New Haggard accuser: 'He really thought he was invincible' - CNN.com: "Grant Haas told CNN he began receiving text messages from Haggard in January 2006 that were 'out of the ordinary' -- questions about what sexual positions he enjoyed, what drugs he used. He said the approaches culminated in a hotel-room encounter in July of that year, when he said Haggard offered him pills and masturbated in a bed they shared."
It doesn't matter what gender Person A or Person B is; if a person in a position of power and authority over another person - adult over child, teacher over student, preacher over flock - uses that power and authority to manipulate or intimidate someone to engage in sexual relations of any nature, that person is a huge scumbag. Period.
Yet male victims vastly under-report incidents because we as a society throw 5 million kinds of bullshit onto the male sexual identity, and unreported scumbags typically go on to victimize someone else. So to every male victim willing to come forward and speak publicly about it, I say kudos. Speaking out and going public is a brave act and it will - not just hopefully, it absolutely will - help other men, and that will help other boys and girls and women and animals and the general mental health of our society. Eventually, we will reduce the stigma to a point that little boys will say something the first time someone does something bad - a key point, because abusers often test a victim first by doing small inappropriate things before they do big sexually inappropriate things. And to the fellows coming forward today, I think you stand on the shoulders of a group of men who finally broke the code of silence in the Catholic church and took a big stand against molester priests.
I know it's hard for bystanders to hear these tales, and I know it is tempting to avoid the messenger along with the perpetrator. It's easy to joke, to pretend it doesn't affect us, to hide behind gender stereotypes and lewd jokes about sexual orientation or "scoring." It's hard to admit that boys and girls and men and women cannot always protect themselves from predators, and it is disgusting to realize just how many predators there are out there. Just thinking about it makes me sick. But I realized something when I listened to those now-grown former Catholic alter boys on NPR however many years ago - every time I ignore it and hope it goes away, every time I turn away or turn off the TV or radio or click off to a less bothersome story, I am letting it go on. The only right answer to any victim of abuse is "that's terrible and it never should have happened to you." If we want a safe place for our children, our neighbors, our spouses, nieces, nephews, and friends, we've got to man up and tolerate the discomfort of hearing these stories and gulp down the bile and say "thank you. Thank you for being brave enough to speak up, so this doesn't happen to someone else." And then we have to stay there, not run away, and admit that we are powerless to fix it, that we are clueless about how to help it, but that we care enough - for the victim AND for our society - to stay and try to offer, if not comfort, then at least fellowship and acceptance.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Take your blood-pressure meds, Bobby, it's another Victims of the Housing Crisis story
"He called his lender last fall hoping for a hardship consideration and asking for a two-month postponement of his mortgage payments. He wanted to have them added to the end of his mortgage. Mobley says his credit rating was excellent, and he was merely trying to free up some cash for the holidays." (Now, perhaps this fellow is too proud to admit he needs the money, so he minimizes his situation by calling it "cash for the holidays," but, please, people, children read these stories and learn by example. Freeing up cash for the holidays is NOT a good reason to ask your lender to incur the expense of processing a loan modification.)
CNNMoney.com has a story about how Tough it is to get a mortgage loan modification. They have the hard-luck cases, like the fellow paralyzed in an accident who can't get a mortgage workout (the article didn't say whether the friend helping out had power of attorney or any other legal status to represent the homeowner - could the problem be a lack of authority for a mere friend to negotiate a loan workout?). They have the real estate agent, who just wants to keep her house of 15 years (okay, not to be cynical, but did they really have half-million-dollar homes in Las Vegas 15 years ago, that would only be worth $350k today?) They have the pitiful retiree, his equity locked in a rental property with an ARM that reset so that the payment is higher than his rental income (I know, it happens, but a retiree who can't afford the potential payment increase should get a fixed-rate loan or sell the house before it's a problem).
Then they have this guy:
That's okay, Grandma, I know your supposedly-safe conservative retirement portfolio of bank stocks is worthless now, but at least you have the comfort of knowing that you're living on cat food for a good cause. We wouldn't want poor Kenny to go without cash for the holidays, and we surely wouldn't want poor Ronny to be "shackled to a bad investment for years".
CNNMoney.com has a story about how Tough it is to get a mortgage loan modification. They have the hard-luck cases, like the fellow paralyzed in an accident who can't get a mortgage workout (the article didn't say whether the friend helping out had power of attorney or any other legal status to represent the homeowner - could the problem be a lack of authority for a mere friend to negotiate a loan workout?). They have the real estate agent, who just wants to keep her house of 15 years (okay, not to be cynical, but did they really have half-million-dollar homes in Las Vegas 15 years ago, that would only be worth $350k today?) They have the pitiful retiree, his equity locked in a rental property with an ARM that reset so that the payment is higher than his rental income (I know, it happens, but a retiree who can't afford the potential payment increase should get a fixed-rate loan or sell the house before it's a problem).
Then they have this guy:
But when it came to obtaining a mortgage workout, he wasn't getting anywhere -- even after months of trying. He finally wrote a letter to the president of his lender to try to resolve the issue.
...
After that, however, and after he was asked to send in all his paperwork for the fifth time, he didn't hear from them again for six months. Then, recently, he finally got a call back with a loan workout offer.The lender offered an extremely low rate, 2.8%, which sounded great.
The problem was the value of his property has dropped from $840,000 to about $620,000 and the lender would do nothing to reduce the mortgage balance. Nash believed he would be upside-down on his mortgage, owing more than the house was worth, for years.
...
He looked around town and decided he could walk away from his house and rent another comparable place for half of what he would be paying his bank just for the mortgage payment.He loves his house but he's choosing to give it up rather than shackle himself to a bad investment for years.
That's okay, Grandma, I know your supposedly-safe conservative retirement portfolio of bank stocks is worthless now, but at least you have the comfort of knowing that you're living on cat food for a good cause. We wouldn't want poor Kenny to go without cash for the holidays, and we surely wouldn't want poor Ronny to be "shackled to a bad investment for years".
Thursday, January 15, 2009
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... Oh, Crap!
Warm, dry happy thoughts going out to the folks who survived the frigid waters of the Hudson River plane landing.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Funding retirement's peaks and valleys
As I project our required retirement income, it's not enough to say "we'll need $X a year." Costs will probably rise, and we'll want and need different income levels at different times in our retirement. Early on, we'll probably want to travel. Much later, there's a good chance that we'll need household help and, eventually, specialized medical care. Very early on - whether due to early retirement, job loss with little chance of finding an equivalent job before retirement, or other reasons - we might not have any social security income at all.
Traditional retirement advice says we should save enough so we can comfortably live off of 4-5% of our savings. So for every $10,000/year we want to spend in retirement, we need to save between $200,000 and $250,000. Yowza. But, if we can save enough, we should be able to withdraw 4-5% a year without reducing the principal; or we can give ourselves a raise to keep pace with inflation, and it will whittle our savings down very slowly; or, in the event of catastrophic medical expenses or other major expenses, we'll have a cushion.
I look at our retirement funding in phases. Phase 1, no social security, we live on savings. Phase 2, social security kicks in and, hopefully, we won't have to tap the 401k yet. Phase 3, The 401k gives us a little more money to weather inflation - or to live it up a bit while we still can. Phase 4, perhaps we have medical expenses, or we have difficulty doing our own housekeeping and home maintenance - for whatever reason, expenses rise.
To fund phase 1, our primary plan is to keep working until we can afford to live on savings without jeopardizing our retirement savings for the later years. For phase 2, again, the goal is to save enough/retire late enough to provide adequate funding. Also, careful budgeting - both to accurately predict our income needs and to avoid unnecessary waste - will help. As we enter phase 3, we can breathe a bit easier - since we plan to live without the 401k money for several years, the 401k should just be emergency/fun/inflation money. If we're just taking the minimum withdrawals from the 401k, it should last well into phase 4, when household help and possibly medical expenses increase our costs.
Housing plays an important role in our retirement plan. If we plan well and buy well, our home will be paid-off by phase 4, when we our expenses rise fastest. Now, some folks say that a paid-off house is just trapped equity, but that's certainly not true in retirement. The more income you need to support your lifestyle, the higher your tax bracket. In retirement, higher income means giving up a big chunk of social security benefits to taxes. So a penny saved is 1.33 pennies earned, or more. Plus, a paid-off house will give us an emergency backstop - we can borrow against the house if we need cash (though only as a last resort).
Investment property plays a part in our plan, too. Experts say an average couple needs to save $300,000 just for medical expenses in retirement. My goal is to acquire rental properties with a combined total of $300,000 in mortgages - with a very strong likelihood of appreciating at market rate over 30 years. As the tenants pay the mortgage down, we'll be building up $300k in equity for our twilight years, and the properties' values should (roughly) keep pace with inflation. Ideally, we'll acquire these properties by the time we're 45 - or else buy properties that can cash-flow with 15-year mortgages. Ideally, rents will increase faster than expenses, so the rental properties will provide some income during retirement, but the primary goal is simply to have properties with an inflation-adjusted, after-sales-expenses net value greater than $300k.
That's our plan in a nutshell. We may not hit every goal, but the closer we get, the better our odds of enjoying a retirement free from major financial stress.
Traditional retirement advice says we should save enough so we can comfortably live off of 4-5% of our savings. So for every $10,000/year we want to spend in retirement, we need to save between $200,000 and $250,000. Yowza. But, if we can save enough, we should be able to withdraw 4-5% a year without reducing the principal; or we can give ourselves a raise to keep pace with inflation, and it will whittle our savings down very slowly; or, in the event of catastrophic medical expenses or other major expenses, we'll have a cushion.
I look at our retirement funding in phases. Phase 1, no social security, we live on savings. Phase 2, social security kicks in and, hopefully, we won't have to tap the 401k yet. Phase 3, The 401k gives us a little more money to weather inflation - or to live it up a bit while we still can. Phase 4, perhaps we have medical expenses, or we have difficulty doing our own housekeeping and home maintenance - for whatever reason, expenses rise.
To fund phase 1, our primary plan is to keep working until we can afford to live on savings without jeopardizing our retirement savings for the later years. For phase 2, again, the goal is to save enough/retire late enough to provide adequate funding. Also, careful budgeting - both to accurately predict our income needs and to avoid unnecessary waste - will help. As we enter phase 3, we can breathe a bit easier - since we plan to live without the 401k money for several years, the 401k should just be emergency/fun/inflation money. If we're just taking the minimum withdrawals from the 401k, it should last well into phase 4, when household help and possibly medical expenses increase our costs.
Housing plays an important role in our retirement plan. If we plan well and buy well, our home will be paid-off by phase 4, when we our expenses rise fastest. Now, some folks say that a paid-off house is just trapped equity, but that's certainly not true in retirement. The more income you need to support your lifestyle, the higher your tax bracket. In retirement, higher income means giving up a big chunk of social security benefits to taxes. So a penny saved is 1.33 pennies earned, or more. Plus, a paid-off house will give us an emergency backstop - we can borrow against the house if we need cash (though only as a last resort).
Investment property plays a part in our plan, too. Experts say an average couple needs to save $300,000 just for medical expenses in retirement. My goal is to acquire rental properties with a combined total of $300,000 in mortgages - with a very strong likelihood of appreciating at market rate over 30 years. As the tenants pay the mortgage down, we'll be building up $300k in equity for our twilight years, and the properties' values should (roughly) keep pace with inflation. Ideally, we'll acquire these properties by the time we're 45 - or else buy properties that can cash-flow with 15-year mortgages. Ideally, rents will increase faster than expenses, so the rental properties will provide some income during retirement, but the primary goal is simply to have properties with an inflation-adjusted, after-sales-expenses net value greater than $300k.
That's our plan in a nutshell. We may not hit every goal, but the closer we get, the better our odds of enjoying a retirement free from major financial stress.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Why am I so hard on real estate agents?
Example 1:
7524 LINDEN AVE, Citrus Heights, CA 95610
List Price: $134,500
55 days on market, 1 photo (front exterior)
Description: "Escrow fell! Your buyers gain!!!! Fannie mae owned. This home is a fixer and is located close to freeway, and shopping. A great investment opportunity!"
Yes, Mr. or Ms. Realtor(TM), let me just play phone tag with my agent who will play phone tag with you to arrange a showing, schlep three or four people across town, and waste an afternoon discovering that, no, it isn't actually a fixer, it's a tear-down. Because that is so much more efficient than YOU actually wasting YOUR time writing up a description of the property and/or taking a couple more photos. For your measly $2,000 cut of a measly $8,000 commission, yes, I can understand that you don't want to actually work more than an hour. My gosh, if you put in a few hours taking pictures and writing a complete and accurate description, you would only earn the hourly rate of a neurosurgeon, and no one wants you to lower yourself to the hourly wage of the riff-raff doctors.
Example 2:
7606 GRANITE AVE, Orangevale, CA 95662
Appears to actually be 7546 Granite Ave, which one can ascertain now that there are actual photos of the house in MLS.
List Price: $310,000
114 days on market as of today
1 Picture - of the chain across the end of the drive - when the house came on the market. First, the agent tried cutting the price, twice. Later - just a couple of weeks ago, after sitting on the market for about 100 days, the agent actually posted photos of the house.
7524 LINDEN AVE, Citrus Heights, CA 95610
List Price: $134,500
55 days on market, 1 photo (front exterior)
Description: "Escrow fell! Your buyers gain!!!! Fannie mae owned. This home is a fixer and is located close to freeway, and shopping. A great investment opportunity!"
Yes, Mr. or Ms. Realtor(TM), let me just play phone tag with my agent who will play phone tag with you to arrange a showing, schlep three or four people across town, and waste an afternoon discovering that, no, it isn't actually a fixer, it's a tear-down. Because that is so much more efficient than YOU actually wasting YOUR time writing up a description of the property and/or taking a couple more photos. For your measly $2,000 cut of a measly $8,000 commission, yes, I can understand that you don't want to actually work more than an hour. My gosh, if you put in a few hours taking pictures and writing a complete and accurate description, you would only earn the hourly rate of a neurosurgeon, and no one wants you to lower yourself to the hourly wage of the riff-raff doctors.
Example 2:
7606 GRANITE AVE, Orangevale, CA 95662
Appears to actually be 7546 Granite Ave, which one can ascertain now that there are actual photos of the house in MLS.
List Price: $310,000
114 days on market as of today
1 Picture - of the chain across the end of the drive - when the house came on the market. First, the agent tried cutting the price, twice. Later - just a couple of weeks ago, after sitting on the market for about 100 days, the agent actually posted photos of the house.
I am unique - but you already knew that, didn't you?
I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm a Self-Improving Organized Money Manager  |
I thought I would come out a "Newness-seeking Self-improving Tree Hugger," I didn't. But what was much more interesting than the label they assigned me, was this little blurb:
"0% of the 45891 people who have taken this quiz are like you."
Well, I still think I'm one in a million, but at least I know for sure that I'm one in 45,891.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Budget is Not a Four-Letter Word, especially when buying a house
Around 2004, our house hunt was going poorly. We were looking for a moderate, middle-class house with a larger garage - or room to add a larger garage. We found a candidate in our price range, just a few blocks from our current home. As we toured the house, we noticed cracks in the walls - the entire center of the house was sinking. That was pretty typical of what we were finding in our price range. So we raised our price range. Then we raised it again. Eventually, we had raised our price range so high that there was not a house in the county that seemed worth the money - but there WAS a house just a couple hundred thousand more that we really liked.
How do you decide how much to spend on a house? We weren't comfortable having a real estate agent make such a big decision for us. I asked our banker what we would qualify for - she ran the application and asked how much we wanted. We didn't know, and she said she had to enter something, so I pulled a ridiculously large number out of the sky, thinking the computer would reject it and spit out the actual maximum. We qualified for the ridiculously high mortgage on a 30-year fixed rate loan. Well, great, but what do we need with such an expensive house?
Eventually, we decided to write up a budget, showing how much we were already spending on everything. We used that budget to write up a projected budget, showing how much we could spend on everything if we bought a more expensive house. In order to make the numbers work, we had to cut back on lattes and hobbies. Okay. We also had to trim our grocery budget - no problem. We had to reduce our savings rate substantially. Ouch. We had to give up 401k contributions. No way.
Voila. We now had a way to decide how much house we could comfortably afford. We put the savings and retirement contributions back into the budget. debated how many vacations and lattes we would need to feel like we weren't slaves to the house, and adjusted the mortgage figure down to accommodate what we felt was a reasonable budget for us. We saw some tempting houses, but then we looked at the budget and decided that having adequate retirement savings was far more important than having a dream house. Besides, most of the potential dream homes needed a lot of remodeling to be dreamy.
The real estate industrial complex marketers encourage a lot of emotional decision-making in the home buying process. It's easy to get caught up in the hype. But our projected budget brought us back to earth, and helped us avoid buying more house than we could comfortably afford. Unfortunately, in the midst of the housing bubble, that meant not buying any house at all. That was good for our budget, but bad for morale. Now, however, we are reaping the benefits, as Sacramento County makes the news for its high foreclosure rate, we are not one of the statistics. Several homes we considered buying in the bubble, are back on the market at $100k less - some as much as $300k less than they cost at the peak.
I would like to take a moment to thank our budget for keeping us out of trouble. I would encourage any would-be home buyer to draw up an estimated budget - including any increased utilities, insurance, and/or maintenance costs. We figured out our moving costs - including any new furniture, drapes, or remodeling we'd want for the new house. Little expenses add up - a new lawnmower, towels that match the new bathroom, blinds for the gorgeous half-circle window in the living room and extension wands for vacuuming cobwebs off the high ceiling can quickly add up to $1,000 or more. If your budget in the new house requires big changes from your current budget, you might give it a dry run - see if you can really live, happily, with cutbacks in dining out, fewer vacations, less lattes. A mortgage can be a 30-year commitment - it's important to feel comfortable that you can live with it for 30 years.
How do you decide how much to spend on a house? We weren't comfortable having a real estate agent make such a big decision for us. I asked our banker what we would qualify for - she ran the application and asked how much we wanted. We didn't know, and she said she had to enter something, so I pulled a ridiculously large number out of the sky, thinking the computer would reject it and spit out the actual maximum. We qualified for the ridiculously high mortgage on a 30-year fixed rate loan. Well, great, but what do we need with such an expensive house?
Eventually, we decided to write up a budget, showing how much we were already spending on everything. We used that budget to write up a projected budget, showing how much we could spend on everything if we bought a more expensive house. In order to make the numbers work, we had to cut back on lattes and hobbies. Okay. We also had to trim our grocery budget - no problem. We had to reduce our savings rate substantially. Ouch. We had to give up 401k contributions. No way.
Voila. We now had a way to decide how much house we could comfortably afford. We put the savings and retirement contributions back into the budget. debated how many vacations and lattes we would need to feel like we weren't slaves to the house, and adjusted the mortgage figure down to accommodate what we felt was a reasonable budget for us. We saw some tempting houses, but then we looked at the budget and decided that having adequate retirement savings was far more important than having a dream house. Besides, most of the potential dream homes needed a lot of remodeling to be dreamy.
The real estate industrial complex marketers encourage a lot of emotional decision-making in the home buying process. It's easy to get caught up in the hype. But our projected budget brought us back to earth, and helped us avoid buying more house than we could comfortably afford. Unfortunately, in the midst of the housing bubble, that meant not buying any house at all. That was good for our budget, but bad for morale. Now, however, we are reaping the benefits, as Sacramento County makes the news for its high foreclosure rate, we are not one of the statistics. Several homes we considered buying in the bubble, are back on the market at $100k less - some as much as $300k less than they cost at the peak.
I would like to take a moment to thank our budget for keeping us out of trouble. I would encourage any would-be home buyer to draw up an estimated budget - including any increased utilities, insurance, and/or maintenance costs. We figured out our moving costs - including any new furniture, drapes, or remodeling we'd want for the new house. Little expenses add up - a new lawnmower, towels that match the new bathroom, blinds for the gorgeous half-circle window in the living room and extension wands for vacuuming cobwebs off the high ceiling can quickly add up to $1,000 or more. If your budget in the new house requires big changes from your current budget, you might give it a dry run - see if you can really live, happily, with cutbacks in dining out, fewer vacations, less lattes. A mortgage can be a 30-year commitment - it's important to feel comfortable that you can live with it for 30 years.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Market meltdown: Where did all the money go?
On the age-old question, where did the money go... Here is one idea:
Market meltdown: Where did all the money go?: "Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, has a different explanation.
He says that from the market's bottom in 2003 until its peak in 2007, the market value of all publicly traded stocks worldwide grew from about $20 trillion to $45 trillion.
During this period, only about $1.5 trillion in cash went into the market. Debt accounted for some of the remaining increase in market capitalization, but most of it existed only on paper."
Market meltdown: Where did all the money go?: "Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, has a different explanation.
He says that from the market's bottom in 2003 until its peak in 2007, the market value of all publicly traded stocks worldwide grew from about $20 trillion to $45 trillion.
During this period, only about $1.5 trillion in cash went into the market. Debt accounted for some of the remaining increase in market capitalization, but most of it existed only on paper."
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