in this situation either it sounds like.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:34
|
|
|
canyoneer posted:No, I get it and agree. I was responding to the "is spending any money on hobbies bad?" poster. The thing that's crushing him is the private loans not being IBR eligible. A friend of mine is in a similar situation, where he can IBR some, but the rest just require whopping payments. Meanwhile, colleagues of mine with 250-300k of debt somehow have the entire debt load under IBR/PAYE, so they don't care whatsoever about how much the total is, since it's completely irrelevant.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:35
|
|
|
Nail Rat posted:I can't find in that thread where it says he makes 50k. Where does it say that? Does the wife work? (she should) Oh sorry I misread his initial debt as his initial salary. (The link to the thread wasn't posted, all I read was that blurb.) I dunno, if my skills were transferrable and I had a plausible way to do it, I would be pretty tempted to flee and save 350k regardless of my current income. If they make six figures, it certainly seems like he at least has a choice, so it very much depends on their combined income.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:38
|
|
|
Lawyering skills aren't extremely transferable. Engineering... I don't know, is there some sort of certification aspect to it?
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
Breetai posted:Yup. I lived in China for 2 years and we'd have to border-hop at least once every 6 months, but it's definitely doable. That's iffy these days (since 2012, HK has been rejecting a lot of visa applications...don't know about the other nearby consulates, but I'm pretty sure Tokyo would be no better, at least), but in some cases you can still do it. I would think that a family visa (I presume that's what the kid is on...basically a really long tourist visa) would be one where that's possible. The fact that they're planning this might just be another example of spending money they don't have to spend.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 17:35
|
|
|
"Just flee the country forever and go live in China" doesn't sound like a great plan unless you wanted to live in China anyway. I bet most of the US population would want to live in the US and pay student loans until they die rather than leave forever and live in China.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 17:42
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:Lawyering skills aren't extremely transferable. Engineering... I don't know, is there some sort of certification aspect to it? EE with a law degree is one of the few lawyer combinations that should be making bank.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 19:02
|
|
|
Harry posted:EE with a law degree is one of the few lawyer combinations that should be making bank. Completely agree. If he is a PE and a lawyer it should be good times. I believe for many lawsuits involving engineering it is a huge advantage to be represented by someone who gets it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 20:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 04:06 |
|
|
blackmet posted:But in this case it cost him hundreds of dollars he could have avoided spending. Even if he had printed it at work and shipped back the Kindle, he would have saved hundreds. For 2 years I paid $1.70 a pound for a service to pick up my laundry from my apartment, wash/dry/fold it, and return it to my apartment.  It's me. I'm the bachelor who was bad with money. I've also done the "buy more underwear" thing once or twice.
|
|
#
?
Jun 19, 2014 20:43
|
|
