Last year, I spent the most on ...
Displaying poll results.24737 total votes.
Most Votes
- What's the highest dollar price will Bitcoin reach in 2024? Posted on February 28th, 2024 | 8475 votes
- Will ByteDance be forced to divest TikTok Posted on March 20th, 2024 | 6970 votes
Most Comments
- What's the highest dollar price will Bitcoin reach in 2024? Posted on March 20th, 2024 | 68 comments
- Will ByteDance be forced to divest TikTok Posted on March 20th, 2024 | 20 comments
Medical expenses? What's that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Medical expenses? What's that? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rand Paul is delusional.
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Food and fuel easily outpaced everything else.
I've been living like a pauper for the last three years, paying off all my debt from when I was young and stupid... about a year left and I'm 100% debt free.
Austerity is hard, and I understand why the Greek people don't want to take their medicine, but sometimes you really have to, and knowing there is an end after which you are free is a wonderful feeling.
-nB
Re:Housing! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mortgage (Score:5, Insightful)
when buying food, I just swipe the credit card, or generally hand them a blank check to let the register fill it out...but I rarely look at the totals.
Damn, wish I A) was a less scrupulous person, and B) ran the check-out at your local green grocer. All those times you'd have handed me a blank check, I'd have added at least $5 to your total each visit, since you don't bother to check. Nice little supplemental income you've been giving someone.
Does everyone on this list track all their expenses so carefully and down to the cent?
Those of us who don't have more money then sense do, yes.
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Austerity is hard, and I understand why the Greek people don't want to take their medicine, but sometimes you really have to...
Money is merely a convenient fiction of accounting, especially when you're dealing with it on a national level. The principle of austerity itself isn't what the masses object to, it's the specific services that get the shaft, and the ideology (most often from the wealthy elite) that dictates what gets cut and who gets off scot-free.
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Austerity is a diet.
When you get used to a certain level of a consumption, trying to scale back becomes a miserable prospect. Human nature is generally greedy and undisciplined. Both of those make any reduction in consumption a difficult prospect.
Doesn't matter if it's Money, Bling, or Twinkies.
Re:I bought a house (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that was pretty foolish of you. Mortgage rates are crazy low right now. With that sort of money on hand, I have to assume that you have good credit. If you have good credit, you could have gotten a mortgage with a fixed rate around 3%. Maybe even lower, if you shopped around. You surely could have found an investment that gave better than 3% returns - heck, my credit union pays 2% on my checking account. If you could make even 8% (a fairly conservative number), then over the fifteen year term, you just threw away over half a million dollars.
So, uh, congrats...?
Re:Check your lifetime maximum (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly your insurance company has misunderstood the meaning of the word insurance. The whole idea is that you pay for everything out of your own pocket, but you have an insurance policy which covers you in case something horribly expensive happens. That is what insurance is.
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditionally this is true, but is it still true? I understand that great sports players are paid more because only they can do what they do, and you need the absolute best talent. It used to be that great actors and musicians were paid more since they had a special talent. But is that still true? You can be a completely mediocre singer these days, but a record company can polish you up, autotune your singing, give you dance lessons, slap on some makeup, and make you a millionaire. It is not about the person's ability in that case, it is about the brand (with their name being a brand).
Can you justify the salary of investment bankers by saying that only a small amount of people have the ability or the desire to do it? I would say no. Or how about CEOs of large companies? Certainly there is no shortage of people who want the CEO salary, and have the desire to be CEO. Yet some CEOs go from company to company, completely ruining the company with bad management and then move to the next company (usually with a pay raise!).
Many job markets are distorted. The "bad yet highly paid CEO" problem baffles me completely, but it is easy to see how ability and hard working can only take you so far in many positions. No matter how hard I work, I will never be the president of the company I work for. The deck is stacked against most of us.
Re:Medical expenses? What's that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Enslaving doctors and forcing them to work day and night giving away healthcare for free is civilized?
How exactly is this different than what we do to soldiers? Or policemen? Or representatives?
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Its hard for us US citizens to grasp the numbers that the Greeks are being asked to swallow as we don't have a great frame of reference. One story on NPR threw out some interesting numbers. The minimum wage measure will cut the Greek minimum wage to less than half of what it is in the US. The percentage in government job cuts would be the same as the US government cutting 300,000 jobs. I'm not saying whether or not the measures are needed. This just helps to put a pretty sobering perspective on the issue.
Re:Housing! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Revenue in the US since WW II has NEVER exceeded 20% of GDP"
Which in no way means it can't be.
And when talking about the rich; just removed the temporary tax cuts. That's all. No one wants the rich to pay 100% of their income.
Although taxing monies over a billion at 100% is an interesting hypothetical. Not one I am proposing, cause it would never happen.
Re:Mortgage (Score:5, Insightful)
Fortunately, most people our honest, and not ass wipes.
Not wasting time worrying over ever penny make s more sense the counting every penny every months; assuming you value time.
Re:Mortgage (Score:5, Insightful)
I can recommend this way of living. When you stop thinking about money, you can start living your life.