All my parents taught me was have a job with a steady income. I wasn't a good student in high school and learned most of my investing/savings strategy in my 30's. I was fortunate because I've never had a yuge amount of debt other than a mortgage. That was by design. I didn't even have a credit card until last year. I was turned down by a local bank when I applied for one even though I have zero debt and haven't had any in awhile. I've actually paid off a few mortgages but was told that didn't count. I didn't have any loans outstanding, not even a vehicle loan.
I'm not sure what they teach these days, but the banking/financial system in this country encourages people to carry a lot of debt, which they do. I know this is politics but the fact that the president is canceling some student loans sends the wrong message, IMO. Money is just too easy to borrow and too hard for many to pay back. But banks and the fed keep pushing that to keep the economy moving. If it wasn't so the fed would have never bailed out the banks in 2008.
More recently, the mortgage meltdown and subsequent global financial crisis took down more than 500 banks between 2007 and 2014, with total assets of nearly $959 billion. That includes Washington Mutual (WaMu), still the largest bank failure in U.S. history. WaMu had some $307 billion in assets when it collapsed, equivalent to more than $424 billion in today’s dollars. (The aggregate figures don’t include investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which weren’t federally insured, nor banks that were sold under pressure but didn’t technically fail, such as Countrywide Financial and Wachovia.)
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Originally Posted by revchuck38
