Friday's 5

[threadwalker]

1. Fitness has been hit or miss lately and that means mostly "miss". I fell asleep at 7:30 last night after a long day. Then I woke up, realizing I missed my run AGAIN! So I did it this morning. The legs are good; the lungs not so good. But it's all win. I feel like I'm back in control.

2. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone is beautiful to someone else AND everyone is not beautiful to someone else. Who are we to pass judgement on others? Just know that you're a 10 and a 1 and maybe you can accept yourself, bumps and all.

3. I am glad I work in biotech. Just saying that people still need their medicine and we make a life-saving drug.

4. It's not that I'm democratic or republican. Candidates from both parties scare the poop out of me, it's just that one of them scares me a little more.

5. Now that I've pulled my head out of the sand and I'm listening to the news, I'm shocked at the reports of people living outside their means. I do not understand the concept of deliberately living beyond your income. I realize there are days when you can't balance your check book to save your life and there are rainy-day emergencies, but in general I don't understand shopping with credit cards if you don't have the cash to cover it when the bill is due. To me, credit cards are a rainy-day safety net, not a lifestyle. A friend of mine who does housing refi's was telling me about people getting 2nds and 3rds on their houses in order to get stuff like jet-skis. It boggles me.

Comments

[stealth-1066.livejournal.com]

You are definitely not a "1"! And thank you for being in the Bio-tech industry making sure "we" that need those life saving drugs can get them.

There is a segment of our society that believe that the average "Joe" is not smart enough or responsible enough to take care of themselves so they have to manage our lives for us! Having 2rd and 3rd mortgages just to buy toys, etc. is not good financial management but things have been set up this way to allow people to get into debt and never be able to pay it off! With that said, unless people wake up the credit card industry will go the way of the Housing market and we will be bailing out yet another industry because of bad lending practices and general bad judgment. But to some that just makes them happy and supports their belief that the larger segment of the population can't take care of themselves!

[xrian.livejournal.com]

For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that it was "OK" to borrow against your house for just about anything -- or to buy way more house than you could afford in the first place -- because the value of housing would continue to go up, indefinitely, at the same pace that it went up in the 1980s and 1990s (i.e. astronomically).

As one totally uneducated in economics, I can dimly see how someone could form that hypothesis, but it still makes no sense to me as a way to run one's life.

Buyer Beward

[thread-walker.livejournal.com]

we were advised to buy as much house as we could afford by our parents based on the assumption that our incomes would continue to go up. The value of the house going up was irrelevant unless we were selling and since we didn't buy with intent to turn it around quickly, that really wasn't a consideration.

But I think you hit on something. There is this assumption that "it will be as it has always been" meaning houses will continue to climb in value and incomes will continue to go up. That's assuming stable, predictable growth. I think we've seen that we have not had stable, predictable growth for a long time and we need to plan accordingly. But lenders (who reap interest benefits and in the case of defaulting they get to forclose on property) don't suggest that because it cuts into their profits.

Buyer beware.