Gabriel Pope posted:

I don't know what he means by "just enjoying being a student" either, seeing that he's not being a student in any sense, but he is 1) working and 2) committed to saving most of his earnings towards school. So regardless of his intentions, he is in fact saving up for school during his time off, which he (in all likelihood rightfully) regards as being a better idea than taking out loans to pay for the kind of education his peers are getting paid for by their parents. Which his parents also want him to get, but not enough to provide any help beyond a very minor subsidy for his living expenses ($200 rent sounds like a sweet deal until you consider that for $300 combined rent+utilities [Idaho] he could probably get a room in a house with much better roomates.)

It's true that he may be posting a very skewed picture--maybe his parents help him out with money all the time and he is just whiny. Some people are just completely lovely to their adult children, though. I knew a girl that got cut off completely the instant she went off to college because her dad's new wife didn't like her--as in, she had to crash with friends for Thanksgiving and Christmas because she was not welcome back home.

Hargrimm posted:

I think the key is here:


His parents are still living in the fantasy that anyone who works hard enough can pay their own way through college. That might have been somewhat true when they were growing up, but it's flat-out impossible to do so now on minimum wage.

melon cat posted:

That's definitely what it sounds like, and his parents need a reality check. I experienced similar pressure from my parents in the years leading up to undergrad. I have no idea how any of our parents expected us to pay off tuition while earning an impressive $7.25/hour at my part-time job.

a worthy uhh posted:

Aagar posted:

"Guarantee my principal, and 1% return daily? This couldn't possibly be a scam. Look! They have a website that updates daily with all the money I'm making. Time to put in all of my retirement money and the kids' college fund..."

Script from one of their animated commercials posted:

A two-minute animation distributed by Secure depicts a chance meeting between two friends stuck in traffic on a highway. Pale-faced Ben, driving a beat-up brown subcompact with a dirty windshield, pulls up beside his tanned friend Nick.

Nick, driving a shiny new green convertible, says he’s just returned from a Caribbean vacation and recently moved to a house by a lake. The men have the following exchange:

“How can you afford all this?” Ben asks in a nerdy voice.

“I invest online in forex,” Nick replies in a deep baritone. He sports a pompadour and an unbuttoned red Hawaiian shirt.

“So you’re a forex trader like that guy Paul at the gym?” Ben asks. “I heard he lost a lot of money.”

“No, I am not a forex expert,” Nick says. “If you’re not a forex professional, chances are you could lose your money. My money is managed by professionals from Secure Investment.”

Ben asks whether it’s very risky.

“There is no risk to the initial investment,” Nick says. “In the past five years, they have had only a few days with negative results. I’m earning about 1 percent of profit daily.” He adds that he can withdraw his money at any time.

Ben has heard enough. He asks Nick how he can get started.

quote:

David Kane, a Houston oil industry technical support manager, says he found his way to Secure because he had stopped trusting bankers and brokers after the 2008 financial crisis. Kane, a single father raising three teenage boys, invested $2,500 in Secure in July 2013. His account grew to more than $4,000 by February 2014, according to his online statements.

Thesaurus posted:

If I were trying to scam people, I'd probably end up dreaming up something overly complicated that wouldn't convince people. I'd be convinced they could easily detect the scam. However, it appears that the best way is to just straight up make wildly improbably promises and people will throw money at you.

Guaranteed return! Zero risk! It's stupifying that people fall for this stuff over and over.

Folly posted:

I wonder if the scammers chose Forex specifically so their victims would self-select. It's been done before.

cowofwar posted:

Ponzi scheme obviously. Forex is great for that because you can't actually verify that you own anything. Just made up numbers. I bet you could run a stats analysis on the posted results and see it fail.

Rurutia posted:

Right, that part is definitely weird. It's what made me think that potentially we're getting a warped view. Like, were they just throwing out random numbers with no idea how much he makes/what things cost? Or his bills? Because that's not in line at all with parents that would teach their child to save their Christmas money that was specifically earred for going out to movies. Either way, I definitely think he needs to sit down with his parents and go through the exact numbers of what they expect and what is possible.

Thesaurus posted:

On the positive side of things, at least these scams are generating business for fake-testimonial actors. They paid one of those guys a whole $4.

Rudager posted:

That's exactly what the article in this post is saying, it's made to be absurd as possible because it means the only people who fall for it are very gullible and easily convinced people who will hand over their money with minimal effort. If it was made to be slightly plausible they end up wasting time on alot of people who'll never fall for it.

It's why those "3 quick tricks to making millions on binary options!" videos go for like 20 minutes until they give you any details, if someone sits there and watches it for 20 minutes, they're nearly guaranteed to be caught hook, line and sinker, but anyone who's not convinced will have closed it ages ago.

Folly posted:

I wonder if the scammers chose Forex specifically so their victims would self-select. It's been done before.

Blackjack2000 posted:

Why do doctors seem like the dumbest investors on planet earth?

I mean, I know, it's because they're the most highly compensated people with no business or financial experience, and you only ever hear about the whoppers. You don't hear about the ones that invest in a reputable PE hedge fund and quietly make 15-20% per year.

I have a doctor friend that was telling me about her financial planner. I asked what he had told her to help her out. She couldn't really answer. If I was her advisor the first thing I'd tell her to do is get the hell out of Philadelphia with its 4% wage tax. That's probably costing her more than $10k per year. But, you know, you can't wrap that and charge 1%, so what the gently caress does he care?

Blackjack2000 posted:

Why do doctors seem like the dumbest investors on planet earth?

I mean, I know, it's because they're the most highly compensated people with no business or financial experience, and you only ever hear about the whoppers. You don't hear about the ones that invest in a reputable PE hedge fund and quietly make 15-20% per year.

I have a doctor friend that was telling me about her financial planner. I asked what he had told her to help her out. She couldn't really answer. If I was her advisor the first thing I'd tell her to do is get the hell out of Philadelphia with its 4% wage tax. That's probably costing her more than $10k per year. But, you know, you can't wrap that and charge 1%, so what the gently caress does he care?

CelestialScribe posted:

It isn't just my friends. The average Australian thinks this way. Buying an investment property is socially seen as an excellent first move before you even buy a place for yourself.

Dave Ramsey would kill people here.

Blackjack2000 posted:

Why do doctors seem like the dumbest investors on planet earth?

I mean, I know, it's because they're the most highly compensated people with no business or financial experience, and you only ever hear about the whoppers. You don't hear about the ones that invest in a reputable PE hedge fund and quietly make 15-20% per year.

I have a doctor friend that was telling me about her financial planner. I asked what he had told her to help her out. She couldn't really answer. If I was her advisor the first thing I'd tell her to do is get the hell out of Philadelphia with its 4% wage tax. That's probably costing her more than $10k per year. But, you know, you can't wrap that and charge 1%, so what the gently caress does he care?

nickutz posted:

As a financial planner/advisor, doctors and engineers are the two toughest clients to work with. Rarely do they ever follow advice, because even though they know next to nothing about money, they still have the "smartest guy in the room" syndrome.

District Selectman posted:

As an engineer, I cosign this. The financial wisdom espoused by my old rear end coworkers is horrific. One guy has 100% of his 401k in company stock, probably a couple mil at this point, and I want to cry. He's done great the last two years, but gently caress man. Then there's literally holds cash in a vault guy. And maybe 10% actually plan for retirement, most just have blinders on and only think about work. It's crazy.

nickutz posted:

As a financial planner/advisor, doctors and engineers are the two toughest clients to work with. Rarely do they ever follow advice, because even though they know next to nothing about money, they still have the "smartest guy in the room" syndrome.

nickutz posted:

As a financial planner/advisor, doctors and engineers are the two toughest clients to work with. Rarely do they ever follow advice, because even though they know next to nothing about money, they still have the "smartest guy in the room" syndrome.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromRetail/comments/20egsr/maam_your_credit_card_is_not_free_money/cg2hzhq posted:

It's surprisingly common for people to completely fail to grasp the idea of credit and/or debit.

A girl I worked with at a pub years ago got arrested during our shift (which pissed me off, as I then had to do a closing bar shift on my own on a friday night! Nice!). She came back a few days later and was ranting about how stupid the police are.

I asked what had happened and she flipped out about how "they say I haven't paid my bills and that I ignored a court summons! I have paid though, that's why I didn't go! I pay all my bills on my credit card so that I don't have to spend my own money on such bullshit! I don't get it, they keep saying I owe money on the credit card! How stupid are they? The bank owes that, not me!"

I just stood there for a second, trying to process what she was blathering on about, then asked, "Well, yes, you paid your other bills on the credit card, but how do you pay your credit card bill?".
She stops ranting, rolls her eyes, looks at me like I'm the idiot and says "Well duh, I don't have to, it's a credit card!"

After a bit more wrangling with her about what exactly she thought a credit card was, it turned out that she too thought credit cards were just free money from the bank. She refused to believe me that the bank doesn't just give people money for nothing or pay their bills for them. They loan you up to a certain amount but they expect you to pay them back, with interest. At the end of our shift, I had to take her in the back room, hop online and show her exactly how her credit card works, including the APR% and minimum monthly repayment.

This set her off screeching that "Nobody told me that! Are you saying that my bills will cost me more if I put them on the credit card? That's awful! The bank should pay! Not me! They said I could have £5000 on that card. They never mentioned that I had to give it back!"

I was dumbfounded. She was 26 at the time (I was 18) and prior to that conversation, she'd always seemed very intelligent. I don't know how people can get to that age and believe something so stupid!

TL:DR Co-worker got arrested during work for not paying her credit card bill and ignoring a court summons for it. Took me 3 hours to explain that credit cards are not free money from the bank.

melon cat posted:

Add Accountants to that list. Doctors and Engineers can have some pretty... interesting bank account statements, but Accountants are absolutely the worst at managing money. They seem to think "I'm an Accountant. Of course I'm good with money", even though their jobs have very ittle to do with actually handling money of any sort.

RommelMcDonald posted:

Engineers are the worst in investing too.

One clients shows up to account performance reviews with worthless spreadsheets because he doesn't know anything about investing or the various indices he's comparing the performance of his assets to. So every meeting begins with the account exec tap dancing around how he knows poo poo about the market.

quote:

My parents are Southern Baptist, and they make all sorts of judgmental remarks about people who “only” tithe 10 percent. “Well, I guess if you only love God enough to give the bare minimum that he asks …”

They give 25 percent of their income to their church. Percent saved for retirement? Zero. My level of frustration over this situation? Through the roof.

quote:

My husband has a coworker that shared a story with him about why he switched to his current church. His old church had called him up and asked him why he wasn’t giving a full 10%. When he asked how the church would know he WASN’T giving that, the church rep recited his annual salary and some other very personal information that he definitely never gave to them. When he asked them how on earth they were able to get that information, they deflected the question and started in on how he wasn’t serving God unless he was tithing a full 10% from gross.

HelloIAmYourHeart posted:

A couple comments on the Ask a Manager blog in regards to tithing (in the context of a job applicant being required to provide a budget that included tithing):



I hope this guy did more than just switch churches over this, like maybe open criminal proceedings or something.

RommelMcDonald posted:

Engineers are the worst in investing too.

One clients shows up to account performance reviews with worthless spreadsheets because he doesn't know anything about investing or the various indices he's comparing the performance of his assets to. So every meeting begins with the account exec tap dancing around how he knows poo poo about the market.

Another had four accounts with us, two trusts and two IRAs. He retired and decided to stop our management for one of each. We strongly suspect this is because he's going to sit at home all day and F5 the brokerage accounts we manage so he can copy our trades. Guy should just give us our fee and enjoy his retirement, because what he's saving on management fees doesn't even add up to post-tax minimum wage.

RheaConfused posted:

Cray Cray Mom

EugeneJ posted:

Is the "dementia" because of pills/alcohol/drugs?

Devian666 posted:

I'm pretty sure my sister and brother in law give 10% to their church. They also donate a lot of time helping with a lot of activities. I think the thing that really disappoints me is that the church has treated them like poo poo with internal politics. The reason for this treatment is because they believe the church should be doing more to help the poor. I guess the church is good with money but bad at being good.

TLG James posted:

How is having any actively managed accounts good with money for 99 percent of people?

HelloIAmYourHeart posted:

A couple comments on the Ask a Manager blog in regards to tithing (in the context of a job applicant being required to provide a budget that included tithing):



I hope this guy did more than just switch churches over this, like maybe open criminal proceedings or something.

baquerd posted:

If they also save a nice but unambitious 15% towards retirement, their church tithes are costing them basically a decade where they wouldn't need to be working and could instead retire and devote their energies full-time towards volunteering if they so chose. If they're saving less than that, it could be the difference between retiring and being a Walmart greeter.

Haifisch posted:

Where have I heard something like that before...

quote:

The average loan at the end of June was over $19,000 - though the median was just over $13,300. At that rate, average balances of $20,000 or more appear likely to become the norm.

quote:

Another parent, an accountant at a major listed corporate who did not want to be named, said he planned to do the same.

Both say they hope the strategy would make their children feel responsible for every dollar they spend during their study years. But in both cases, neither want their kids saddled with long-term debt.

"When he finishes his studies, he needs to get on with buying a house," said the accountant.

TLG James posted:

How is having any actively managed accounts good with money for 99 percent of people?

Devian666 posted:

Of course it wouldn't be complete with an accountant being serious until the punchline. He intends to pay off his son's loan then expect him to buy a house in an inflated market with high mortgage payments.