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Bloody Queef posted:But now I'm worried that my brother will be pissed I'm buying his kid so much poo poo. He's a tightwad like I am. Yeah, they might not want it cluttering up the house either. And they might feel somewhat obligated to keep it to not hurt your feelings. I know parents who have Thunderdome rules for new toys: two toys enter, one toy leaves. For everything you buy, donate/toss something else. Seems like a smart policy.
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Apr 11, 2014 00:47
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My dad had a 1961 Fender Stratocaster that he purchased for $400 in the early 70's. It's a beautiful, highly collectible instrument worth upwards of $20k. It is the instrument I learned to play guitar on, and we all have memories of him playing it. It's always sort of been the family joke (but not really a joke) that we'd all fight for it when he died, as it is the most valuable/interesting/memorable asset he owns. They've had money problems for a long time, stemming from a period of unemployment/underemployment where they were putting groceries for 5 kids on credit cards. Now they both work as teachers, and are still having money problems. A few years ago, he came up with the idea to sell his guitar to pay down credit card debt. I thought it was a great idea, stuff is just stuff, and getting out of debt is a smart thing to do. One of my sisters opposed it, saying that they were just going to get into more debt again, and in a year they'll be in just as much debt as before but no longer have the cool guitar. He sold it to Joe Satriani and made over $20k from it even after consignment fees. That was three years ago, and they still have credit card debt and no more cool guitar  If I ever get an enormous windfall of money, at least now I know who to contact to try and buy it back.
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Apr 14, 2014 18:19
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baquerd posted:Talented writer gets undergrad paid for by her parents, lands a full-ride MFA followed by a fellowship, and is living in one of the lowest cost parts of the country. So of course she goes $40,000 in debt for "linen curtains and homemade granola". My wife's sister once had a boyfriend with a good job. He worked for one of the sports networks, working in the camera room for NHL games and drew a really nice salary. He was a nice guy too. This sister spent over $10k on credit cards at Pottery Barn and antique stores furnishing their apartment. Then she cheated on him with an unemployed, fat and creepy 19 year old (she was 30) from her community college improv class who she played World of Warcraft with. As part of her breakup with the cool hockey boyfriend, she threw away or destroyed all those designer decorations she had bought less than a year ago, including a set of two antique Tiffany chairs that were worth over $1,000 each. They're still together, and he has never had a job (except for 2 weeks at Blockbuster, then he decided that was "beneath him"). He used his only paycheck from Blockbuster to fly out to New Mexico to visit a 15 year old WoW guildmate who was depressed because his mom was cutting off his subscription for getting bad grades. Moms just don't understand, man. I'd like to think that the kid saw that he was on the path to being a pathetic manchild and got scared straight. They also have two kids now, and have been floating for the last few years a few months at a time mooching off various family members. They are also the most ungrateful mooches ever. She was shopping for a birthday present for him, and wanted to get him "pajama shorts", because "he gets so hot wearing his long pajama pants all day" as he plays Playstation and Warcraft. Most people's solution to that is to, y'know, shower and get dressed. He withdrew $2,500 from an account his mom had set up for his education so he could "get a laptop for school", and bought a $2,500 gaming laptop and never registered for any classes. A family member used some connections to get her a sweet job working in the marketing department for the newspaper. Really stuck their neck out and pulled in some favors to get her set up here. In the 15 work-days she was employed there before she quit, she called out for 7 of them and rigged one of the newspaper's promotional giveaways for a 2 night stay at a nice resort in town so that her boyfriend would win it under a fake name. With her one paycheck from the newspaper, she spent all of it on $8/bag organic snacks from Whole Foods, gourmet beer/soda, fake nails and hundreds of dollars in lingerie. She's waiting for "the credit card debt to drop off" when the statute of limitations expires. She says it's completely immoral for the debt collectors to keep harassing her, because she doesn't even have the stuff anymore! Checkmate, creditors  By some miracle, her own $20k+ private student loan debt (for a degree she didn't finish) from Washington Mutual disappeared during WaMu's bankruptcy and sale to JP Morgan Chase and she hasn't heard a word about it since 2008. Mother in law has got some financial problems of her own due to all the mooching adult children and stepchildren. I had to talk her out of buying another car and giving them the old one (7 year old Altima with maybe 50k miles). They didn't need the other car they were looking at, they were just going to buy another one so they could give away the old one. The daughter got in a huge fight with mom a couple years ago and swore she'd never speak to her again, "I'm divorcing this family and want you out of my life", etc. Mom had been sending checks for a few hundred a month and paying her phone bill, and wouldn't you know, someone's still cashing the monthly checks....
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Apr 14, 2014 21:48
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Engineer Lenk posted:I'm betting the marshmallow test administered at age 5 would be a better predictor of credit card debt at age 40 than any amount of financial literacy education. The marshmallow test is actually a better indicator of "how poor is the household you're growing up in?", which probably has some predictive effects about debt levels at age 40 anyway. Here's a guy. http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/233lfv/im_in_way_over_my_head_and_need_help/ Took out a 6 year car loan on a $14k used car with 51,000 miles at a 14% interest rate  . Also spends $76/month on a gym membership, which at $76/month I am going to assume is inside a solid gold Saudi palace.GoGoGadgetChris posted:"I don't want to live in a cardboard box and eat Alpo" is an excuse people make to avoid saving for retirement. That's a good way to end up living in a box eating Alpo! Dog food is not nutritionally complete. You need primate chow. There was a guy who did an experiment to try to eat nothing but monkey chow for 7 days, and had to give up after three days. Sadly, the website is gone 
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Apr 15, 2014 19:35
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I can see why gyms are expensive if they include unique amenities or have round the clock instructor led classes. I can also see why people would choose to spend more than average for a well provisioned gym that they use often. But someone who is horribly in debt with a 16% underwater used car loan should at least try to find a cheaper way to exercise. Here's another from reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/22pf20/im_about_to_have_a_panic_attack_just_found_out_my/ quote:I'm about to have a panic attack. Just found out my GF of 5 years has $166,000 in student loans. I want to stay with her forever, but this is loving terrifying. (US) (self.personalfinance) Relationship protip: you should have some idea about these sorts of things if you're dating someone for a long time. Surprise!  And then his girlfriend makes a thread. http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/22y0d5/i_am_the_gf_of_guyterrifiedofdebt_who_posted_last/ She's a nurse who is working (not in a hospital!) in San Francisco for $64k/yr, with rates between 5% and 7.9%, planning on having her loans forgiven through the public service program thing. At least she got a useful degree. Doesn't public service loan forgiveness only apply to federal loans and not private loans anyway? Fortunately, it looks like they're both getting pretty sound advice.
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Apr 15, 2014 22:53
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Anne Whateley posted:Salaried people paid biweekly have a huge advantage over hourly wage workers -- those two unbudgeted paychecks. Makes the math so much easier to get paid 24 times a year though. I used to work at a department store. They had a pretty sweet employee discount, 25% off. The cool thing is that 25% off applied to sale prices/clearance stuff also. So if something was 70% off for all the plebs, employees would get another 25% off of that price. That also means that they could hide all the good stuff in the days leading up to the sale for their own purchasing, which is why you can never find things in your size on sale  The catch with the discount is that you must use a store credit card to get your discount. The rates on them were horrible, 20%+ interest rates for most people. The store made it really easy though, you could make a payment on your card right at the cash register. So a smart employee would purchase something with their card for the discount, and immediately pay it off with cash or check. More than half of the people I worked with carried balances on their 20%+ interest rate store credit card. They didn't conceptually understand that if you carry a balance on your card for a month or two, you've wiped out all of your "savings" from the discount. You could always tell who they were, because they would make a cash payment on their card BEFORE purchasing something, so they could free up some credit limit on their maxed out cards. I keep in touch with some friends who worked there, and a couple of them only paid off their card 3 years after they stopped working there.That employer only matched your 401k contributions if you were putting it in company stock. There were a number of managers there who had been working there for 20+ years and had six figure balances in company stock, with no other investments. It went from $30/share to $3/ share at the depth of the recession in the space of 2 years, and many of them panic sold it. Now 5 years later, it has bounced up to $90/share. Some of those people would be really well set up Can't complain too much. I was enrolled in the plan when stock was $3/share, and sold at $36/share, turning $600 of my pre-tax earnings into a $10k down payment on my house 
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Apr 18, 2014 17:52
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SiGmA_X posted:A month at 20% APR is 1.66% and 2 months is 3.33%, so I think they're still saving money with a 25% discount. I worked at a Sears when I was pondering life after highschool between college and college, and we had the same deal - employees made payments to use their store cards. It was sad. You're right  The underlying principle remains, because everyone seemed to have either had zero balance always or maxed-out always.
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Apr 18, 2014 21:32
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Having had bedbugs once, the best policy for used furniture is "nothing with upholstery of any kind". And check the non-upholstered stuff thoroughly too. And please, please, please, never pick up something off the curb. They might be throwing it out because it's full of bedbugs, and you just picked up a free couch for $2000 in bedbug treatment.
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Apr 21, 2014 23:29
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Jeffrey posted:both are ripoffs compared to pirating books if we're really going down this road I just use my imagination, and entertain myself for hours My sister mentioned the other day about how she put a Disneyland trip on credit cards a few years ago when her husband was unemployed (to be fair, he was unemployed a lot). Her kids probably don't even remember it, and she realized that by the time they'll have paid it off, with the amount she spent she could have done the trip in one of the $300/night hotel rooms. People can vacation however they want, but I know a few people who just MUST take their annual family Disneyland trip, regardless of whether or not they can afford it that year. Also bad with money? Boat owners who don't live right next to a body of water or have a ton of money to burn. Owning a ski boat is a rich person's game.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:32
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:You boring motherfuckers editing your posts. God drat. Here's a synopsis: Veskit tried to talk a kid out of wanting to feed the birds for tuppence a bag and he and all of his rich old man banker friends sang a song together. Everyone else in the thread said "interest rates are garbage right now anyway, feeding the birds is the better investment"
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Apr 25, 2014 00:22
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There is a time value for money. The sooner your insurance provider gets the cash from you, the better their life is. So they cut you a discount to encourage you to pay up front.
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Apr 25, 2014 05:57
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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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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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I think I read somewhere criticizing Clash of Clans for nerfing purchased items indirectly by releasing bigger and better store items all the time. So spending $2k is probably just keeping up on the treadmill of always having the best and nicest pretend castle or something in a phone game. I can't decide if that is more or less pathetic than a World of Warcraft player who has been playing since launch spending $2,000 on expansions and subscriptions to date.
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Apr 28, 2014 18:49
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Duckman2008 posted:A fairly close cousin of mine, who used to be big into music and after high school made her living as a nurse of some sort, now wants to major Music Therapy at a private school. She posted in Facebook something along the lines of "thoughts on good idea or bad idea?" And everyone is just saying every stereotype on how education trumps any financial consideration. My favorite quote: I went to school with a girl who left a big-shot high dollar marketing job in NYC for an international sourcing firm that she landed right out of undergraduate to go be a dance instructor for a summer at a Caribbean beach resort. The difference is that her uncle owns the company she left (and can go back anytime), and she comes from a family of literal billionaires. So following your dreams and not worrying about money is a great move if you're from the kind of family that will never have to worry about money.
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May 6, 2014 07:21
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Two stories. Just heard about an acquaintance's career/home buying plans through a mutual friend. She just got married. They are relocating from Los Angeles (living with roommates) and want to buy a house in a decently sized city in another western state. He has been unemployed for over a year. She has been working multiple jobs at restaurants, hotels, reception work, but all of them part time. They just spent something over $30k on their wedding. A third of that was the venue rental only. They didn't have a meal served or open bar (snack foods and a cash bar). I know it's a BFC tradition to argue about the reasonableness of wedding costs, but really, how did they manage to spend $30k without food or drink? Now they want to move to a new city and buy a house there, and were asking about how to qualify for a mortgage. They have highly transient jobs, long periods of unemployment, and low income reliability. Also, she wants to get her old job back here, working as a dealer in a casino. She makes a good income there, but I really doubt she's was claiming all of her tips for tax purposes, which she'll have to do if she wants to use that income to qualify for a mortgage. Second story: My wife's stepsister is a horrible person and a mooch. Short background on the family dynamics: Her father (wife's stepfather) is so rad, and a great dad and awesome guy. But she hates him, because she blames him for her mother's depression and their divorce. The real story is that her mom spiraled into a long depressive period after the skydiving instructor she was banging (they were both married) died in a skydiving accident, which eventually led to discovering the infidelity and marital problems ending in divorce. The daughter still doesn't know this happened, because her mother has been telling her all along it was because her dad was a jerk. Whatever. She's very manipulative, and convinced her father and stepmother to cosign for her student loans to go to culinary school in New York City @ $15k/semester plus living expenses. She has graduated, and of course, she's dead broke and making zero payments on the student loans. She just married her culinary school boyfriend, and her father made her an offer. He would either help pay for their wedding, or keep paying on her student loans after she got married. She chose "pay for the wedding." PS it's going to be in NYC at a mega expensive venueI should note also that at the wedding, she didn't invite her father sit at the "family" table (where her mom and mom's boyfriend were sitting). She also barely took any photos with him, he was just another guest. She had her brother escort her down the aisle, and did the "daddy dance" with her mom's boyfriend (who she has been dating for less than a year and lives in a different city). So now she's married, and dad no longer has to pay for her student loans, according to their agreement. Within a week, she calls and informs him "Well, I can't pay for these loans. And you're cosigned on them, so you're on the hook for them no matter what. So unless you keep paying them, nobody pays them". He's paying for the loans again.
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May 6, 2014 17:11
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Nail Rat posted:Flowers. Shittons and shittons of flowers and crazy centerpieces that can be brought home. That's my guess. Oh yeah, that's one detail I know. She had to have orange flowers, but some special flower in orange that is out of season and had to be flown in from Asia or something. The bouquet had to have the stems spend a few minutes in water at least every 15 minutes, or else it would die. I imagine she had a rotating cast of bouquet babysitters who kept running it back and forth from her hands into a tiny vase. They spent almost $6k on a photographer for a single day of shooting and a brief edited video. One of them worked for years in film production, and probably knows dozens of competent pros who would have done it for a "friend discount" at much less than $6k. Strong Sauce posted:I sympathize with your wife's father. But how did he not see that coming? Heartbroken, really. She's never wanted to be close to him. Some years the only time he ever hears from her is a brief phone call on his birthday or father's day. Some years she doesn't call at all. Her mother lives in the same city as he does, and she visits her mom a couple times a year, but even though she's literally 3 miles away, she won't make arrangements to visit or meet for lunch or anything. I should note that dad isn't moneybags. He's an engineer that makes a decent living, probably in the low 6 figures, but they don't have a lot of money left after paying for all the mooches in their life (see my post history in this thread for more examples of what they have to deal with)
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May 6, 2014 18:02
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Folly posted:Wedding chat makes me feel old. I had to include inflation calculation to compare my price to these. Now I just felt old, because I went on the CPI website to check your calculation. Start year, well, 14 years ago, thats got to be 1990... No. It's 2000 Here's one. Not "bad with money", but "silly ideas about money" Someone in the family had a mysterious infection for a while, which we all suspect was syphilis (due to her swinger lifestyle  )She complained that she didn't have the money to go see the doctor. She was uninsured. Her sister, who has spent her entire adult life under military health insurance, said "That's stupid, who doesn't have enough money to see a doctor? It's only like, $25." She's not stupid or anything, just the realities of life without health insurance were not familiar to her.
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May 6, 2014 19:44
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Rudager posted:Come on now, this isn't a movie, why is she going to trust an anonymous letter over her mother? I don't even know her. Never met her. There is probably nobody she would trust who both knows the truth and would tell her. She may actually know already, who knows? Like I said, I've never met her. My wife hasn't seen her for years. Regardless, I'm pretty sure she has just made a decision to hate her father and everyone else associated with him. Perhaps someday in life she'll regret that choice, but I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
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May 7, 2014 01:02
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I have an acquaintance on facebook who is pretty bad with money. He started a "clothing line" of cafepress tshirts with logos he designed. He's not a good artist by ANY stretch. https://www.facebook.com/pages/MAD-ART-Clothing-Company/309630719056165 He's also a valet at some nice restaurant, because of course that "business" isn't paying the bills. Last year, (before I began ignoring his posts) he posted a hilarious combo of posts. One was a picture of him parking a Lamborghini owned by a pro baseball player. An hour later he posts an angry rant about how the guy "only" tipped him $8, and he knows the guy makes millions each year and can afford to tip more. I would think an $8 tip would be a decent tip for a valet taking 5 minutes to park your car (that he had a fun time driving) But you heard it here first: Tipping at restaurants should be a percentage of the bill, tipping valet service is supposed to be a percentage of your gross income.
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May 7, 2014 17:46
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My dad just bought a used truck from a guy in my city on craigslist. Dad lives in a city a couple hours away. He bought the truck for $5k, and needed a loan for $4k. If you've ever bought from a private party with a loan, it's sort of a pain. It would be logistically difficult to have the guy go to dad's credit union in another city to transfer the title. So the credit union offered him a short term personal loan at 14% interest so he could have $4k in cash right away, pay the guy, drive the truck back, and convert it to a 3% auto loan. Instead, I volunteered to float him $4k for a weekend so he could pay cash and get the title transferred to the bank once he drove it home. This kept him from having to take a 14% loan (with some origination fees) for a week for $4k. If his finances were in order the scenario could have gone two ways. He could have paid cash outright for the car, having saved up for it for a year or two (because he knew he had to replace his old vehicle). Or he could have taken $4k from his emergency fund for the weekend and taken out the car loan the next week and replenished his emergency fund. The moral of the story is that financial freedom comes from saving and budgeting. I'm happy to help him out, but I wish for his sake that he didn't need the help.
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May 13, 2014 18:06
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:Do not leave any amount sitting in your paypal account. moana posted:Double ditto on this. Paypal is a bunch of bitches, do not ever ever ever leave money in there like it's a bank. It is not a bank, it's not FDIC insured. Learn this lesson. I learned that lesson by having $600 tied up in PayPal purgatory for 3 months and spending 12+ hours on the phone with customer service people. 
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May 14, 2014 01:16
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Folly posted:giving away money Yeah. I once dated a girl who was a money fountain to her friends, cousin, sister, etc. She made like $12/hr as a massage therapist and didn't get a lot of hours. I had no idea how she was financially surviving. She was paying her adult cousin's $200 electric bill for months on end. Her cousin was in a two income household, had two kids, and was renting an enormous house with a well stocked bar. Husband was into dirt bikes also, which can be one of the most  experiences you can have with vehicles without getting into boats, aircraft, or desert racing. Maybe don't buy as much booze next week and you can keep the lights on in your rented McMansion?That would have been a total dealbreaker for me. Never came up, because (surprise!) there were several other dealbreakers besides
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May 16, 2014 18:34
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Hip Hoptimus Prime posted:As for all the retirees who only have Social Security and nothing else--the smarter ones move somewhere cheap. In Nicaragua, Guatemala, or certain parts of Belize, you can live extremely well on $1,500/month, with cheaper everything including medical care. Me and my husband are considering becoming expats once he leaves the Army to try to get away from the rat race here. Added bonus: they're cash societies for the most part, so it's unlikely we'd ever have a lot of debt, if any at all, if we stayed there. I can keep working an online job and he'll have a VA disability pension, so that's how we'd be able to do it. I wouldn't depend on that. You should probably save your money as if you'll need more than $1,500/month in retirement. You know where else seemed like a great place to retire? 1950s Cuba and 1990s Venezuela.
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May 20, 2014 05:29
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Strong Sauce posted:I both love and detest this thread. The loving worst tangents ever. Checks. Braces. Foreign ownership of debt? No one cares about that stupid poo poo, I just want to hear about the man or woman who spent their last $100 to take a loan out on last year's flat screen TV instead of paying rent. Is that too much to ask? Fine. Here's one: Some sellers on Craigslist are bad with money. I was in the market for a motorcycle, and had my eye on a few different make/model/year ranges. I did the smart thing, which is to watch craigslist for a few weeks, set bookmarks, and see what stuff was actually getting sold for. If a guy lists a motorcycle for $3k on Friday and the listing is gone on Monday, I can assume that it has been sold for something close to asking price. I saw a motorcycle come up that should have been about $3200, with an asking price of $2500. I called the guy within 10 minutes of the ad being up, met up with him 30 minutes later, and was riding away within 90 minutes of his ad being posted. He mentioned at the bank that "Gee, I've had 8 missed calls from other people calling about this since we started driving to the bank". Yeah, that's because you listed a smoking deal. He was selling this perfectly serviceable motorcycle so he could buy a BRAND NEW sport bike (and his driving record is so bad that he has to insure it in his mom's name). I bet he needed $2500 for the down payment, and that's where he set his price. I rode it for a year, put 10,000 miles on it (went from 14k miles to 24k miles), and sold it for $3,000. Original seller could have gotten another $500-700 easy, if he had been smarter about setting his asking price. On the flip side, there are people with hilariously high ideas of what their stuff is worth on craigslist. Sorry dude, nobody is going to buy your 2013 Ford Focus with gaudy rims for $16k. But please, go ahead and repost it 3 times a day just in case.
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May 21, 2014 18:45
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Penny wise, pound foolish. I had an older Nissan Pathfinder that I drove for 4 years or so. The second year I drove it, it started having AC problems just before summer hit. I took it in to a mechanic, who replaced the compressor and recharged the AC for a couple hundred dollars or something. Nice cold air, which is great because summers where I live top 115 degrees. The next spring, the A/C didn't turn on. Not wanting to spend another $200 so soon, I just neglected to get it fixed. I drove around that car for two more years in miserable heat without AC. When it was time to sell it, I had a guy from work come to fix a couple problems with it, including my leaking brake line. "Hey, you're missing the belt that drives your A/C. It probably just broke one day and fell out onto the road. I'll try replacing it and see if your AC works." So, an $8 AC belt and 10 minutes later, the A/C was working fine. I made myself miserable for two years in that car thinking I was saving $200-300, when it was actually just an $8 belt I could have changed myself. 
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May 28, 2014 21:48
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask / Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Tell us stories about every crappy car you owned Someone in my family have had for years one of those stand-up water coolers where you put the 5 gallon jugs of water on top. They bought the cooler for $100 at Costco maybe 15 years ago, and have been filling up the 5 gallon jugs for a dollar each at the grocery store. They are getting older, and its a little harder to haul the water jugs and heft them up onto the cooler. Then the cooler broke, and no longer cools the water, but dispenses it at room temperature. Instead of spending $150 to replace the water cooler with a new, bottom loading one (no lifting required), they bought a water delivery service with a cooler rental from a door to door salesman for $15/month. Now they still have to lift the water jugs to install them, and are paying an extra $13/month for water. Fortunately, they cancelled it after a year and have one of the bottom loading coolers now. LorneReams posted:To add, I used to be in this boat and would always buy a 2-4 year old car which would be 50% the price of the new one. However with the last car I looked at, the used price was like 20% of the new price and I was like gently caress that give me new. Used/New pricing structures seem to be way different now then when I was growing up. I wonder if better reliability in general is feeding into this. Yeah, that's what I observed with the Honda Fit. Part of that is the "Honda Tax", but it's not a totally fair comparison. If you're buying from a private party, you're not paying sales tax like you would new or used at a dealer. I got used car financing for 1.92% from a bank for a $10k 36 month note by finding them on Bankrate.
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May 29, 2014 18:41
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Effexxor posted:And on the other hand, I have some family members that also belong in this thread. They have 4 children, the wife doesn't work, because how can you when you have 4 kids where the oldest is 5, and the dad works 4 jobs to try and keep it all going. To his credit, he is working his rear end off and it's pretty commendable, even though I have no idea when he sleeps. But man, I don't know how they're doing it. She's really big into organic food and all of that stuff and her kids always have fancy snacks from Trader Joe's. But hey, there's some money savvyvess, she gave birth to the latest three kids in her bathtub instead of in a hospital! Granted, that's totally illegal in our state and she also didn't get blood tests or even an ultrasound before the kids were born, but hey, think of the savings! Never let them watch "extreme cheapskates". It is a stupid TLC show that was on Netflix. One of the moms has her entire family use reusable toilet paper. Little squares of fabric go into a bin next to the toilet once coated with turds. It's like what they do in areas where the plumbing can't handle toilet paper, except the poopy mass of fabric goes in the washing machine for reuse.
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Jun 9, 2014 17:47
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Wickerman posted:What about the time value of money for the sake of annuity vs lump sum payment? Trust me, it's factored into the lump sum payout at a ridiculous discount rate.
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Jun 11, 2014 00:43
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Barry posted:I saw that, it's just mind boggling. She won't need all that savings when she gets a foodborne illness and is too cheap to go to the hospital.
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Jun 11, 2014 19:55
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canyoneer posted:Content: I posted this in March. Since then, that same girl took a severance package from our employer. People rotate internally every couple years or so, and she looked for over a year unsuccessfully and ultimately gave up and left. She has since moved from the west coast back home to the Washington DC area. She has a job lined up, but  hasn't started yet. She just posted on her facebook about the new 4 bedroom townhouse she is building, "with all the upgrades". Two car garage, fancy fixtures, two-oven gourmet kitchen, marble countertops, upgraded appliances, etc. No idea what bank would loan her money for that. She is single, was probably pulling down mid $60's here, has no inherited wealth, and I doubt that the severance package was more than 3 months of salary.
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Jun 12, 2014 16:58
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EugeneJ posted:I lost it at "2 llamas" I too, lost it at the 2 llamas, then lost it again when he said that the ducks have stolen his parking space in the garage 
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Jun 13, 2014 18:21
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Butt Wizard posted:My DVD collection is a BFC story in itself, but I don't think I've bought one in months. I remember once going to a birthday party for a kid in my class in elementary school. His parents had VHS tapes lining the walls in huge, custom built shelves. It was really impressive to a 9 year old. It was a few years before DVD hit the market. I expect that within 10 years, they had trashed every single VHS cassette that they had spent thousands of dollars obtaining. And if they were like almost everyone else on planet earth, 95% of their library only ever got watched once or twice. In 10 years when the Amazoogle media/mind control chips get implanted into our brains, we'll take the moments in between mandatory advertisement broadcasts to remember how quaint it was to spend thousands of dollars building up a DVD or bluray collection of physical media. blackmet posted:"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. Yeah, of course, that's the first troubleshooting question in the computer help threads here when people have problems running games 
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Jun 18, 2014 19:35
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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.
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Jun 19, 2014 00:57
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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!
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Jun 19, 2014 15:53
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"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.
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Jun 19, 2014 17:42
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What kind of dumpy laundromat doesn't have a quarter exchanging machine on premises? Unless it's a shared laundromat in your apartment complex, I guess.
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Jun 20, 2014 19:06
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If you're buying individual stocks with money you can't afford to lose, you are insane with money and have a risk profile akin to running through the zoo's tiger enclosure wearing only a meat bikini. Every one of your workplace "stock gurus" is lying to you. If he was making so much money on his stocks, why is he working here like the rest of us schlubs? They're proud to tell you about how they made $5k trading Dr. Pepper stock, but never share the stories about how they lost $25k on HP.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:57
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baquerd posted:Yeah, but what if it kept crashing? That sounds like a GMAT question. No. The expected value is only neutral if your crystal ball is predicting stocks that will double.
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Jul 9, 2014 01:41
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I am dumb. Of course you can make money if you can accurately predict a movement, even if you aren't buying/selling directly 
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Jul 9, 2014 17:54
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