Am I missing something here on car payments?

[Borderland]

I think that young service members have long been victimized by easy credit extended by sharks.

I'm not sure what it's like today but when I was in the military they would just make the payments for you if a creditor convinced payroll that you owed the money.

You didn't have to leave the base to find somebody making payday loans with 25% interest.

There are all kinds of credit scams and come-ons out there. About a month ago I went into a farm supply store and bought a harrow. I gave them my bank card to pay for it. Instead of hitting my card they sent me their own credit card (25% interest) and a payment plan. I paid it off and called them about what I thought was a deceptive action to deliver me a credit card and put a charge on it.

I won't do business with a company like that and told them they lost me as a customer with the first transaction. I doubt it matters.

[RoyGBiv]

I'm not sure what it's like today but when I was in the military they would just make the payments for you if a creditor convinced payroll that you owed the money.

You didn't have to leave the base to find somebody making payday loans with 25% interest.

There are all kinds of credit scams and come-ons out there. About a month ago I went into a farm supply store and bought a harrow. I gave them my bank card to pay for it. Instead of hitting my card they sent me their own credit card (25% interest) and a payment plan. I paid it off and called them about what I thought was a deceptive action to deliver me a credit card and put a charge on it.

I won't do business with a company like that and told them they lost me as a customer with the first transaction. I doubt it matters.

That's illegal. I'd be finding out what state agency handles financial fraud and pressing charges.

[Borderland]

That's illegal. I'd be finding out what state agency handles financial fraud and pressing charges.

I thought it might be. My wife wanted me to call the AG's office and file a complaint. So far I haven't but if they contact me again about this I have the documentation that I'll be sending the AG. I told the farm supply company the best thing they could do at this point is close that account and never contact me again. I'll see if they understand the situation.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Man, if car salesmen can afford those payments they make a lot more than I do.

Or, I guess, potentially might live under a more forgiving tax structure that allows some of that as a business write-off or something, I guess that could also be possible.

But there is no way I'd consider touching those payments, not in a million years. I thought a friend of mine with $800 payments was out of his mind.

If I had that kind of money to spare, I'd be driving a 2005 Camry or something, and putting $1000/month into an index ETF. Prices are low right now and in the long run, the market will pay off.


Granted that's just what I WOULD do, I'm not saying that's what they SHOULD do. I'm not pretending for a second that I wouldn't enjoy owning a fast car. I just couldn't prioritize that over adding to the net family wealth, I don't think. Or I'd have to have so much money before doing that, that I wouldn't need to do that, because I'd just take eighty thousand bucks out of my bank account and hand it over.

ALTHOUGH I guess actually if I had enough money in the bank to do that, I wouldn't necessarily do that, because A) the money wouldn't be in a chequing account, it would be in an investment account and it would be earning, so I'd have to look at the respective interest rates and potential penalty for early buyouts and stuff and work out what I thought would be the best play. But presumably everyone takes my point, which is that if I had enough money to own a car that nice BUT only month-to-month, I wouldn't be spending that money on a rapidly depreciating toy. But that's just me; I don't really fault other people for having different priorities, although obviously I'm not a big fan of taxpayer-funded bailouts when interest rates uptick 200 points.

[guymontag]

If I had that kind of money to spare, I'd be driving a 2005 Camry or something, and putting $1000/month into an index ETF. Prices are low right now and in the long run, the market will pay off.

It’s a 2002 actually. Even then though - current world events and overall asshattery have me cynical on the market. Past performance doesn’t predict future results, no tree grows to the sky, the government’s capacity to fuck up a wet dream, etc.

Maybe they’re smart for living in the moment and the next bailout is the government taking hold of the private 401K, Roth IRA, etc.

[Rocky Racoon]

I don’t know how any of my students or favorite baristas are ever going to buy a house.

I don’t know about your students and their prospects, but yeah I think we are past the days you can earn enough money as a barista to buy a house.

Part of the problem is wages haven’t kept up with housing costs. The other part of the problem is their job is to pour coffee into a cup. I’m sympathetic to a point, but from here on out, if a teenager with no experience can learn your job in about a week, you are never going to get paid a decent wage doing that job.

[LittleLebowski]

I don’t know about your students and their prospects, but yeah I think we are past the days you can earn enough money as a barista to buy a house.

Part of the problem is wages haven’t kept up with housing costs. The other part of the problem is their job is to pour coffee into a cup. I’m sympathetic to a point, but from here on out, if a teenager with no experience can learn your job in about a week, you are never going to get paid a decent wage doing that job.

Factories are bad for the environment and blue collar jobs are icky.

[BehindBlueI's]

I don’t know about your students and their prospects, but yeah I think we are past the days you can earn enough money as a barista to buy a house.

Part of the problem is wages haven’t kept up with housing costs. The other part of the problem is their job is to pour coffee into a cup. I’m sympathetic to a point, but from here on out, if a teenager with no experience can learn your job in about a week, you are never going to get paid a decent wage doing that job.

What's harder, making coffee or putting pieces on a washing machine going down the line? Probably a wash. Yet one of those jobs used to be sufficient to gain you a ticket to the middle class in the mature Industrial Revolution. The issue now is largely we've moved away from a manufacturing and industrial economy to an information and attention based economy, and that will concentrate more wealth in fewer hands. Wide swathes of the population do not have the intelligence to do highly technical jobs and no amount of training will get them there any more than any amount of training will make me an Olympic level gymnast. We are not built for it and can't be forced into that mold. So what happens with the roughly 20% of the population with IQs that let them live independently but can't learn complex tasks? The roughly 30% who are on the low side of normal and can master most tasks the Industrial world demanded but who are increasingly getting frozen out of an increasingly complicated world? I see guys retiring because our systems get more and more complex. They can run an investigation and juggle case law changes, etc. but they are not wired for computers and are starting at a very low level of competency in that arena to begin with. As tech changes faster, that'll hit people younger.

You can't put the brakes on technology and innovation, but how do people make a living and how do we not return to a serf society given the speed of change we're seeing? Tough questions for which I'm sure there's no solid answers, but my grand grandchildren's world will be as alien to me as pre-Colombus America I would wager.

[psalms144.1]

What's harder, making coffee or putting pieces on a washing machine going down the line? Probably a wash. Yet one of those jobs used to be sufficient to gain you a ticket to the middle class in the mature Industrial Revolution. The issue now is largely we've moved away from a manufacturing and industrial economy to an information and attention based economy, and that will concentrate more wealth in fewer hands. Wide swathes of the population do not have the intelligence to do highly technical jobs and no amount of training will get them there any more than any amount of training will make me an Olympic level gymnast. We are not built for it and can't be forced into that mold. So what happens with the roughly 20% of the population with IQs that let them live independently but can't learn complex tasks? The roughly 30% who are on the low side of normal and can master most tasks the Industrial world demanded but who are increasingly getting frozen out of an increasingly complicated world? I see guys retiring because our systems get more and more complex. They can run an investigation and juggle case law changes, etc. but they are not wired for computers and are starting at a very low level of competency in that arena to begin with. As tech changes faster, that'll hit people younger.

You can't put the brakes on technology and innovation, but how do people make a living and how do we not return to a serf society given the speed of change we're seeing? Tough questions for which I'm sure there's no solid answers, but my grand grandchildren's world will be as alien to me as pre-Colombus America I would wager.

I'm usually NOT the conspiracy theory type, but, being a student of history, I know that no "socialist" system ever developed in an economy where there was a functioning middle class. I'm having a harder and harder time not thinking there is a large section of our political leadership that is intentionally working to destroy the capitalist system so they can usher in a newer "fairer" system where they have all the money and power, and their "citizens" are entirely dependent on (and obedient to) the big government.

Having said all that, location, location, location. In my little burg, my younger son picked up a $20+/hour job at the local pharmaceutical plant, working 3x12 and getting paid for 40/week. The local McDonalds is paying $15 to start, $18 for overnight - just to flip burgers and rotate the fries.

The problem, as alluded to above, is all that money means NOTHING in today's wildly inflated (largely due to government action) economy. My older boy is working in a professional salaried gig at the same plant, making nearly $80K/year, and we just moved him and his fiancé back into our basement apartment because rents in this town on shithole apartments are more than my mortgage. There's NO WAY on his salary he could buy a house in this market - falling down shacks on 1/4 acre are all in the $300K+ range.

Which takes us back to car payments. I read something recently (forget where) saying the AVERAGE car payment in the US now is close to $800 PER CAR. As a guy whose "fleet" consists of a paid-off 2006 Camry, a paid-off 2010 Kia Soul, a paid-off 2018 Ram 1500, a paid-off 2020 Kia Soul, and my older boy's not-quite-paid-off 2020 Kia Seltos, I can't imagine paying $800/month for anything that rolls. Flex on me all you want but carrying that kind of debt is just financial suicide.

[BWT]

What's harder, making coffee or putting pieces on a washing machine going down the line? Probably a wash. Yet one of those jobs used to be sufficient to gain you a ticket to the middle class in the mature Industrial Revolution. The issue now is largely we've moved away from a manufacturing and industrial economy to an information and attention based economy, and that will concentrate more wealth in fewer hands. Wide swathes of the population do not have the intelligence to do highly technical jobs and no amount of training will get them there any more than any amount of training will make me an Olympic level gymnast. We are not built for it and can't be forced into that mold. So what happens with the roughly 20% of the population with IQs that let them live independently but can't learn complex tasks? The roughly 30% who are on the low side of normal and can master most tasks the Industrial world demanded but who are increasingly getting frozen out of an increasingly complicated world? I see guys retiring because our systems get more and more complex. They can run an investigation and juggle case law changes, etc. but they are not wired for computers and are starting at a very low level of competency in that arena to begin with. As tech changes faster, that'll hit people younger.

You can't put the brakes on technology and innovation, but how do people make a living and how do we not return to a serf society given the speed of change we're seeing? Tough questions for which I'm sure there's no solid answers, but my grand grandchildren's world will be as alien to me as pre-Colombus America I would wager.

It happens in IT as well believe it or not.

Mainframe programmers, telephony/collaboration engineers (calling systems going to the cloud), and datacenter technology (going to the cloud - to an extent - ROI on cloud always on subscriptions limit this plus certain orgs can’t accept the risk). What surprised the crap out of me has been software programmability has re-emerged domestically - my parents were both in application development but it was watching jobs go over sees for years. My Dad moved into database architecting and my mom went into project management because application development was being outsourced hand over fist.

I’m learning programmability for my job and I work in networking/security.

Which is why I never learned or emphasized Computer Science but went Networking. I remember my Mom coming home from work every day talking about people being laid off and transitioning to other departments where they laid off other people. My entire childhood was watching us go through the 2000 recession then 2008 recession, etc. it honestly shaped my career choices.

But as far learning I’ve seen guys just choose to ride the wave out or learn.

I literally finished the CCNP Security (for Cisco) in May of this year. I’ve got the study guide printed and I’ll be learning the PCNSE (for Palo Alto). I figure it’s worth it to be able to service multiple vendors.

In our house we’re not pushing technology on our kids yet. Because the internet’s a terrible place and I love my children. But, I do need to do that and plan that whether it be coding or making circuit boards with them. These days we emphasize just spending time with them and doing devotionals, etc. I figure shape the character as much as possible then education/job skills.

Anyway, this went way the heck out in left field. My bad.

You know what is doing us literally no favors? At least in my professional/education experience. Education does little to prepare us for the job market or to be competitive. But man, we got opinions on everything else.