The housing market in the U.S. is still in trouble. Sales are down and foreclosures remain too high. Developments that five years ago were slated to make huge profits have been halted; the weeds are growing where landscaping was supposed to be. It has become more difficult to get a mortgage.
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Many adults get nervous when they consider taking college courses in order to improve their ability to get a good job. They haven’t been in school for awhile, perhaps they had some bad experiences in school, and they are not at all confident about their ability to learn college material.
Yet if you have been working a job or two at a steady rate and you are over twenty-five, you have some skills and abilities you did not have at the age of fifteen. These skills will help you to be successful in college classes.
If your job seems reasonably secure and you own a gas guzzler, now is the time to consider buying a new car. Not only are car dealers ready to do just about anything to sell cars because sales have been down significantly during the recession, but the U.S. government has a new program that encourages people to buy vehicles with better gas mileage.
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As a society, we are just beginning to figure out how much the internet can be a resource in our lives. One significant way has to do with finances.
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Economic indicators range from consumer confidence to the stock market, from unemployment figures to inflation, from the housing market to oil prices, from the price of gold to the exchange rates on various foreign currencies. Given the complexity of this range of indicators and the fact that they appear to go up and down almost at random, how will we know that the economy is improving?
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Do you remember when you were a kid and you got an allowance? Maybe there was something special and you saved up for it. When you finally got it, it was a wonderful feeling.
Now, we halfway think we want something, whip out the plastic, and then have a heart attack with the credit card bill comes in. It’s not as much fun as it used to be.
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When you buy a house, you will experience a loan that is amortized. The first payment you make will be just a tiny bit of the principal (the actual amount of money you borrowed) and the rest will be an interest payment. For example, if your mortgage payment is $500, in the beginning the amount you are paying on the actual debt may be something like $20. The next month, you might be paying $25 on the debt and $475 on the interest. Over the course of time, the debt goes down slowly and the rate of principal to interest climbs. By the end of the loan, thirty years later, you may be paying $475 in principal and $25 in interest.
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There was a generation or two that retired at 65 or even earlier and had enough money to take cruises and do other interesting things. That is not the present generation of working people. Social security is scheduled to run out all too soon and in the recent financial troubles, many people have lost money in their 401k retirement accounts.
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In this world of instantly checking your bank balance by internet or cell phone, the idea of balancing one’s account seems quaint, a relic from the past. Yet there are some compelling reasons to do this on a monthly basis, when your bank statement comes out. (more…)
So much of our money is electronic in nature. When we go to a store and use a credit card, there is no physical exchange of dollar bills. Instead, an electronic signal goes through a maze of computer networks from the store to your bank and back and you get a charge to your account.
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