Higgy posted:

SiGmA_X, the hero the thread needs right now.

I'm not sure if this is BWM, exactly, but it's just so...

My Goal is to build and live in my own castle

quote:

quote:

What's the quickest way for me to get to my goal?

Inherit a castle

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

Yikes, imagine having a partner who worried about your $40/week habit, regardless of what it is.

Sundae posted:

Photex posted:

I just went and bought a certified pre-owned car and let me tell you people without even a little bit of financial savvy or balls don't stand a loving chance in a dealership, I actually now have some empathy for people who try to buy a reasonable car but just get sticker shocked into signing.

Krispy Wafer posted:

Next time, I always tell myself. I will walk into the dealership pre-approved with my credit union. Next time for sure.

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

It just blows my mind that so many dealers still try to play the "waste your time until you sign" game with the 15 minute trips to the back room to sniff glue and Talk To The Manager.
I literally walked out of the first dealer I went to on the day I purchased a 2019 BMW M2 worth half my take-home salary. What a nuisance that dealer was!!

howdoesishotweb posted:

In a bit of BWM redemption, I had mentioned my in-laws awhile back. My pastor father in law opted out of social security for his career, and has basically no retirement savings. The only investments they had they made in 2006-8 in lovely high fee funds, then panic sold when the market dropped thanks to their poo poo rear end Key Bank financial advisor.

It turns out my mother in law, a cello teacher, DID pay into social security, thank Christ. So at least he gets half her benefits. And it turns out his church has a pension, he just never looked into it until his regional advisor had him fill out the forms. Which, combined with SS is more than they made working.

Now I just have to worry about my own dad, who retired at 58 and has burned through a sizable portion of his 401k by age 65! Subscribing to the RE of FIRE without the FI is BWM.

n8r posted:

Wtf is a church pension?

quote:

My pastor father in law

Krispy Wafer posted:

The Idiots on Social Media thread has been in an 10 hour derail about vegetarianism.

It's been a bad weekend for derails. Where are the mods?

mandatory lesbian posted:

The myriad of posts telling people to put John Smith in ignore are as bad as his posts themselves tbh

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

It just blows my mind that so many dealers still try to play the "waste your time until you sign" game with the 15 minute trips to the back room to sniff glue and Talk To The Manager.

I literally walked out of the first dealer I went to on the day I purchased a 2019 BMW M2 worth half my take-home salary. What a nuisance that dealer was!!

Higgy posted:

I'm not sure if this is BWM, exactly, but it's just so...

My Goal is to build and live in my own castle

quote:

Inherit a castle

quote:

Well time to go marry a royal.

quote:

I posted a keyboard on Craigslist and got this response almost immediately. Something about it seems fishy. Should I be concerned? Screenshot

quote:

howdy, I'm in a bit of deep water financially with the state
Got in some court trouble.. didn't realize I had a $300 monthly bill for GPS tracking, as well as another monthly bill for $70 for supervision fees, another one for monthly computer monitoring which is $80/mth.. anyway, all this legal stuff is costing a fortune. I currently owe the agencies $900 and $160 for the GPS and monitoring, respectively. I've paid off the supervision fees. I currently owe $1060 to these agencies and I have 0.32 cents in my bank account.

I was bailed out on $5000, both my parents paid out $2500. I want to pay them off, and I don't care what they insist on, because I owe them for saving my rear end.

Paps wants me to work for the money (I'm actually working for him), but making $11/hr is concerning. I work 3 days in a week, which is.. what, $260 every payday. 15% goes into a savings account / trade account (Charles Schwab.. great company. seriously). Can't get much of a greater job than this at 18, really. My last jobs were $8/hr.

This leaves me with around $220 to utilize.

Due to my situation, I can't work full time as of yet, but when its discussed and permitted by the court, this will give me a solid 40 hour week to earn money and pay off what I need. ($440 without the 15% taken out or taxes)

My mum is having a lot of trouble, so I'm using a fair portion of that money to get food just so we can, well, not starve.. She lost her job after she got disabled in a really freak-incident. some bad internal damage and whatnot.. and I'm almost certain she probably has $100K in medical bills at least, since her insurance was linked to her job. I'm not sure about it though because I haven't talked to her about it.

I'm really asking here how I should prioritize and budget everything. If I had to list it out, most prioritized compared to least, I would put the legal bills first- if they discontinue their services I get thrown into holding in a jail cell somewhere around here. I need to maintain contact with them as well and give them at least some money to show that I'm not blowing them off.

Second, I'd prioritize starting a percentage amount that goes into repaying my family the $2500 they each spent. Then I would put the rest in my bank account for either food or entertainment. I'm going to try and limit myself as much as I can for the latter.

Anyway, advice wise... what would you folks suggest? I've seen a lot of you give some really good advice, and a lot of you are in this financial field. Any budgeting apps you would recommend? Lemme know.

Cheers.

n8r posted:

Wtf is a church pension?

SiGmA_X posted:

I'm not about to DO it, but I've always thought a castle would be badass. Tony Robbins had the right idea - rent one! Del Mar Castle

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

I literally walked out of the first dealer I went to on the day I purchased a 2019 BMW M2 worth half my take-home salary. What a nuisance that dealer was!!

Moneyball posted:

I witnessed BWM singularity this weekend. Convergence of "cruise people" and amateur art collectors. Why yes, put me down for an $11,700 painting of a cartoon owl, thank you



I mean there were some Peter Max paintings, a few Dali works, and the girl who brought me dropped some coin on a fairly pricey oil painting, but there were some questionable decisions made this weekend.

Liquid Communism posted:

FAUXTON posted:

Yes I'm having a Return of Jim in three weeks do you think you could squeeze me in?

quote:

My grandfather is visiting my family (he doesn't live in the US). One night, he fell down the stairs of my parents' house and had to be taken by ambulance to the emergency room.

Thankfully he is safe. He had visitors' coverage/travel insurance that he brought with him to the US, and my dad gave a copy of this coverage to the some of the ER staff at the hospital when taking my grandpa to the hospital. The ER staff scanned it into the computer.

My grandpa ended up needing several CT scans and lab work.

Today, we just got a bill in the mail (in my grandpa's name) in the amount of $6,673.01. The total charges were $26,692.04, and the hospital provided a $20,019.03 self pay uninsured discount to give the amount owed of $6,673.01.

This is in addition to a $979 ambulance charge.

My father did not sign any form claiming responsibility for the bill at the hospital, and the bills that have come so far to our house have been in my grandfather's name (who is a foreign national).

A $6.6K bill for the ER + nearly $1K bill for ambulance + who knows what else can be quite heavy to pay. What is the best way to move forward here?

Moneyball posted:

My favorite part about art weekend, aside from unlimited drink tickets, has to be their minimum spend to be invited to the next auction. I mean, it's four nights all inclusive at a five star hotel, but you've got to drop a minimum of $7,000 on art to be invited. "You've spent $5,700. If you just spent a little more, you'd be up over the $7,000!"

$15k - $25k: "Free" domestic cruise
$25+: European cruise, guided tour of the Hermitage, artists' homes, etc

This was the star of the show at a price tag of $43,000. Murrica.



He gonna die soon, so expect that to go up.

TraderStav posted:

He?

America is a lady dude. But yes, she's on her last legs.

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

$15k - $25k: "Free" domestic cruise

That's a nice future thread title

What is the background on this event?

Moneyball posted:

Just a buyer and reseller of art at expos and on cruise ships. I won't lie, some of the stuff I saw made me wish I had stupid amounts of money, and I briefly considered a piece for $950, but I don't care that much about art.

quote:

The biggest display was a set of six Salvador Dalí prints I immediately recognized—and couldn’t believe were being sold. In the 1940s, Dalí had collaborated with Walt Disney on a short film, Destino, for which the surrealist master drew some storyboards. The project wasn’t completed during either of their lifetimes but was later revived by Disney’s nephew Roy, whose animators turned out a seven-minute film in 2003. For the release, Disney created a set of numbered prints based on frames of the film. By 2008, Park West was offering a set of six Destino prints for $11,000, discounted from what it said was an appraisal value of $22,000.

Years later, those valuations didn’t hold up. A quick Google check (we were in port, and I had phone reception) showed recent auction estimates of $200 to $300 per Destino print. On Craigslist, someone with a set that had passed through Park West was trying to offload five for $4,000, including the company’s frames and certificates of authenticity. The Destinos also showed up in the class-action litigation against Park West; the plaintiffs cited a Dalí expert who valued the prints at $100 each.

quote:

Mostly, Park West doesn’t sell works that are unique in the sense that most casual collectors might understand. With a few high-end exceptions, it sells what are, essentially, reproductions with individual embellishments, such as a signature. The official terms include giclée, a type of inkjet print; serigraph, or silk-screen; and “mixed media,” which, in most of the Peter Max works, are paper lithographs with dabs of paint added. It took days of me hanging around the gallery and attending auctions to understand this—and I’ve covered art sales for years as a journalist, with the benefit of a Ph.D. in archaeology. Seeing actual brushstrokes threw me off. I finally saw in the Park West catalog, a copy of which is placed in every Epic stateroom, that the “intense impressionist” pictures were actually “hand embellished giclée on canvas.”

In fact, according to the company, most of Park West’s art is mass-produced to some degree. Those Kinkades Miller bid on? She won’t be getting the exact ones. Instead, she’ll get others from the same series, sent from Park West’s Florida framing and shipping facility. That way, the shipboard floor samples can stay where they are. It’s spelled out in the terms and conditions, Item 16: If you buy an embellished or mixed media work, “you likely will instead receive a unique work that is a variation of the example displayed.” Bisset, who works as the finance director of a company in Dubai, had read the fine print. “I know these pictures are not originals,” he said. “I know they are limited-edition copies. I’ve either got to want them or not.”

Liquid Communism posted:

Foma posted:

wait, not everyone here has read the Park West BWM story https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-14/ever-bought-artwork-on-a-cruise-prepare-to-be-seasick

Foma posted:

wait, not everyone here has read the Park West BWM story https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-14/ever-bought-artwork-on-a-cruise-prepare-to-be-seasick

quote:

My rabbit does like $3000 worth of damage to our apartment per year, on top of $300-400 vet bills, and a few hundred for food and bedding.

I’d like to get this figure down but whats a realistic option. Are there couches he can’t eat?

John Smith posted:

Ok... but honest question here. Wouldn't blood coming out of you convince even the most indifferent doctors? I genuinely find it difficult to imagine a halfway competent board-certified doctor looking at a patient with blood coming out of him, and saying, "Well, aren't that bad. Quit bitching". Lol.