Are you all super rich or is there a method I don’t get?!

[ShadowsPapa]

I work at a camping resort and the amount of “younger couples” coming in with brand new diesels and nice new trucks and 38-42 foot toy hauler 5th wheels with 8,000$ golf carts is absolutely mind boggling. Like people in they’re early 30s. A lot of these rigs are like 70-80,000$ for the truck and another 80-100k for the fifth wheel.
so yeah a built gladiator doesn’t seem to bad to me. We see people with a built jeep and think money. Which it is don’t get me wrong but we don’t drive by everyone’s house and judge them on they’re massive mansion or they’re 150,000$ Escalade. I tell my wife that
when we drive down the road. If she sees a built truck she’s says looks like they have money lol. I say, you didn’t say anything when the g wagon just went by!!! Haha idk it’s just money who cares what people do I guess.

I'm sure you and others here have seen the reports that show how many Americans are xx thousands of dollars in debt - on CREDIT CARDS, not counting home mortgage, vehicle loans and student loans. Credit cards - some have 2 or 3 almost maxed out. Some I know "float" those cards - they get another app in the mail and transfer balances, etc.
Just wait until it's time for them to retire! LOL - they think they can live on SS?

Dominic, a guy I worked with in the 90s, was an Italian guy, came over with his parents as a youth. Modest car (some would ask why he hadn't already crushed it at over 200,000 miles, big old thing, looked old, too). He drove that car to work, or at times took the bus. He lived in an old south-side of Des Moines 2 story house - small, tiny lot, no garage - with his Italian mother who knew only spotty English. He didn't spend money - he worked in the same department I did - and as an electrician and network person I earned more than he did - I made $13,000/year. He usually brought his lunch. Some would call him cheap, my mother would have called him frugal or "Scotch".
A couple of years after I left that company for greener pastures (and 6K a year more) I got a call from a friend who still worked there with Dominic - hey, Bill, did you hear about Dominic? Yeah, he built a new quarter-million dollar house on the SE side! Paid CASH!
Just goes to show - you have no real idea unless you personally know the person and their situations. He was saving pennies, living like a pauper - keeping his debt load at 0. And now lives in a very nice house and has no mortgage.
Then there was the woman in our agency when I worked for government. She spent money like it was water in the ocean. Spent a lot of time at casinos, claimed she won a lot of the time, took a lot of sick days and that's generally where she'd be found. When she REALLY got sick she was begging for sick leave donations and crying when the government and union agreed to wage freezes claiming she just couldn't make ends meet as it was, living paycheck to paycheck. She was the exact opposite of Dominic. Spent it as fast as it came in, wasted her sick leave, claimed she couldn't afford to put any money aside to be matched by the government (we could set aside up to xx dollars from each check and they'd match it up to so many $$. FREE MONEY! You save, and they'll toss money into the pot. Hell yeah!
When we did get a raise, such as it was, we decided we were living ok, getting bills paid so didn't HAVE to have it. We set it aside - and so did our employer, matching what we saved.
If I was sick, I sometimes took vacation instead of sick leave. I was very frugal with my sick leave - in fact, my wife kept a spreadsheet that showed at any given time how much sick leave and vacation time I had. I kept the sick leave maxed out, and usually maxed out vacation to the point of take it or lose it.
When I retired, the state took my hourly salary x the hours of sick leave I had saved up (maxed out) and put that amount into a pot and paid for my health insurance each month save for $20 a month. When I hit 65 and that program ended automatically, money left or not, there was a month's health insurance money left in there. So I paid $20/month for health insurance for the first couple of years, then it went up to $40/month until I hit 65.
Working my butt off, little vacation time taken, staying as healthy as possible - not wasting sick leave meant while others struggled to pay for health insurance - mine was mostly covered. My wife, unfortunately, burned her sick leave by converting it to vacation time. She was only covered the first 2 years after she retired, but still it softened the blow.
It's PRIORITIES you set. What's important to you.
Yeah, I'm retired - but I have a shop and spend countless hours in the shop doing restorations for others to help cover the JT expenses. My wife does quilting for others with her long-arm quilting machine. That way we can afford to leave this county once in a while. People have no idea the time she spends doing that just so we can enjoy a few days now and then. She rarely "just sits".
Frankly, I don't know how some people out there do it - but then we don't know their circumstances, and when they reach my age, they may be in such a hole they have to work at Walmart just to buy groceries or pay for their medicare. Or - they may have been super smart in other areas. Who knows. If you see lights on in their garage in the evening - are they installing a lift kit - or are those grow lights?

Sponsored

 

[Minty JL]

Having numerous income streams is the key. Have several income streams that are passive are the real key; your money either working or making you money with nearly no effort to zero.

I've gotten back into investing because the market it prime, buy cheap sell high. Don't trade with emotions making $1000 in 2 hours is better then sitting on it and waiting to reel in a monster yield 5 years later. Keep turning and burning.

ALWAYS pay your self first. What I do after I make a profit. My initial buy in funds + 10% automatically go back into the bank. The I take that 80% and determine where those proceeds are best used/spent. Pay off debt first, retirement accounts (Roth IRA/401k), then what ever remains gets split between saving and fun money.

My first JTM payment is the end of December, I should have it paid off by March 1st. Of note zero credit card debt. I use my AMEX card as a debit card and pay it off bi-weekly. Why, why not reel in all of those points and free benefits. Gotta work the system ladies and gentlemen. I used point off my AMEX Platinum card to get my daughter a plane ticket for Christmas for $3.18

ALWAYs pay yourself FIRST!!!

 

[Jeeperjamie]

I'm sure you and others here have seen the reports that show how many Americans are xx thousands of dollars in debt - on CREDIT CARDS, not counting home mortgage, vehicle loans and student loans. Credit cards - some have 2 or 3 almost maxed out. Some I know "float" those cards - they get another app in the mail and transfer balances, etc.
Just wait until it's time for them to retire! LOL - they think they can live on SS?

Dominic, a guy I worked with in the 90s, was an Italian guy, came over with his parents as a youth. Modest car (some would ask why he hadn't already crushed it at over 200,000 miles, big old thing, looked old, too). He drove that car to work, or at times took the bus. He lived in an old south-side of Des Moines 2 story house - small, tiny lot, no garage - with his Italian mother who knew only spotty English. He didn't spend money - he worked in the same department I did - and as an electrician and network person I earned more than he did - I made $13,000/year. He usually brought his lunch. Some would call him cheap, my mother would have called him frugal or "Scotch".
A couple of years after I left that company for greener pastures (and 6K a year more) I got a call from a friend who still worked there with Dominic - hey, Bill, did you hear about Dominic? Yeah, he built a new quarter-million dollar house on the SE side! Paid CASH!
Just goes to show - you have no real idea unless you personally know the person and their situations. He was saving pennies, living like a pauper - keeping his debt load at 0. And now lives in a very nice house and has no mortgage.
Then there was the woman in our agency when I worked for government. She spent money like it was water in the ocean. Spent a lot of time at casinos, claimed she won a lot of the time, took a lot of sick days and that's generally where she'd be found. When she REALLY got sick she was begging for sick leave donations and crying when the government and union agreed to wage freezes claiming she just couldn't make ends meet as it was, living paycheck to paycheck. She was the exact opposite of Dominic. Spent it as fast as it came in, wasted her sick leave, claimed she couldn't afford to put any money aside to be matched by the government (we could set aside up to xx dollars from each check and they'd match it up to so many $$. FREE MONEY! You save, and they'll toss money into the pot. Hell yeah!
When we did get a raise, such as it was, we decided we were living ok, getting bills paid so didn't HAVE to have it. We set it aside - and so did our employer, matching what we saved.
If I was sick, I sometimes took vacation instead of sick leave. I was very frugal with my sick leave - in fact, my wife kept a spreadsheet that showed at any given time how much sick leave and vacation time I had. I kept the sick leave maxed out, and usually maxed out vacation to the point of take it or lose it.
When I retired, the state took my hourly salary x the hours of sick leave I had saved up (maxed out) and put that amount into a pot and paid for my health insurance each month save for $20 a month. When I hit 65 and that program ended automatically, money left or not, there was a month's health insurance money left in there. So I paid $20/month for health insurance for the first couple of years, then it went up to $40/month until I hit 65.
Working my butt off, little vacation time taken, staying as healthy as possible - not wasting sick leave meant while others struggled to pay for health insurance - mine was mostly covered. My wife, unfortunately, burned her sick leave by converting it to vacation time. She was only covered the first 2 years after she retired, but still it softened the blow.
It's PRIORITIES you set. What's important to you.
Yeah, I'm retired - but I have a shop and spend countless hours in the shop doing restorations for others to help cover the JT expenses. My wife does quilting for others with her long-arm quilting machine. That way we can afford to leave this county once in a while. People have no idea the time she spends doing that just so we can enjoy a few days now and then. She rarely "just sits".
Frankly, I don't know how some people out there do it - but then we don't know their circumstances, and when they reach my age, they may be in such a hole they have to work at Walmart just to buy groceries or pay for their medicare. Or - they may have been super smart in other areas. Who knows. If you see lights on in their garage in the evening - are they installing a lift kit - or are those grow lights?

This is good advice. I use to live paycheck to paycheck until I started my commercial cleaning business 12yrs ago and kept my full time job as well. It's funny but now that I can afford to blow a little money here and there I tend to not. The wife and I have gotten a lot smarter with our spending. I'm planning to have my house paid for in the next 3 yrs and I'll be 48 and will not have any car payments either. I'm not planning on working past 60 with 55 being the goal. My full time job matches Dollar for Dollar UpTo 10% and I have been taking advantage of the full amount since I turned 40, before that I was putting like 4% back. Plus we try to keep enough in the bank to cover at least one full years salary of me or the wife if something happened to my full time job or hers. We both make decent money at our full time jobs and that's one of the reasons I have kept mine.

 

[Jeeperjamie]

Having numerous income streams is the key. Have several income streams that are passive are the real key; your money either working or making you money with nearly no effort to zero.

I've gotten back into investing because the market it prime, buy cheap sell high. Don't trade with emotions making $1000 in 2 hours is better then sitting on it and waiting to reel in a monster yield 5 years later. Keep turning and burning.

ALWAYS pay your self first. What I do after I make a profit. My initial buy in funds + 10% automatically go back into the bank. The I take that 80% and determine where those proceeds are best used/spent. Pay off debt first, retirement accounts (Roth IRA/401k), then what ever remains gets split between saving and fun money.

My first JTM payment is the end of December, I should have it paid off by March 1st. Of note zero credit card debt. I use my AMEX card as a debit card and pay it off bi-weekly. Why, why not reel in all of those points and free benefits. Gotta work the system ladies and gentlemen. I used point off my AMEX Platinum card to get my daughter a plane ticket for Christmas for $3.18

ALWAYs pay yourself FIRST!!!

Having no CC debt is amazing. When we paid all ours off about 6yrs ago I was amazed at how much we were spending on payments. I'm a cash is king on most purchases under $10000 and if I have to finance something those 2% interest rates are nice at the credit union. I still try to pay a loan off in 6 months or less unless it's a vehicle, I need to do better on that side

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Having numerous income streams is the key. Have several income streams that are passive are the real key; your money either working or making you money with nearly no effort to zero.

I've gotten back into investing because the market it prime, buy cheap sell high. Don't trade with emotions making $1000 in 2 hours is better then sitting on it and waiting to reel in a monster yield 5 years later. Keep turning and burning.

ALWAYS pay your self first. What I do after I make a profit. My initial buy in funds + 10% automatically go back into the bank. The I take that 80% and determine where those proceeds are best used/spent. Pay off debt first, retirement accounts (Roth IRA/401k), then what ever remains gets split between saving and fun money.

My first JTM payment is the end of December, I should have it paid off by March 1st. Of note zero credit card debt. I use my AMEX card as a debit card and pay it off bi-weekly. Why, why not reel in all of those points and free benefits. Gotta work the system ladies and gentlemen. I used point off my AMEX Platinum card to get my daughter a plane ticket for Christmas for $3.18

ALWAYs pay yourself FIRST!!!

I worked for a company that was bought out by Roper. I took my retirement benefits from them as company stock. I left it all in. The stock split shortly before I started there, it grew by leaps and bounds after that.
Let 'er ride, I said. While others were afraid - I left it in place. Yeah, it dropped badly those few years ago (when was that, about 2008? But when it recovered, it recovered to double the amount it was before the dip. Every expert said "you can't do that! Get out, diversify FAST!". Nope. I only converted when I actually retired. I had a gut feeling based on working there, the history of the holding company, and other factors. I saw a picture I guess others didn't.
My wife and I both had stuff all over the place - easier to not break into it and spend it that way. All you saw was a lot of smaller pieces instead of one larger lump you felt you could dig into and not hurt anything. Take out of smaller pots it looks really bad. So we used psychology on ourselves.

We never put on a credit card anything we can't pay off next due date. And my wife likes to go in a couple of times a month and pay things off.
My son uses Minty's credit card strategies - he hardly ever pays big for plane tickets. Good thing as they fly back and forth around the states - and to/from Korea multiple times a year. She's got 2 schools over there she has to keep tabs on, and she's been going over for her book tours for weeks at a time. He has flown many times for business. He's crazy smart with travel planning, air fare, etc. but then he's literally a genius in the true sense of the word so no surprise there. (seems to me his score may have beat mine)
They have one vehicle - the Jeep Compass he bought years ago which replaced a Ford Fusion they had for several years. He leverages other people's money very wisely, very well. He said years ago his goal was to retire by 50 - he's 40 now and I'd not be the slightest bit surprised to see him meet his goal. He's a goal-oriented person.
His credit rating is only a couple of points lower than mine, and I'm 1 or 2 lower than my wife's (the credit union said hers was among the highest of any of their customers). Unreal, before he hit 40 he had a credit score that many work decades to get to - or never achieve at all, ever.

 

[Minty JL]

Having no CC debt is amazing. When we paid all ours off about 6yrs ago I was amazed at how much we were spending on payments. I'm a cash is king on most purchases under $10000 and if I have to finance something those 2% interest rates are nice at the credit union. I still try to pay a loan off in 6 months or less unless it's a vehicle, I need to do better on that side

Yeah when I retired from the Army I had almost 75k in credit card debit. I spent my first 2 years retired paying everything off and saving to build a new house.

Almost 5 years later......zero balances on cards, new house and JTM.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Having no CC debt is amazing. When we paid all ours off about 6yrs ago I was amazed at how much we were spending on payments. I'm a cash is king on most purchases under $10000 and if I have to finance something those 2% interest rates are nice at the credit union. I still try to pay a loan off in 6 months or less unless it's a vehicle, I need to do better on that side

Here's what helped us years ago -
We took out any loans for the maximum possible term. Home mortgage - 30 years. Vehicles - 6 years or more, whatever - we always went for the longest possible term. That got our monthly -payments down low. We always made sure any contract had NO pre-payment penalty.
Each month we paid extra on the principal - we included enough in the mortgage payment it was basically the same monthly amount a 15 or 20 year term would have been. Same for cars.
Then when PFG did their great IT purge in 2002 and booted about 80 of us, and I found myself unemployed and over-skilled for most jobs so no one really wanted to hire me, we cut back to those longer term lower $$ monthly payments until I got a job again. That way we didn't have to call anyone or ask if we could negotiate lower payments or whatever, we simply fell back to the normal payments. In the end a 30 year mortgage was done in 20 (would have been less except for that unemployed bit) and vehicles were paid off well in advance. Some people seem to think that they MUST go with the shortest term possible to save money - but then they are locked into those higher monthly payments when hard times hit.

eah when I retired from the Army I had almost 75k in credit card debit. I spent my first 2 years retired paying everything off and saving to build a new house.

My now wife freaked out when she saw my credit cards and bank loans when we first met - while I was farming. It was made worse by the fact that I didn't have any income until I sold something. I had 4 years of a 0 income back then. She just couldn't handle it, and what really bugged her was the fact I was renting the ground from my first wife! "what if Sherri gets really mad at you and refuses to rent to you next year".
I tried to convince her - ain't gonna happen. She wasn't that sort of person, still, owing the bank $100,000 and credit cards at about 40K and an ex holding the land rental contracts was just too much for her. (and this was in the 80s when farmers all around were going bankrupt anyway, land prices went down the toilet, etc.)

 

[Escape.idiocracy]

I'm sure you and others here have seen the reports that show how many Americans are xx thousands of dollars in debt - on CREDIT CARDS, not counting home mortgage, vehicle loans and student loans. Credit cards - some have 2 or 3 almost maxed out. Some I know "float" those cards - they get another app in the mail and transfer balances, etc.
Just wait until it's time for them to retire! LOL - they think they can live on SS?

Dominic, a guy I worked with in the 90s, was an Italian guy, came over with his parents as a youth. Modest car (some would ask why he hadn't already crushed it at over 200,000 miles, big old thing, looked old, too). He drove that car to work, or at times took the bus. He lived in an old south-side of Des Moines 2 story house - small, tiny lot, no garage - with his Italian mother who knew only spotty English. He didn't spend money - he worked in the same department I did - and as an electrician and network person I earned more than he did - I made $13,000/year. He usually brought his lunch. Some would call him cheap, my mother would have called him frugal or "Scotch".
A couple of years after I left that company for greener pastures (and 6K a year more) I got a call from a friend who still worked there with Dominic - hey, Bill, did you hear about Dominic? Yeah, he built a new quarter-million dollar house on the SE side! Paid CASH!
Just goes to show - you have no real idea unless you personally know the person and their situations. He was saving pennies, living like a pauper - keeping his debt load at 0. And now lives in a very nice house and has no mortgage.
Then there was the woman in our agency when I worked for government. She spent money like it was water in the ocean. Spent a lot of time at casinos, claimed she won a lot of the time, took a lot of sick days and that's generally where she'd be found. When she REALLY got sick she was begging for sick leave donations and crying when the government and union agreed to wage freezes claiming she just couldn't make ends meet as it was, living paycheck to paycheck. She was the exact opposite of Dominic. Spent it as fast as it came in, wasted her sick leave, claimed she couldn't afford to put any money aside to be matched by the government (we could set aside up to xx dollars from each check and they'd match it up to so many $$. FREE MONEY! You save, and they'll toss money into the pot. Hell yeah!
When we did get a raise, such as it was, we decided we were living ok, getting bills paid so didn't HAVE to have it. We set it aside - and so did our employer, matching what we saved.
If I was sick, I sometimes took vacation instead of sick leave. I was very frugal with my sick leave - in fact, my wife kept a spreadsheet that showed at any given time how much sick leave and vacation time I had. I kept the sick leave maxed out, and usually maxed out vacation to the point of take it or lose it.
When I retired, the state took my hourly salary x the hours of sick leave I had saved up (maxed out) and put that amount into a pot and paid for my health insurance each month save for $20 a month. When I hit 65 and that program ended automatically, money left or not, there was a month's health insurance money left in there. So I paid $20/month for health insurance for the first couple of years, then it went up to $40/month until I hit 65.
Working my butt off, little vacation time taken, staying as healthy as possible - not wasting sick leave meant while others struggled to pay for health insurance - mine was mostly covered. My wife, unfortunately, burned her sick leave by converting it to vacation time. She was only covered the first 2 years after she retired, but still it softened the blow.
It's PRIORITIES you set. What's important to you.
Yeah, I'm retired - but I have a shop and spend countless hours in the shop doing restorations for others to help cover the JT expenses. My wife does quilting for others with her long-arm quilting machine. That way we can afford to leave this county once in a while. People have no idea the time she spends doing that just so we can enjoy a few days now and then. She rarely "just sits".
Frankly, I don't know how some people out there do it - but then we don't know their circumstances, and when they reach my age, they may be in such a hole they have to work at Walmart just to buy groceries or pay for their medicare. Or - they may have been super smart in other areas. Who knows. If you see lights on in their garage in the evening - are they installing a lift kit - or are those grow lights?

I do agree with several posts in here about judging… but at the same time there are many aspects of life that just don’t make any sense anymore… from purely a math standpoint…. It’s like real estate. Median incomes are “y” for an area, median sale prices are “y*10” plus the assumed value of many other things it is questionable anymore.
The walk away I guess is everyone should know their own standings and stay within the latter their limits…

unfortunately- this smells all too well of a bigger and badder 06/08 housing crunch.

For those that will want to criticize how mortgages play in here… many folks use their homes as an over sized credit card and refinanced with the low rates plus assumed inflated value and made poor choices by throwing it into toys vs a second house, or renovations….

To the comment about debt- I can’t even imagine what the standings are. In 2019 when we picked up our last house, USAA noted to me that their AVERAGE credit card debt seen on reports when applying for home loans was $80k….. and this is before the insanity train took off…. Now reports are showing most CC transactions are on basic essentials….. looks like the house of cards may falling quick!!!

 

[Tommyd]

This is good advice. I use to live paycheck to paycheck until I started my commercial cleaning business 12yrs ago and kept my full time job as well. It's funny but now that I can afford to blow a little money here and there I tend to not. The wife and I have gotten a lot smarter with our spending. I'm planning to have my house paid for in the next 3 yrs and I'll be 48 and will not have any car payments either. I'm not planning on working past 60 with 55 being the goal. My full time job matches Dollar for Dollar UpTo 10% and I have been taking advantage of the full amount since I turned 40, before that I was putting like 4% back. Plus we try to keep enough in the bank to cover at least one full years salary of me or the wife if something happened to my full time job or hers. We both make decent money at our full time jobs and that's one of the reasons I have kept mine.

What kind of cleaning business?

 

[Rusty PW]

suck-start a shotgun, fawk a blender, and drink bleach were some of the classics.. lol

Toe start a shotgun, and chewing on the end of a gun barrel are my favorites.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

This is good advice. I use to live paycheck to paycheck until I started my commercial cleaning business 12yrs ago and kept my full time job as well. It's funny but now that I can afford to blow a little money here and there I tend to not. The wife and I have gotten a lot smarter with our spending. I'm planning to have my house paid for in the next 3 yrs and I'll be 48 and will not have any car payments either. I'm not planning on working past 60 with 55 being the goal. My full time job matches Dollar for Dollar UpTo 10% and I have been taking advantage of the full amount since I turned 40, before that I was putting like 4% back. Plus we try to keep enough in the bank to cover at least one full years salary of me or the wife if something happened to my full time job or hers. We both make decent money at our full time jobs and that's one of the reasons I have kept mine.

Back in 1999, my wife would have liked to have killed me as I got us to buy the quilt store she was working at part time to help pay the bills. Took out a SBA loan and financed the rest through the seller of the business. For a few years my wife said "it would be neat to have my own quilt shop" - and she was ok with it at first, then the work, the employees (employees suck - especially female employees, they are SOOO "high school")
We both had full time jobs besides.
I got permission from the SBA to pay off the loan from the sellers (they were not happy as they loved the monthly income and interest). Then a year after that, I got the 5 year SBA loan paid off. Turned a "might make a profit" shop into a "more than double what the SBA said we might do" business. Ended up being nationally known and sold quilting supplies and fabrics to people in other countries like Germany and Japan. But it was killing us physically and mentally - trying to run a business, keeping full-time jobs, living 40 minutes away from the store, lazy employees, the cliques and politics of women employees "I want the day off and I tried but can't find anyone to work for me" types and then I start at the top of the list and before I get to number 3, I've found someone to work for that person.......... ugh. If it wasn't for employees and the crap.........
Sold out 5 years later - and my hunch was right - times were changing, other shops that weren't big enough were having struggles so we sold out - to the woman who we got to "manage" things for the last year. What a joke - we later found out things about her........ we'd have fired her sorry ass had we known. It's sort of funny, though - I took a store that was lucky to gross 80-90K and by the 4th year was grossing 200K. We more than doubled what we paid for the business when she bought it - and inside of a year we found out she wasn't paying the bills, she'd run it into the ground by trying to open a second location right away and going too deep too fast. A bit over a year later, it was close and she was gone and creditors were looking for her.
The funny part was that while she was thinking of buying - she'd gone to business classes! Oh, she knew all about small businesses, was always telling me how things should be done, how to
'improve" things.
Those 5+ years stressed us mentally and physically and I'm surprised our marriage survived - but in the end, it boosted our ability to retire, and I have my shop building from the proceeds of the sale. During those years, I came up with a web site, this was before "shopping carts" and software for such things was very common at all and what was there cost almost as much as we paid for the business. I went to bed at midnight and got up at 5:30 am those years.
You just never know what's behind what people have. They may have risked everything and almost killed themselves getting it.
My D-I-L is night and day dealing with her schools, she was up into the wee hours writing her books. My son helped with the graphics and art work - all while raising an extremely active son (likely ADHD like me and like his father) who is so advanced for his age, they can hardly keep up.
They are earning their retirement for sure!

 

[Jeeperjamie]

Commer

What kind of cleaning business?

[QUOTE="Tommyd, post: 1064677, member: 4648

Commercial cleaning, Doctors Offices and medical facilities mainly. It's been pretty good to me with little effort on my part to promote it. Got 18 people working for me and able to pay them pretty well.

 

[Rusty PW]

I do agree with several posts in here about judging… but at the same time there are many aspects of life that just don’t make any sense anymore… from purely a math standpoint…. It’s like real estate. Median incomes are “y” for an area, median sale prices are “y*10” plus the assumed value of many other things it is questionable anymore.
The walk away I guess is everyone should know their own standings and stay within the latter their limits…

unfortunately- this smells all too well of a bigger and badder 06/08 housing crunch.

For those that will want to criticize how mortgages play in here… many folks use their homes as an over sized credit card and refinanced with the low rates plus assumed inflated value and made poor choices by throwing it into toys vs a second house, or renovations….

To the comment about debt- I can’t even imagine what the standings are. In 2019 when we picked up our last house, USAA noted to me that their AVERAGE credit card debt seen on reports when applying for home loans was $80k….. and this is before the insanity train took off…. Now reports are showing most CC transactions are on basic essentials….. looks like the house of cards may falling quick!!!

You want a good indicator. Keep an eye on bankruptcies.

Back in the early 80's when things went to shit then. I watched my friends go through this. First things to go was the toys. Next was the boat or bike. Then the 2nd vehicle. When the guns went, you knew is wasn't good. After that, it was the fighting. They didn't care who was around when it started. During the divorce, the house got sold for a lot less then what they paid for it. If goes to shit again. This is most likely going to happen.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I do agree with several posts in here about judging… but at the same time there are many aspects of life that just don’t make any sense anymore… from purely a math standpoint…. It’s like real estate. Median incomes are “y” for an area, median sale prices are “y*10” plus the assumed value of many other things it is questionable anymore.
The walk away I guess is everyone should know their own standings and stay within the latter their limits…

unfortunately- this smells all too well of a bigger and badder 06/08 housing crunch.

For those that will want to criticize how mortgages play in here… many folks use their homes as an over sized credit card and refinanced with the low rates plus assumed inflated value and made poor choices by throwing it into toys vs a second house, or renovations….

To the comment about debt- I can’t even imagine what the standings are. In 2019 when we picked up our last house, USAA noted to me that their AVERAGE credit card debt seen on reports when applying for home loans was $80k….. and this is before the insanity train took off…. Now reports are showing most CC transactions are on basic essentials….. looks like the house of cards may falling quick!!!

And thus - your forum name

We use our CCs for basic essentials, leveraging the "benefits" they insist on giving us. We routinely get $25 gift cards in the mail from Fleet Farm - sometimes 2 at a time. Granted they are only good at FF, but that's often where we buy our cat food and certain other things anyway so it's not making us do what we'd not otherwise do.
Those rewards are a catch 22 in many ways. It's a ploy to get you to use specific credit cards. Miles aren't free, not really. Cash back isn't free - nope, you pay for it in the products you buy.
Where does that money come from? Merchant fees. When you go to a store and use a CC, that store pays a huge percentage of each transaction to the CC company for the "privilege" of being able to accept cards. Back when we owned a store - it was almost 3%, and was in the end based on the total $$ worth of charges that month. So if we sold someone $50 worth of goods, we paid the CC company $1.50 just to be able to take the card. And there were other massive banking fees. It's all likely much more now.
So you think you are getting a great deal from that CC company when you use their card and get money back?
HAHAHA - I laugh at thee.
Very funny. You paid 1.5% more for the price of that item to get 1% back while the CC company raked in billions.
Same for "miles earned" - it's to get you to spend, to do what you'd otherwise not do, so they can make more $$. Those fees end up being paid - by you and others.
Credit card companies GIVE YOU NOTHING. You get nothing from them. They take from Peter and pay you, Paul, or they take from Peter with one hand and give it back to Peter as a free gift with the other hand.
They aren't your friends and you are paying for every "free mile" or every "percent back" that you "get".
If CC companies didn't exist, stores could charge a lot less, so you'd actually save money without their very existence.
They are also taking millions - or billions - from those who pay interest because they over-spend and spreading it around to those who do pay. They are punishing with exorbitant interest fees those who don't or can't pay and giving it to those who don't really need a credit card to begin with. Those who can afford to pay cash are making money from those who can barely make ends meet.
A real nice system.

 

[Blade1668]

After it got bought out and ruined by Vertical Scope someone started it back up as Irate4x4. Not sure how it compares to the Pirate of old though.

I wondered what happened with it I had not been on there in over 15 plus years.
In past many of us in Jeep community would have "lift kit instal party" on weekends helping out others with it and guidance.

Sponsored