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Something Offal posted:And what kind of crime is common to those immigrant communities, I'm assuming this fraud is tied to money laundering? So does it tend to be drugs, racketeering, embezzlement, does your institution know which are most common? Sorry for all the Qs, I should have probably gotten plat and PM'd From 2009 but still so very relevent: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/19/bust_out_scheme_charges/
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Oct 15, 2018 00:59
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SpelledBackwards posted:Not a real BWM post, but an thought experiment in hypothetical horse BWM, since this thread loves that so much: If you are ever bored, seek out the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker. It's about Ginger Baker, the legendary drummer of Cream, who is as lovely a person as he is great a drummer, and then some. Fascinating stuff and chock full of BWL. It's actually a little depressing, though not because of him, but rather the wreckage he's left around him over the last several decades, in particular his family. The relevance here is, after years of acrimony, royalty lawsuits, and general infighting at a level that makes most "former band mates hate each other" stories seem tame, Baker agrees to a 4 performance reunion concert in 2005, which actually goes well. And he's paid a ton of money for it. Which he promptly turns around and spends on importing 70-odd Polo horses to South Africa, which is where he was living in near-poverty before the reunion. And was living in near-poverty after it, if you follow the horse trail to its logical conclusion.
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Oct 15, 2018 08:01
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:These are just amazing. The post you are quoting was custom-written to elicit this kind of response. Not that it isn't an amusing waste of time, just check the outrage. It's fake.
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Oct 19, 2018 07:33
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:That's possibly a bad example because cutting your savings from $12,000 to $8,000 might be the difference between having say 4 months of emergency fund expenses in hand and less than 3, which some people are understandably uncomfortable with depending upon the security of their employment or the general risk of uncertain expenses in their lives. Many people would pay $20 a month (the interest on $4,000 at 6%) for that extra peace of mind, and there are a lot of moving parts and factors of personal utility in that decision even if it is a strictly better accounting decision to pay off the debt immediately. There can be exceptions but in general it's boneheaded. She should have paid off the 6% loan. The real reason people don't do this is because they don't just turn around and start socking away the money they freed up (in principle+interest payments) to rebuild savings, instead they find new ways to spend it. Then they end up right back in debt, now with less savings. The dude with 25K in CC debt and 16k in savings is probably a better example of this. He could retire almost 2/3rds of his debt, put the monthly savings towards quickly retiring the rest, and be in great shape in a few years or less, but no, gotta have that house right now. Also that 16k sounds like it is combined savings between his wife and him and I don't have to guess who contributed most of it. Mostly, though, his 25k of CC debt, spread across "9, mostly maxed out credit cards" speaks to the real problem, which is he doesn't have a working budget and the only thing keeping him from spending even more than he is now is he's at the limit the banks will give him. With their combined income they wouldn't exactly be living in poverty, as expensive as parts of the UK can be, so he's probably just a BWM moron. Ixian fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Oct 22, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 22:29
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blackmet posted:My Facebook feed is currently covered in posts for an online Pampered Chef party my friend threw for her sister, asking me to join the group and get a free prize. I have no idea how this works, nor do I want to. My wife's feed is wall to wall Mom Bosses doing Rodan+Fields, which appears to be the new Mary Kay among MLMs (only it's totally legit see, it's run by actual doctors and scientists who wear white coats!). I don't know what the particular hook for this one is and don't want to but Jesus it has been spreading like a plague for a while now. My wife's flat out stopped talking to a real life friend because they kept messaging her on Facebook to take a free, quick survey (I assume that's the first try at the hook) and apparently they are coached that a polite "no thanks" is no excuse to stop trying.
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Oct 30, 2018 14:54
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therobit posted:I think there are kind of levels to how spammy an MLM is though. Mary Kay is an actual product that people buy, and it is possible for the sales rep to make a living selling the product. Cutco is also about selling a product, it just isn't a great product and is overpriced (don't tell that to the working class folks in my hometown though, they all paid to much for it and love it). Then you have Amway, Meleluca, etc where they tell you to make money by making more sales reps. Those are what I think of when we talk about MLM scams. My take, right or wrong, is no matter how good the products they offer may be, if the business model is based on leveraging a large base of non-employees for direct sales, and in turn the majority of the comp. said non-employees (or "business owners") earn is based not on commission on their own direct sales but rather how many people they sign up and how much those poor fuckers sell, many layers deep, then it is by definition an MLM. And also a lovely way to do business in my opinion. It's a poo poo model that in practice seems to end up taking advantage of desperate people and drives family and friends apart.
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Oct 30, 2018 18:15
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Motronic posted:This is absolutely the case. The first notice will come at right around 6 years from the first blatantly fraudulent filing. Yep. The IRS budget may be hosed as of late, but that just means more elaborate tax frauds will skate under the radar. This kind of stupidity is easy to catch though automated systems and the IRS operate on a much longer schedule than most people who don't deal with them are used to. I once forgot to file a schedule D for some stock options I sold (the taxes were withheld via payroll, but the schedule D was needed to show the offset/wash sale matching the brokers own filing). Took them almost 5 years to come around knocking saying I owed a fairly large sum. In reality, I didn't, but trust me it was a loving nightmare to deal with. Took months and I finally spent $1500 on a tax attorney who got me through it. And this was a situation where no taxes or penalties were owed in the end. This guy...this guy is hosed and doesn't know it yet. Well, he knows he's hosed, he doesn't know how badly. Holy God, if it turned out I actually didn't pay what I was supposed to and deliberately tried to get out of it I'd probably still be hosed and this was, no poo poo, almost 20 years ago.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:38
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Lowness 72 posted:Is the raptor more expensive than the Platinum? What about king cab? I feel woefully uninformed about truck equity. You're thinking of the Limited. The Raptor can be configured cheaper however unless you order it direct from Ford that way you will never find one - dealers know the target market for those, believe it - and I expect virtually no one does. In any configuration they are far less practical unless your daily drive runs through the Baja desert. Raptors are the kind of truck you don't even need to put a pair of swinging balls on the tow hitch because they're automatically assumed to be there by everyone else.
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Nov 11, 2018 02:50
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greasyhands posted:assuming the guy making $190k has a significant 401k, it seems like one of the only instances where I would recommend getting a 401k loan, paying down the high interest debt, then paying back the 401k loan. Last step in this plan would be growing the gently caress up Given his situation I'm gonna go with "small chance of that" followed by "if he does, he already went down that road and it's part of his current debt load".
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Nov 12, 2018 20:27
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Murderball posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3599364 It looks like they did! First time this thread has generated a title change for another?
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Nov 14, 2018 00:07
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:A horse is a stable asset Not if it's made in the spur of the moment.
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Nov 15, 2018 03:11
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Bird in a Blender posted:Probably more goes to people not having a budget, or understanding what they can afford. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I think there's a good section of the public that just assumes they'll always be in debt, and never really think about what their income actually covers. I think it's worse than that, I think a good section of the public factors "access to credit" in to "Can I afford x" for every loving thing. Literally think if you have, say, a 20k CC limit, then you have 20k to spend, and so on. Like, "We'll always be working, and we have to pay all this other poo poo like utility bills every month anyway, so why not take the Disney trip of our dreams?" etc./etc. Even otherwise intelligent people go for this, all the time. Let's not call the kettle black either, most of us here have to some degree at one time or another until we snapped out of it (at least I hope most people here have by now). Banking certainly does a large part to enable this behavior but it is a two way street.
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Nov 20, 2018 21:32
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Yeah, CC for points never works out for cars. Best I did was when I bought my last car for cash and they let me put $3k of it on my card (which I then paid off and got the points) and they acted like dicks about it. Not that I care what a car dealer thinks of me. Doesn't matter if the margins are thin or not, dealers have it beaten in to them to give no quarter, and the fees they pay for CC add up. Not saying I feel sorry for them, that's just how it is. On another note, auto financing is such a racket that they actually hate you a little if you come in with cash or your own bank loan. You'd think they'd like an easy sale but that isn't how they view it at all.
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Nov 21, 2018 20:04
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Ashcans posted:I'm pretty sure this is what the French Foreign Legion is for. Not sure that still works though? The Legion doesn't clear your slate; you can get a new identity while you are in it (and a number of them do) but it's not some magical reset button for your life. There was an US Army deserter a few years ago who did 5 years in the Legion, new id, got out, went back to the States and was arrested and sentenced to 4 years. Basically it boils down to a hard way to hide out for a few years. This is all just idle fun, of course, because the idiot OP who lost 400k is probably in no shape whatsoever to join anyway.
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Nov 29, 2018 14:59
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MayakovskyMarmite posted:I don't even really know who is being bad with money on this one, but I can certainly tell you who is very good at making money. Pieces of the loans will presumably be swept up into some CLO. Leveraged buyouts are such a loving racket. "Hey, we're going to buy your company by giving it a loan meaning technically *you* pay *us* for the privilege, and which you, the company we're buying, will pay back on unfriendly terms. Also we'll probably sell that loan to someone else soon". It's a way for Private Equity to Get Paid up front without having to deal with the pesky aspects of running the business well and collecting profits. They also cut expenses to the bone (firing people left and right) to insure better cashflow for the loan payments - sorry, they restructure the company to streamline operations - and since generally they have 5 year or so timelines, as long as it can limp along for that amount of time it doesn't matter to them what happens after. These assholes are just taking the game to a new level
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Nov 30, 2018 16:53
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I'm kind of dreading the day a few years from now when a good book like "The Big Short:Inside the Doomsday Machine" or (classic) "The Smartest Guys in the Room" comes out, only it's about what's going on now with auto loans and how everyone should have seen the crash coming. I mean, I'll read it, but it'd be nice if it didn't need to be written. There will always be a huge number of consumers who will take whatever banks are willing to give them whether it's smart or not. That is nothing new. What's changed dramatically in the last couple decades is the willingness of the banking/finance industry to profit off and indeed flat out exploit that fact. Everything going on with auto loans, 84 month terms (72 is nearly the norm now!), rates, etc. reminds me of the lead up to the housing crisis where I had a number of (idiot) friends and co-workers buying overpriced houses on interest-only terms because housing prices just kept going up. At the time they were buying mini-mansions on ex-farmland in the prairie outside Denver - an area not known (then or now) for a shortage of real estate. Jesus.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:57
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crazypeltast52 posted:Thankfully interest only or negative amortizing auto loans don’t exist yet. Please no one tell me they exist if they do. As with the housing calamity in 2007-2008 what matters is not the terms to the consumers, but how banks are packaging and selling the loans in the form of bonds or other financial instruments. You'd *think* they'd know better now but... All that matters on the consumer end is whether a large number of them start defaulting leaving pennies on the dollar for whoever ultimately ended up holding the bag of risk. It's a zero-sum game so someone is going to lose, and those losses can ripple far beyond their particular market segment. And cars hold value even worse than houses and also have almost no chance of improving over time; quite the opposite. That, and a large number of loans are starting to approach mortgage like levels - look what a loving Ford Raptor tricked out (to use a favorite example here) costs.
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Dec 13, 2018 05:06
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Most student loans are viewed as low risk because there are so few options to get out from under them but at the end of the day dollars need to cross the table and if they don't, people betting on them are hosed no matter what the various laws are, also if we learned anything from the crisis a decade ago it's that idiots making increasingly risky bets can explode all over the economy. As far as auto - I don't think auto loans themselves will be as bad overall as the housing market implosion was either but I do think they have the potential to gently caress things up pretty good regardless.
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Dec 13, 2018 08:51
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Motronic posted:
Payment buyers are more common than not. It's an easy way to live the life of your dreams if you calculate what goodies you can stack up before your bank account hits zero after all the payments each month. Next step of course is calculating that based on the absolute minimum payments you can make, which in many cases doesn't really even service the debt. There's plenty of blame to go around on both ends here. Banks shouldn't be lending people money that allow them to get in these situations, and the people doing it should pull their heads out of their asses.
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Dec 14, 2018 04:29
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I always feel like there's a little more to those stories - not that I don't believe there are terrible parents who gently caress their kids over, but at the same time passing it off as "my parents stuck me with this! I'm innocent!" is a little too convenient. My guess is that OP is more complicit in the arrangement than he's letting on.
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Dec 14, 2018 17:54
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It's a real proposal by a real elected official in the US who read about Venezuala's crypto attempt and stopped after the first paragraph of the first story on it. In general, I am mildly curious at what point cognitive dissonance totally kicks in with government sponsored altcoins.
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Dec 16, 2018 09:36
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Subjunctive posted:Yeah, I’m not really making fun of the fact that someone is forced to live paycheque to paycheque, more the idea of a 60-hour emergency fund. I don't know the circumstances and he could well turn out to be a BWM superstar but given the prior history I'm willing to cut some slack, personally. Self-employed heath insurance is a loving nightmare in the US even with ACA and when you have a sick wife it's not so easy to squirrel away an emergency fund. I mean we could sit around all day and second-guess whether he should have bought this thing or that or why isn't he driving a 10 year old beater car etc. etc. but right now I feel like there is more fertile BWM ground to be sown. Like: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/a7thsx/how_long_would_it_take_an_unpaid_55k_loan_to_go/ quote:There's no way to refute or cancel it(?) but I don't feel responsible for the loan for details I will spare you from. I already have a car loan and I won't be getting a mortgage for at least 8 years, my only other concern with credit is it could effect job opportunities that check credit. If I were to ignore the loan and not declare bankruptcy, how long till it falls off my credit report? Before you ask why don't I pay it off, I have too many other bills and debt I'm already struggling with that have far worse consequences if I fail to pay such as eviction, no utilities, loss of medical treatment and reposession. I've also contacted the lender to ask for adjustment on the monthly amount and term limit which they declined. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I'd like to start saving at the expense of non-payment of the 5.5k even if it make take years to recover my credit as a result. Thanks for the read Or: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/a7tf76/19_year_old_in_bad_finance_situation_with_car/ quote:I just turned 19 years old in November and when I turned 18 everything was brand new and I felt the need to look for a car to finance, well I did, January 3rd 2018 I financed $13,890 on a 2015 Dodge Dart with an interest rate of 17.74%. If anyone knows anything about Darts, you’ll know that they were a complete failure from FCA (I did not know this at the time) it had 27,000 miles and I thought the price was good for what I was getting (navigation, manual transmission, and the black appearance package. Now I’m almost to the one year mark of ownership and the car is not worth what I am paying for it. My payments are around $350 a month and I drive anywhere from 300-600 miles a week which can cost on the low side of $23 a week to fill up @300 miles or $46 to fill up @ 600miles. The car has a small gas tank so my fuel range is limited. I owe about $12,600 and it’s worth about $8,000 (trade in) I’m considering trading it in for a new car that is financially economical, and has a rebate that can cover my negative equity. My credit is in remission after an unfortunate financial situation I was put in a few months ago. So about 600 is my score and I could maybe put down $600-$1,000. What price range should I be looking at? And new or used? And should I even do it? I will have 4 years left and it currently has 43k miles. I started working at a ford dealership 2 months back so I think that helps a little. One car I was looking at was a 2018 Ford Fusion SE for $22,600 with rebates of $3,000 plus. I can manage higher payments to get something that makes sense. Ixian fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Dec 20, 2018 |
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Dec 20, 2018 06:18
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Motronic posted:
I love the sheer naivety of this statement from the OP. Why yes, please do talk to a banker about getting a loan that looks like a regular mortgage, only without the house as collateral. And report back on how it went. Since he has a mortgage a HELOC might be possible, and god knows plenty of idiots still leverage those to pay the debt that allows them to live the life of their dreams, that's why so many got hosed in 2007-8, but when do people wake up to the fact that getting out of debt starts with not taking on more debt?
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Dec 21, 2018 15:23
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AndrewP posted:How do you rack up that much in CC debt? I don’t understand the decision tree that ends with three near maxed out cards. Especially making half-decent money like this guy. That is just blowing money on an inconceivable scale. Treating credit as an extension of your bank balance. Justifying expensive toys though self-entitlement. Finally, playing the equivalency game i.e. "I'll always need to have a job, and I'll always have monthly bills, poo poo I have to pay the electric bill every month don't I? Credit related payments are just another bill! Besides I really want that boat/horse/Raptor. Nay, I deserve them. All 3". Combine that with a financial system that has figured out, time and again, how to securitize risk and have it pay huge returns, and we end up in situations where people who have no business taking on any non-collateralized debt at all have $100k credit card balances.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:01
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SiGmA_X posted:I can’t believe that some of the decently well dressed people I work with don’t wear stays... It’s like $6 for a box of 6 pairs of different sizes of stainless stays on Amazon. (Or it was a few years back - sub-$10 today I assume.) How about $12 for 40 stainless steel ones in 4 sizes: https://www.amazon.com/40-Metal-Collar-Stays-Box/dp/B00A7L8ZKE I know I'm probably getting old when I think "who the gently caress wears dress shirts and doesn't know about collar stays?"
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Dec 23, 2018 03:21
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Motronic posted:I'm not sure I've ever bought a collar stay......... As long as you know what they are for and use them. The stainless ones are just nicer and being slightly heavier do a better job, but nothing wrong with the ones that come with the shirts. Speaking of which: 100 HOGS AGREE posted:i always just threw those away i thought they were just there to make the shirt look nice in the package/on the shelf. Don't do this. It's BWS and BWM both.
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Dec 23, 2018 03:37
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Hoodwinker posted:But jeez, man, I feel like they're a generation or two away from creating little Zaurglings who don't understand the time value of money or how it works. The way I read that they are already in the generation that doesn't understand it.
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Dec 27, 2018 00:21
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KingSlime posted:No one in this thread is saying this No, but the implication is that these billionaires by being selectively thrifty are a great example of how you don't need a lot of stuff is a pile of poo poo; Warren Buffet owns Netjets, a subscription service for private jets, and it costs more for a single flight than his lifetime of McD's breakfasts paid for with loose change. Zuck's private security, including the follow cars (2 black SUVs) that his security uses so annoyed his neighbors in Palo Alto they passed a city ordinances banning them from idling at the curb outside his street - oh yeah, he doesn't just own a few houses there, he effectively privatized an entire street of houses - more than <x> minutes (in all fairness it wasn't just him; former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer also had security that did this, and so on). gently caress him and his Acura. Buffett isn't cleverly thrifty, he's a weirdo who's good with money and got very lucky, just like the rest of them. Don't venerate "good" billionaires; they all essentially won a special version of life's lottery and are otherwise just as nice/lovely/stupid/smart as everyone else.
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Dec 28, 2018 23:18
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Motronic posted:I know one of his Netjet stewdaresses who often crews his personal flights. She calls him "Uncle Warren". Apparently he's a sweetheart and the staff loves him. Not trying to argue with you either...but it has less to do with min/max'ing his own luxuries and more to do with it being a good investment, like anything else he does. Netjet, in spite of being a capital intensive business, has brought him great returns. Personally, because in addition to Berkshire he invested billions of his own in to it. Which begs the point of what exactly thrifty breakfasts, self-driving to the office, and relatively inexpensive houses have to do with anything other than the *appearance* of seeming thrifty so he can wag his finger (or rather, let the media wag it for him) at everyone lower on the ladder. Same with any other example, like Ballmer driving his dumb Ford Fusion around. He does it so he can show off how much he doesn't need to care. The interest payments alone on the dullest, safest investment portfolio he has would pay for a new Bentley every month. He makes a point of not doing that just to be a dick. This is a guy who owns a Gulfstream G650, a $60m+ jet. Which he flies around to Clippers games, the sports team he bought for $2b. His Ford Fusion has no relevance here. Super-rich people can be and usually are just as BWM as dirt poor, the only difference being some people are so wealthy money literally has no relevance.
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Dec 28, 2018 23:48
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