We’ve taken on a lot of biggies. In the past three days we Banished Blanket Statements, Gut-punched Gravity and brought Art to Asteroids. What’s left?
How about Financial Industry Reform? The Senate passed it yesterday so it’s all over the news today, which means it’s high time for some Uninformed Commentary from Bud Buck.
Finally Congress has passed a financial reform measure! This was sorely needed after the sub prime loan debacle and the collapse of major banking institutions that were Too Big To Fail. There was some other stuff that happened regarding money things that are too difficult to understand. Something about derivatives and bundling and credit-default swaps. Whatever.
But now all of that has been addressed. Or if it hasn’t been addressed, at least I can stop trying to think about it, and that provides some personal relief for me in these terribly stressful times. Thank you congress!
But there is one part of the bill that irks me, and that’s the section that creates a new Office of Financial Literacy. In addition to lowering the boom on predatory lenders and Wall Street Fat Cats, now Washington is going to try to make me smarter about money so I don’t squander so much of it! I don’t know what that will entail, exactly. I can be stubborn, so my first bit of money saving advice for the government is to not waste any resources trying to educate me! I’m doing great!
For example, I always read agreements and contracts completely before I sign anything, which is a real headache for sales people since they have to sit there and watch my lips move while I read and they wait. But over the years I’ve been able to speed up the process by skipping over the terms I don’t understand. Instead, I just go with the way the word “feels”. For instance, I always make sure my bank accounts pay “simple” interest instead of “compound”. Why? Because all simple things are good, and houseflies have compound eyes, which are creepy.
If I see that a loan has “balloon” payments, I sign it. Balloons are happy, colorful things, and so much of the other stuff that you see in contracts is gray and dismal. If the balloon payments can be shaped like pretzels or wiener dogs, all the better!
Investing is important to me, so I always go for the highest number when it comes to the projected return, especially if some fund or bank or individual is paying a whole lot more than the others, because that means there’s somebody super-smart involved – somebody who knows a lot more than all the other dummies on Wall Street. Like this guy I ran into on the street corner just outside my bank. Inside they were paying, like 2% on savings, but he said he could get me 22% on a special deal he called a “Ponzi”. That sounds like “Fonzi”, who was a very cool, very big star years ago on “Happy Days”. That’s proven celebrity talent, and if a celebrity says I should do it, I usually do. Being popular is their main job, so why would they lie?
Finally, I always make sure my finances are organized so I can get a big fat tax check back from the government in the spring. My paycheck is smaller, but what could be better than money in the mail?
So here’s a notice to the new Office of Financial Literacy – don’t fritter away those precious government dollars trying to improve my situation. Direct the money toward dealing with the truly important issues like Too Big To Fail, and leave me my Too Good To Be True.
This is Bud Buck!
Assess your financial literacy.
Trail Baboon 
Not rock bottom–quarry rock bottom.
Have a good day and weekend all.
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you are smarter than me. look how he sucked me in!!
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Not long ago, I was feeling super-guilty about how badly I was handling my finances. And one day I got a suspicious-looking letter from my bank. I was afraid to open it. It was clearly not the routine kind of letter I get from those folks. I formed a fantasy in which the letter would say, “We’ve been watching you, slimeball, and we are appalled at your immature money habits. As of today we are revoking your account. If you go to an ATM to withdraw money we have programmed the things to cackle derisively like a hyena until you flee in disgrace.
When I finally opened the letter, what it said was that I was pre-approved for a generous new line of credit. My bank loves doing business with me and wants to up the ante, giving me a longer rope with which to hang myself.
I felt relieved, or at first I did. My bank was still happy to loan me money. And then I remembered that banks don’t really seek out smart, responsible customers who pay all their bills on time. They earn their fat profits by sucking in flakes like me and pandering to our worst financial habits. So . . . they want to loan me more money? Gee, I didn’t know my finances were THAT bad!
We should all do our banking at that place in Lake Wobegon, the bank whose sign is a sock and whose motto is “Neither a lender nor a borrower be.”
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Tee Hee. I remember the days when that bank was in an old trailer on Main Street.
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Still is. Green mobile home.
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Didn’t he call it Inquist Federal or something? I’ll have to dig out my old, old set of tapes (and listen while I wear my very old Powdermilk Bisquit T-shirt!).
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Rise and Save Babooners:
Bud, as ever, your level of sophistication and command of the financial details is overwhelming. Your research must have been remarkably superficial! It would appear you are deeply influenced by that most competent of leaders, GW Bush!
My very short response to this is — don’t spend what you don’t have. A second response is the self-employment tax is very difficult to scrape up every quarter.
Now I must go complete the 3 or 4 credit card offers I received this week from Chase Bank which has blanketed my mail box with offers ever since the financial crisis occurred. I complete all of them, so I now have 33 credit cards from that fine institution and a total credit line of $1M. Now if I could just get a job!
(OK, not really).
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Totally agree on quarterly taxes…ugh.
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Can anyone explain the estimated tax schedule – January, April, June, September? Would it be so hard to space them out at consistent three-month intervals?
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The wisdom of the IRS?
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wow buck. at last you have a method to your madness. i thought most americans were like me and just spent until they ran out of checks or the credit card said no. if the country is going to get it back on track the safeguards have to be put in place by someone other than the banks themselves. the oil industry has been watching itself , the banking industry has been monitoring and regulating itself, how about if we look into all the other industries and asked them to set up their own parameters. i guess we do in a way. did you hear about the energy star debacle where the government set up a dummy company to apply for energy star approval for their items and they got a gas powered alarm clock and an air purifier that was in fact a space heater with a feather duster attached to it.
i got sucked in and was even sold enough by the too goood to be true news to get my folks involved in the a.r.m. finances of the early millenium housing financiers. it was terrible and has raised horrible consequences for me and millions of others. my literacy will never be good enough to keep up with all the new angles they will come up with so i wil end up treating them like i do the phone company solitications i get. i will not even listen. the evil i am dealing with is familiar and the evil you are offering is not. i don’t have time or the energy to monitor the lies the new guy will offer vs the lies the last guy got me to sign up for. it is terrible and it would be great if there were a place where the people offering to help were not trying to retire with the proceeds from my sucker based decision. ask but to print up those guidelines for us all. balloons does sound happy doesn’t it.
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the other funny thing is the people in the bank today. maybe they were always doorknobs and i didn’t notice but the quality of the folks in the bank today is scary. the us bank wells fargo tcf formula seem to be to get a body that will show up for work and promote them to divisional vice president as quickly as possible. there are 24 year olds with no knowledge of ,money other than the ability to run a calculator who are the commercial loan officer and if it doesn’t get much better as time goes on i will start banking in my sock. it is too weird.
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We bank at Wells Fargo in Monticello — and what kind of bank they are I’m not sure, but they’re the nicest, friendliest folks around. In person, they have outstanding customer service skills, falling over themselves greeting you, asking what else they can do for you, offering other bank products that might fit your needs, etc. My guess is they’re highly trained to be exceedingly nice to make up for all the other bad feelings we have against banks in general right now.
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I wonder how difficult it is to start a financial institution from scratch.
TimSock State Bank, anyone?
Save at TimSock! Cash Stashed. Money Lent, and Lint.
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Is it even LEGAL to have a financial institution that would only lend out what it actually had in the vault? I think that was the George Bailey strategy, and look what happened to the S&Ls.
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I heard a report on NPR 15 years ago (ca.) about a man who wanted to start and run a real small town bank in a far-out suburb of Chi. He had been a banker in a big bank that kept getting bought out by bigger banks. He had to jump many hoops and fight the big bankers who were trying to stop him. He pulled it off, and the bank grew rapidly because people wanted that too. Three years later one of the big banks bought out his bank and closed it; there was nothing he could do to stop it.
In 1977 I wanted to buy a car and a camper. The local banker in TH told me how much I could borrow to do it. Three weeks later I told him I had the camper picked out and how much it was but did not yet have a car. He told me to write the check. Four weeks later I found the car and called him. He said write the check and he would call me when he had the paperwork done. Two weeks later he told me to come in. I signed a few papers he had ready and it was done.
SIGH . . .
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Might be easier just to bring a piggy bank to the Blevin’s book group or State Fair and start that way. We could even put IOU’s in the piggy bank on small scraps of paper when we take out loans.
That would be “unregulated baboon banking” — could inspire yet another website for baboon micro-loans!
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Baboon micro loans – sorry I missed this yesterday! I like it!
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Good point, Tim.
Do you all remember the Mother Goose Rhyme “The House That Jack Built?”
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
I bring this up because I bank at the bank that ate the bank that ate the bank that ate the bank I once chose to bank at. This gets creepy, like the infinite regression of the image of the Cracker Jack boy on the box and he his holding a Cracker Jack box that . . .
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you are supposed to focus on the great prize in the cracker jack box.
when i first got involved in the a.r.m. financing my loan was sold to greentree, one of the first financial giant ponzi schenes to go down. the people that i had to attempt to deal with as my house payment tripled were hired bodies who knew nothing and cared less. hopefully heart of the industry being pointed in this direction will make a difference but with the wall street bail out providing the billion dollar bouus again i am doubtful. do you think maybe we should sell those wall street positions for the right to fleece us? if they had to pay 20 or 30 million for the right to collect 10 million a year in bonus at year end at least we’d get something out of the deal. what would you call it, fleece lisence? wear it round your neck with a fleece number like a cabby? make it a nice laminated 5×7 with a photo that would look good with a pin striped suit.
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Fleece license – I love it!
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the financial situation leaves me shuddering cold
i hate to think how it could worsen
the credit card companies were allowed to accept you
then the raised interest rates left you cursing
the set up was total the sliming complete
the pickpockets wrote their own pass
now we are trying to stop all the financial rape
and kick the reaper in the ass
the bushies had fun while the industry spun
into bankruptcy based economics
the applications we signed for the cards all seemed fine
but the fine print was straight form the comics
now we’ll try to reform
and weather the storm
and get back to wise fiscal stuff
but its hard to bankers
who supply lifelong anchors
of them i have had quite enough
i’d like to believe
that the debauchery could leave
and we could go back to the day
when a dime store phosphate
would make the day great
and weeks work would earn a weeks pay
good luck to the guys
who are financially wise
and are trying to make it top shelf
the premise should be
that what you do to me
is what you’d like to have done to yourself.
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hard to trust bankers. i should proof read!!
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tim, your ability to quickly and elegantly produce these poems leaves me in AWE.
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well, we bought a bunch of those goats that, when you feed them hay, gold comes out the back end (as presented by Dale and Bubby at the state fair a couple years ago). we put all of our money in them. i think Bubby bought one too. we have seen NO GOLD yet. the guy selling them said it’s like apple trees – gotta wait maybe five years for the gold to start coming out. still waiting.
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ginsing and bamboo are two products that if you find the correct environment to grow them they basically do nothing the first five years . you have to have faith and thenthe bamboo tree grows 40 feet the 5th year and you can begin the harvesting. and the ginsing will flourish and begin bearing fruit for many years of very profitable transactions. anybody want to look into developing a ginsing/bamboo farm?
i think it would be ok to have goats as long as they didn’t eat the seedlings
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Operative words being “the right environment”. If they will do well on an island formed by scooping up the bottom of Superior, I’m in.
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Don’t forget Worm Farming, a wonderfully wriggly scheme!
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Well, Barb, in keeping with the theme of the day, I hope you bought the goats with Bud Buck’s advice. On credit of course.
Good luck with the gold thing. I started my life on a farm. My hunch is that the gold may be found in fertilizer!
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There’s only one response to that . . .
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Barb — you didn’t get the memo where it explains that you have to “seed” these goats by feeding them gold, and then they produce. For every $1.40 you put into a goat you can expect to get back $1.00 in gold. That rate of return discourages some goat ranchers, the less serious ones, but the deal is you gotta make it up in volume. Bud Buck would understand.
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dale did you ever wonder why i start my day with a blog instead of the newspaper? i don’t want to get cranked up about injustice and pain before i’ve put on my pants.
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i read you all every day but rarely contribute cuz you are all so good and funny and i love reading your musings
having no creative bones in my body means i have lots of time to be practical and i highly recommend not owing any money to anyone for anything ; i receive no offers for anything in the mail
no luxuries but no stress, and lots of time to play with the grandsons (they are now 7 and have discovered pop radio and break dancing and i have earplugs)
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Well done, yayask! Sounds like you have found the secret to happiness. I can get you in on a ground floor deal to market that and make yourself rich beyond your wildest dreams! All it will take is a small investment, by you—but think of the returns!
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Greetings! I like Bud Buck’s take on finances – simple is good and balloons are happy. That’s about the extent of my financial savvy and our financial situation is sinking into the core of the earth. I won’t go into details because it’s too depressing. If it’s bad, it’s happened to us.
I’ve sometimes thought they should teach some kind of financial literacy in schools, but the Wall Streeters who are way too smart for their own good without the wisdom and conscience to do what’s best always seem to win anyway. Plus, they’ve got the government on their side!
An excellent way to learn is through Robert Kiyosaki’s books “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and his game Cash Flow. Learned more about assets and balance sheets through playing a game than anything else (except when you’ve been through it in the financial wringer).
Ah, well — it’s another beautiful day. Will hit the beach and work on that massively underemployed tan.
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I like Kiyosaki’s books too, but he just had to go one step too far and start offering seminars on real estate investing as a way to get rich and is now pretty much discreditted.
Money was never discussed beyond “don’t spend what you don’t have” and “we’re not made of money”. Probably the best financial lessons I got were how to not spend. Making money is not my strong suit.
Somehow, I’ve imparted an interest in economics to the s&h-probably because it is so math-oriented. What can I say-we are geeks.
We are also thrifty, but we try really hard not to be cheap (and yes, there is a BIG difference).
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Good Morning to All.
I thought I was very smart when the stock market was good and my modest investments were growing. Now I am afraid to put any money into the stock market. Of course, a lot of that money I made on my modest investments is gone, so that can’t be invested any way. I don’t think I was completly stupid. Mostly I think Wall Street has stolen part of my savings or badly mismanaged them.
May be a box buried in the back yard for saving money is an approach worth considering. Will the government office for educating us include information on burying your money in the back yard. I’m not counting on the goverment to pass enough reforms to make sure that the financial system will really keep my money safe, so hiding it in the back yard is starting to sound like the best option.
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You know, that was an approach that the Confederate South used during “The War of Northern Aggression” to protect family heirlooms. Perhaps they were on to something. Some people still use it–when my father-in-law passes away, I’m personally digging up the back yard!
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I fear money under my tutelage tends to mind about as well as my basset hound – it sniffs around a bit, probably jumps up and down a bit, does not sit long enough when I ask, and then leaves a big pooh right where the kids might step in the yard before taking a nap.
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Nicely put Anna. When you really want to start worrying is when your money begins humping your leg.
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Oh dear…
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Yes, but it never has puppies.
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But will have fleas.
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I use some of Bud’s schemes but much more conservatively. I was thrilled to have paid off my mortgage a few years ago. This year for the first time I checked my credit rating and found the only thing I was being down-graded on was my failure to regularly pay my mortgage. I protested and they did remove this blotch from my record. I thought I had uncovered another level of outrage-requiring us to kee paying homage to the mortgage company even when the balance was zero.
Pennies on the sidewalk are an income stream!
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They say most people derive satisfaction from having just a little bit more than the next guy, so they can feel a little superior. With that in mind, I try to be the person in the neighborhood or peer group to whom everyone else can compare themselves favorably. Anyone who is discouraged about their lot in life can look at me and think, well, at least I don’t have her house/yard/car/job. I have managed to sock away a little money, but that can be easily hidden at the credit union where it will not make anyone feel bad.
That is my contribution to the happiness of those around me.
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You are such a good person to do that. I like your mindset.
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Church members sometimes accuse the pastor of preaching the sermon directly to them, sometimes approvingly, mostly not. Byt hthe topics he has chosen lately, I think Dale is doing that to me. Hey, Dale, get out of head!!
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hi there – just back from errands in “town” – Cloquet. stopped at the bank to drop off our amassed change from the last year. Steve took it in, and after about 20 minutes i wondered if they were making him count it. so i went in to help, and found him in a “personal banker” cubicle, listening to the mandatory info about how things have changed. how we can’t use our debit card to charge gasoline for more than is in our account at that moment. what a concept! anyhoo, this poor guy had to inform everyone who came in today (and in the future, i suppose until everyone is told). if he does it as slowly as he did with Steve (who basically said at the get-go “we never use our debit card except at the ATM”) he has long term job assurance.
again. what a concept. not spending more than you have. but isn’t that what our economy is built on? spending waaaaaay more than we have? uffda.
now out to listen to the goats complain about the heat.
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At TCF, they will continue to let you go right on charging things even without the money in the bank, but will also continue to charge you $35 (at least) for every transaction of that sort-but now you have to opt in for this. Surely this is the sort of protection we all want, right?
Every single time I drive up or walk in to the place, I get asked about opting in to this. I think I have gotten a couple of letters about this too.
I get a strange look every time I inform them that if I do not have the money, I do not want to borrow some and pay more than the original transaction amount for the fun of doing it. Every single time, they tell me they will put that on the record, every single time, I get asked again.
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This is an unusual part of the country; west and east of us the charge you for visiting a teller instead of a person.
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I mean . . . duh . . . instead of a machine.
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freudian?
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Nope. An accidental truth.
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I’m very lucky that my Mother was a very successful stock broker for many years. Even having been retired for fifteen years, she and my Dad still keep tabs on the markets and their investments and help me out with mine.
Here’s what I learned from college:
1) When stocks go up, bonds go down
2) The stock market is driven by fear
3) I enjoy spending money WAY too much
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Oh, quit rubbing it in.
And . . . that apple seems to me to have fallen a distance away from the tree.
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I haven’t yet been able to put my parents’ monetary strategy into operation, namely-don’t spend much at all. I don’t know how they do it.
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Renee – I hope your day goes better! I don’t know how my parents did it either. Raising 7 kids, sent all of us to private Catholic schools, half of us to college, paid off their original mortgage, built a new house for retirement, saved money and still had a bit of money for us when they died. They both worked for either the state of Wisconsin or City of Green Bay with nice pensions, but certainly not high paying jobs. But we rarely ever went out to eat, always camped for vacation, Mom sewed some of our clothes and we had a big garden. Even if I did all that, we still wouldn’t be ahead, I don’t think. It’s just a different world, for sure.
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Thanks, Joanne. I think the rest of the day will be fine!
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Well, after a very busy day I logged back in, AND FOUND THIS GROUP CURIOUSLY ON TOPIC after 12 hours. Money can do that, I guess. Some of the comments, poems, stories and opinions made me laugh out loud. Then there is Renee and the Ingrate Daughter! That really made me laugh.
Thanks guys. I needed that. And Monday, I’ll need it even more.
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Hey everyone… still digging out from my ‘working Vacation’ earlier in the week so just catching up on you all…
Well, I guess my wife and I are fairly fortunate in regard to banking; yes, I don’t like their fees and I do wonder at some of the tellers lately, but we have a financial adviser that we really like, trust and enjoy working with. And while I got a different ag banker this year, it’s fairly straight forward and this year he just automatically gave me two years credit rather than one; which is a little scary knowing I could blow it all the first year and have nothing left for the second year… but that’s where the trust comes in I guess. And crop insurance.
Farming is always a gamble; but you just put your faith in God. (And that crop insurance I mentioned before). Maybe this year will be better!
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best wishes, Ben – farming is not for the faint-of-heart
i’m not courageous enough to do it as more than a hobby (but i know that i’d lose my shirt for sure)
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