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Had a coworker a few years that made such mind boggling decisions on money that its still hard to comprehend. When hired, he was living in a town about 80 miles north of here. Now, most people would look into a cheap apartment at first to figure out if the job would be a thing, and to look for better housing. This guy instead hauled down a small camper to live at an RV park. While strange, I guess saves on rent, but its not comfortable and is only liveable until late fall, when it gets too cold. His solution to this problem? Sold his truck as collateral for a larger camper that was better insulated. Now he had a better place to live! But no truck to do things like drive to work, or whatever. So instead he rode an 4-wheeler into work, which was liveable until late November. He would bum rides to work from other coworkers who lived out in that direction, but he never once chipped in for gas or seemed all that thankful, so that eventually stopped. He traded in the 4-wheeler for a car from a friend, so at least he was able to survive the winter. Spring arrives and he is ready to have his wife and son move down for the summer, as he didn't want to pull him from school after it had started. So they moved in, now they had 3 people living in a camper. Now, money was still a problem as his job likely paid pretty well, but he was retarded with spending and went out too often. The solution they came up was the pay a dog breeder to get their dog pregnant with some certified dog and then sell the puppies. He thought he could sell each puppy for 400-500 bucks for some reason. Turns out raising puppies in a camper is a bad idea, as a half dozen puppies will poo poo everywhere. Also he only got 250 each for the 4 he sold, 1 was given away as a gift and the other was payment to the breeder. They moved out of the camper sometime after this, and made their 1st reasonable move into a single-wide that had neat things like central heat and showers (communal showers at the RV park, imagine having to walk 100 yds to take a shower in December.) But after making a good decision, it was time to make some stupid ones. So he bought a boat. A used one that was in pretty shaky condition. Since he didn't have a truck or a trailer, it had to be delivered to a local lake, and he had to pay berthing on it. So he decided he needed a truck. Now, there are car lots full of reasonable trucks as people trade in constantly, so finding a good used truck should have been easy. So he ends up with a diesel F-250 that was lifted a good 4-5", you know, too high to fit a trailer to it. It was incredible how bad he was with money. I just remembered that before he moved down, they had won some settlement for something and got 25k. Was this money used to pay off credit cards? Pay off other debts? Save for the future? Nope, his wife got a nose-job, he bought a giant TV and they took a vacation somewhere. From what he said, that entire 25k was gone in a month or so, and they little to show for it beyond a shiny TV and a nose. Not sure if the nose was shiny. After he quit here, he left to move to the oilfields in ND/WY and that's the last we heard from him beyond the occasional creditor trying to track him down. Probably the saddest thing on this is he was in his 40's, yet acted like a teenager with money.
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Jun 28, 2013 21:25
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coreycoryecorey posted:I guess that is good he could cancel them, but it just seems like a bad idea to me. It is a massively bad idea. Its not 2001 and the PS2 anymore, stores are going to have a shitload of them, and anyone trying to flip them is going to be going up against thousands of other people trying to do the same.
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Jul 2, 2013 06:30
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razz posted:I'm not sure I really get the whole "getting clearance" thing. So does a person apply for a job and then if they get denied, they have to go before a judge and just lay it all on the line and hopes that the judge rules in their favor? Then what happens, if the judge says "yeah you're good for clearance" then do they automatically get the job or what? Or do you ALWAYS have to go before a judge when applying for a position that requires clearance? They are applying for a security clearance which is required for getting a job. What happens is they apply for a job hoping their skill set is wanted enough by the employer that they'll pay for the clearance testing. The job is somewhat incidental, once you get clearance, its yours and can be moved around. Its like a general rubber stamp that says "This person pretty much has their poo poo together." Generally, people go in for an appointment and are asked a shitload of questions about their life. Before they go in, someone is running a pretty thorough background check on them, interviewing friends/family and so on. When stories don't line up, or you don't disclose information you should have, you can torpedo your clearance extremely quickly. I had a neighbor interviewing for a country deputy position and another officer came by and asked me a ton of questions about him. Our schedules didn't line up well, so I didn't know him very well, but almost every question was on general character. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 17:23
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Kate Hate posted:My mom is a huge fan of Rent-A-Center/Colortyme/Aaron's/all stupid rent to own bullshit stores. I try to tell her that she could just save the drat monthly payments she would make on a couch or whatever and go out and buy one, but she still keeps going back. I've never been to one of those stores before and I don't see the appeal. I guess I don't have that "but I want it NOWWWW" trait that their customers have. I went to one after I moved to a new town and had squat for furniture, thinking I'd look into a sofa and other random furniture. Everything in there was priced at least 2x what normal retail is, and doing the math on the payments it got obscenely expensive quickly. For an okish sofa, you were looking at 20 bucks a week for a year. I listened to the salesman talk to a customer and they were going to be paying 80 bucks a week for their furniture.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:29
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Old Fart posted:Senior year, I got a gift of $1200 cash, so I bought a used school bus. Are we talking normal Blue Bird full length school bus? Or a short bus? Because I've seen people buy weird poo poo on an impulse, but a school bus wasn't one of them until now. Congrats on getting everything else together though. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Aug 22, 2013 |
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Aug 22, 2013 16:44
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Rockzilla posted:Nah, he just gets bored with his knives really quickly. He takes care of them, but as soon as he finds something newer and cooler he sells or barters off his old ones. I almost don't want to know how its possible to get bored of a knife. I understand that there are levels of craftsmanship at work here in high quality knives, but what would a new knife do differently? Anyway, while out to lunch with some coworkers, we saw the wife of the person I mentioned earlier, and it looks like they traded down their giant lifted F-250 King Ranch for a slightly smaller F-150 that was still lifted, and had the exhaust running through stacks like an 18-wheeler. I really hope he got his poo poo in line, but I doubt it. Even oil money can't fix stupid.
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Aug 28, 2013 06:14
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dreesemonkey posted:I have another friend who could be wealthy, but ends up spending most of his money. What are they doing with them? Just drive them for a bit and sell them?
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Sep 3, 2013 17:23
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P.D.B. Fishsticks posted:In addition, the living room is pretty small in this house, maybe 10 by 14 feet or so. They had a wall-mounted 30" LCD, which made sense given the size of the room. But the husband decided that wasn't big enough, so he went to the rent-to-own place he used to work and traded it in... for an 80", rear-projection, analog TV. This thing's depth is 20% of the width of their living room, and you're only sitting 6 feet from it. The picture quality is atrocious compared to a modern LCD, it's far too big for the room, but hey - with the trade-in, it only cost them $2000! And, of course, they're making monthly payments on it, so it's such a good deal! I've done the giant TV thing before in a small apartment it was terrible. It was 2005 or so and I had this genius idea that I didn't like this CRT TV I was using, and a friend of mine needed a TV, so I upgraded. To a 52" Mitsubishi Rear Projection set. At the time, my couch sat about 6-7' from the TV and I could get motion sickness if I leaned forward while on the couch. I had that for close to year, sold it to a coworker who had a basement that it would be perfect in and got a 32" LCD from Costco. Kinda wish I had room for it, because if you sat the right distance from it the picture quality was honestly really good, shame that right distance was in the hallway outside my apartment. Actually TV's are my own albatross for being bad with money. A friend is using the same 24" CRT for about 18 years now, I've gone through 4 in 10 years, but I think the plasma I have now is a keeper. At least until OLED get cheap. CitizenKain fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 19:01
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SpelledBackwards posted:Inches, you say? That wasn't motion sickness, you were hitting your head on the TV. Well, it was a pretty small living room. But yea, ' not ".
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Sep 13, 2013 22:44
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Harry posted:A computer store I used to go to in the 90s got massacred due to selling people computers with pirated versions of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. The store was gone overnight and reopened a year later owned by someone else. Many years ago a local computer store where I used to live got their rear end sued to the ground by Microsoft. They'd be selling computers with pirated Win98 on them, they would break and people would come to office supply stores to get advice or to buy a new computer. Talked to one really upset woman who discovered her $2k high end computer wasn't, and was using all stolen software that she thought she purchased.
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Oct 16, 2013 23:33
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melon cat posted:I've seen similar things with oil rig workers at Fort Mac- they pull in $2500 biweekly paycheques, and their accounts are still overdrawn. Meth. Depending on how the area surrounding the oil industry is, the oil workers might be spending half their check just on rent for a 2bd singlewide they share with another worker.
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Oct 17, 2013 15:25
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corkskroo posted:Yeah, I don't know exactly what the problem was, just that he said it in a "hey I'm so dumb hurr dee hurr" sort of way. I think anyone who used Netflix's disc service ended up doing that at some point. I rented a movie and didn't have time to watch it for awhile, so I ended up paying 3 months of subscription to sit on a movie. Not even sure I ever watched it before sending it back.
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Dec 30, 2013 20:38
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I feel like buying a new should be an automatic entry into this thread, but I'm getting ready to drop 30k on a new car. In my defense, I've been saving up for it for about 6 years, I'll be able to put half the asking price as a down payment so I can keep my payments reasonable.
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Mar 18, 2014 23:24
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No Wave posted:It's fun to watch people be really good at things. What you enjoy watching will vary depending on your interests. I used to be crazy about Top Chef for that reason... No, I've saved up a lot of other money, but always peeled some aside for the car. Rest has been put into savings, IRA, 401k and such. I've got enough saved up to buy the car outright, but why not take advantage of low interest employee loan.
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Mar 19, 2014 18:39
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seacat posted:How did you manage to spend $1500 on a head gasket? it's not that hard a fix if the engine is still in good shape On Subaru's you have to pull the engine. They had a run from 97 - 04 ish where the head gaskets corroded extremely fast and it wasn't until the 05 models that they had a new head gasket that doesn't implode.
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Mar 26, 2014 16:24
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Mantle posted:I don't know if this counts as bad with money or just being young. I have a friend that works as a reservist in the army a few days a week and at Sport Chek another few days a week, so not making that much money. He's 20 years old and I've been trying to teach him about saving, investing, financial planning, that kind of stuff since I wish I had started earlier. I thought I had gotten him excited about planning by showing him an article about how if he started saving just $361 every month he would retire a millionaire, whereas at my age I'd have to save close to $1000/month. This would be totally doable by him with the amount he's working now and him living at home. Unless you are rolling in cash, no one is saving 360 bucks a month when you are 20. I mean, paying 25k on a Ford Focus isn't smart at all, but even if he was driving a hand me down beater I doubt he'd have the money to save that much.
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Apr 18, 2014 15:58
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Authentic You posted:e:^^^ What in the hell. It's still way cheaper for me to have some groceries go bad and have to buy them again than it is to go out all the time. Besides, if you're worried about letting your produce rot, buy frozen/canned veggies. And yeah, making some big pots of chili and stew and curry you can freeze and reheat is really easy to do and saves money AND time. When I first moved to where I'm at now, I didn't have any furniture beyond a lovely futon and a bed. I wandered into a nearby rent-a-center knowing that it was more expensive then buying things outright, but not really realizing how much so. It was pretty eye opening to see how much they were nailing people for stuff in there, if you were to fill a living room with basic furniture you'd probably pay something like 80-90 bucks a week for at least a year, and you'd be out double what the stuff cost.
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Apr 21, 2014 21:23
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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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EugeneJ posted:Waiting to see what the new models look like when they're unveiled in July. You are considering paying real money on a riding lawnmower that doesn't have a cutting deck while you have an existing good car that isn't garbage.
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May 25, 2014 06:33
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:Also you guys are talking about seat warmers but not the infinitely more awesome seat coolers. I had rented a 2014 Taurus once that had seat coolers, I wish it had been warmer so I could have used them more.
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May 28, 2014 23:30
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dividertabs posted:Has the topic of credit unions ever come up? The kind of person that uses "doesn't trust banks" to not open a checking account is probably someone who either has already been booted from a credit union, or doesn't know/care about the difference. A friend of mine got pretty hosed by never getting a credit card when he was younger to establish some form of credit history when he was buying a house. When they do a credit pull and the answer from the credit agency is a "who?", he got nailed on interest rates.
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Jun 3, 2014 05:34
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LLCoolJD posted:Not to deny the truth of your post about the value of a credit card, but a credit card isn't do-or-die. I had a good credit rating when I got my mortgage, and I've never used a credit card. (I did have a stable income, some savings, plus I had been paying utilities and significant ($800/month) student loans for years without late payments.). Its just of all the things you can do, getting a credit card and paying it off is one of the easiest ways to generate a positive credit report. There is more to why my friend didn't have much of a credit report, plus his own bad with money story.
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Jun 4, 2014 06:10
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FrozenVent posted:It came from A/T: I get the mail part being dumb, but I don't see how you'd be to collections for someone being unable to charge you, unless you are tied to a contract.
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Jun 9, 2014 22:12
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rrrrrrrrrrrt posted:loving shoot me if I'm ever selling my vacation time back to my company. I didn't even know that was a thing people did. I would poo poo rainbows if I could. I sit near cap on vacation often, if I could sell half back and get a nice paycheck, I'd be all over that. I really should take more time off, but I just don't have anywhere to go or people to go somewhere with, so most of my time off is wasted.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:28
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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.
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Jun 19, 2014 15:50
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Weatherman posted:OK, that's just messed up on a number of levels. Is this something that normal people think, or are they in some sort of Disney cult? Because when I think of Disney I don't think "happy memories", I think "five figures of debt" and "loving copyright leeches". Most people think of Disney as the company that made those movies they grew up watching and their kids love. I went to Disney land almost 30 years ago and there are parts of the trip I can still remember really well, I'm not saying I'd go 16k into debt to go visit, but I certainly see why people want to go.
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Jul 12, 2014 06:09
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Renegret posted:Pretty much this. I wish I could do that. I have 160 hours of sick banked up.
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Aug 7, 2014 01:29
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pig slut lisa posted:Nooooo if your pancreas fails you (note: one of several hundred fun surprises your body may spring on you at any moment!) and you need to spend a month in a medically induced coma and then three more months out of the office recuperating you will be super happy you can just bleed off your accumulated sick days instead of having to take unpaid FMLA, or worse, quit your job. Any long term illness I would go on short term disability if I'm going to be gone for 2 or more weeks. They'd drain the sick time until then however.
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Aug 7, 2014 17:56
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Guinness posted:All ya'll with hundreds of hours of banked vacation/sick time need to take some time off. Working that much with no break ain't good for you. Seriously, take 2+ weeks and do something fun and totally disconnect. It's good for your body, mind, and soul. We can't use sick for that. I am sitting on over 100 hours of vacation, but actually using has always been an issue for me.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:29
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Boris Galerkin posted:I've never bought a car before and I'm a mid twenties professional. All this cartalk sounds confusing. How would I even shop for a car anyway? I'm smart enough to understand that salesmen will keep hounding me what I want to pay per month so they can charge me up with interest vs just telling me the total cost but that's about it. I always thought cars were 30,000$+ ordeals. What are these nice 10-15000$ nice cars? Do you know someone who is even remotely into cars? Also, hit up car related sites like Car and Driver, Autoblog, Edmunds and so on, most are going to focus on more interesting cars then a grocery getter. If all else fails, find a price range you like, hit up some of the major manufacturers and see what is in your range, find something that looks good and do some research. I like the Ford Fusions I get as rentals when I'm on the road. Don't expect much in the 10-15 range for new though, most things in there are going to be barebones. There are some pretty major quality of life improvements on higher package ranges. If you are in a cold climate, heated seats are a life changing experience.
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Aug 11, 2014 16:57
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Radbot posted:Yeah, I had that same situation - maxing Roth IRA and my Designated Roth Account, no consumer debt, and was still told how stupid I was for getting a new car. The new car bugaboo is frankly loving weird compared to the silence about mortgage and private student debt. A lot of people just don't like cars or driving, so they see any money above the minimum as wasted. I can understand that, there are many places in this country where owning a car is a huge albatross and driving is painful. I don't live in those places, so I have a car that I love to drive and its been one of the best purchases I've ever made.
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Aug 11, 2014 18:06
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canyoneer posted:People are idiots though. A coworker makes all of her financial decisions based on Nascar sponsorship of a single driver.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:41
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DEMAG posted:As a huge NASCAR fan and commentator that is loving hilarious! Which driver? If I had to guess I'm going to go with Jeff Gordon. DuPont didn't work out better dump it all in 3M! Dale Jr. She stopped eating M&Ms because a rival driver is sponsored by them.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:42
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VideoTapir posted:If selling an item on false pretenses counts as a scam, it's a scam. I always feel really bad for these kids, although some of them are in their early 20's. Last guy that came by I gave him a beer and a water before sending him on his way. I don't know how they always manage to stop by the rare days I have off where I'm in town, its uncanny.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:26
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BigDave posted:Isint that illegal? Pretty sure intentionally devaluing a company to purchase it at a low cost is fraud. Depends on what the reason is that Apple called their loan. My guess is that GT A couldn't meet milestones and Apple pulled their money. But I bet Apple really wants those patents for the next Iphone and the watch so they can used at a company that can actually produce the numbers they want.
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Oct 8, 2014 19:53
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My current car needs premium, and I was asked if I could notice the extra money when fueling up. To be honest, the extra 3 bucks when filling up doesn't really matter to the monthly payments. Plus the car is a shitload of fun to drive, so it all works out.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:29
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This is terrible with money:quote:Hedge Fund Manager Loses 99.8% In 9 Months, Tells Investors He Is "Sorry" For "Overzealousness" http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-21/hedge-fund-manager-loses-998-9-months-tells-investors-he-sorry-overzealousness Now, I know nothing about hedge funds, but I bet I could throw darts at a board and not lose 99 million dollars in 9 months. In fact, I could outright steal half of it and they'd still be better off.
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Jan 22, 2015 04:19
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LorneReams posted:Why are people so loving afraid of SAR and transaction reports? If you have like 20 of them in a week, someone might start asking questions, but there are people who literally deposit >$25K in cash every day with no issue. It boggles my mind why someone would want to take a legal transaction and make it illegal for absolutely no gain. If you consistently deposit that much money, they'll stop filling out SARs when they've found out its no long suspicious. Its when its some idiot depositing 17k out of the blue with no records of how he got the money, they are getting a SAR filed.
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Jan 24, 2015 07:40
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Whuh, why. How. Who has looked at Radioshack since the early 2000's and thought "This company is going places other then a painful bankruptcy."
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Feb 3, 2015 05:43
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loving Radioshack. A company that hasn't been worth poo poo since the 90s, and someone goes all in on it. I'm not investing genius, but when something loses 99% of its value in 5 years, its not because its suddenly going to change direction.
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Feb 8, 2015 06:39
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