BBRoundtable

Have your spending habits changed as a result of this uncertainty?

I'm really worried. I'm trying to change my spending habits and starting to worry if I should stock up on stuff.

Everything is outrageous in Cali right now with the prices of gas, utilities, grocery stores, even the fast food joints have raised their prices, and I just can't keep up with it all.

I'm a bit concerned, but things haven't changed too much to cause major worry. I'll likely cut back on extraneous expenses a bit more than normal to prepare for winter.

I'm somewhat worried. With Jesse still out of work and scheduled for more surgery on the 16th of this month, we're still bringing in a percentage of what we used to bring in when he was still working. It's been tough enough trying to stretch out our money to make sure everything gets paid. Thank God for my daughter helping when she can..... but with the prices constantly going up with gasoline, utilities & groceries it's getting harder to keep up. I'm hoping this financial uncertainty gets somewhat resolved soon so maybe the prices will become more stabilized and perhaps even come down a bit.

The advantages of being quite poor...no need to worry. They can't take what I don't own.

Oh by the way: instead of cutting yourself down, you should strive that those who had caused the crisis should be cut...if anything else fails, with a guilliotine. But a nice place in jail, together with murderers and rapists would also do nicely.

In the "brilliant" world of the market, confidence makes things go up, and lack thereof makes them drop, regardless of whether the confidence is warranted or not. Eventually investors won't want the market to go down, or will think it'll return for some contrived reason, and it'll return. (It already has a little.)

It's not a good time to begin investments, but existing ones will survive the long haul, and those like me without investments will be fine.

//Edit: I should note that I do think the market will totally flatline one day if that does keep up without some sort of change. I just don't think it's doing that now. Just one of the bigger waves of warning we're getting.

80's fanatic wrote: Thank God for my daughter helping when she can.....

Aww that's sweet of her! How is she doing? Is she driving a lot now? I remember when she got her license and how nervous you were!

Jesse's surgery is only 2 days away? Sending my best wishes for a quick recovery! Please keep us posted on this.

I'm not worried in the least about this, because none of my money is located in risky investments. As one article I was reading last week was saying, people will only lose money as a result of this financial ridiculousness if they actually sell their holdings in the near future. Now, for some older person who's about to retire and needs to take the money out of their 401k, they're taking a huge hit because that 401k isn't worth half of what it was before this whole dumb thing started. For someone young like me, though, it's perfectly fine to just keep my money in the mutual funds it's currently in and wait for the value to go back up again (which it will; it always does). The long term effects of this on me will be nil, and for that matter, the short term effect is that gas prices went down due to a lack of confidence in market demand. I'm actually making out BETTER at the moment as a result of the emotional lunacy that's been permeating Wall Street for the last few weeks.

Anyway, the only other way this will affect the average person is if either they need to get a big loan for something and their credit is less than perfect, or if they work for some employer who needs short-term credit to make payroll and THEIR credit is less than perfect. It's not like all the local banks are bogged down with bad mortgage loans, so you can still get credit from them if you're properly qualified - key words "properly qualified." I pay all my bills on time, so I have no problem there, but someone who might be considered a risky borrower would most likely get turned away right now. Those are the people who will have to buckle down and do everything they can to scrimp and save until more banking credit opens up or their own credit rating improves.

By the way, Nakor is exactly right about this all being a matter of confidence. The second something bad happens somewhere in the world, stocks plummet. Then if conditions change and it looks like help is on the way the next day, they shoot right back up. It's not even based on reason half the time. Stupid overemotional investment eedjets.

I'm not worried at all. I live in a way that's not affected enough by it for me to worry about it. I haven't even started saving up for retirement and I wasn't going to count on that sort of thing anyways as an American. I'll be in Canada or some other country hopefully not too long from now. Then I'll think about that sort of thing.

Frong wrote:Anyway, the only other way this will affect the average person is if either they need to get a big loan for something and their credit is less than perfect, or if they work for some employer who needs short-term credit to make payroll and THEIR credit is less than perfect. It's not like all the local banks are bogged down with bad mortgage loans, so you can still get credit from them if you're properly qualified - key words "properly qualified." I pay all my bills on time, so I have no problem there, but someone who might be considered a risky borrower would most likely get turned away right now. Those are the people who will have to buckle down and do everything they can to scrimp and save until more banking credit opens up or their own credit rating improves.

I beg to differ...currently, my job is also on the line as the outlook on the near-future business isn't very reassuring. The more people trying or being forced to keep their few bucks together, the less they are going to spend it - that's it. All German car makers with exception of VW had already shortened the production, and they are also already talking about substantial layoffs - just one effect of the uncontrolled financial market which is hitting average persons even if they don't own anything more than an bank account.
And especially in Soviet Germany, the aid for the ailing rich is always being paid by the ordinary Joe. 400 billion € doesn't come out of nowhere, but at least the rich will once again get away with as much as a mild scare while our schools are continuing decaying. Hey, and the ten cents we are currently saving on the litre of gas could easily being raised up again as "tax for the poor banks", so the crooks disguised as bankers won't have to leave their Benzes in the garages.

At least the Asians and Arabs are having their field days now...never in history it was so easy to gobble up the whole western world with a few bucks from their privy purses.

Thank you bankers, thank you politicians for plunging us some notches deeper in the shizam.

Things haven't really effected me as yet... aside from general annoyance with falling interest rates on my accounts , though it is concerning none the less how things are going. I'm not really a frivolous spender anyway, so no change necessary. Actually felt like things were looking up when I went for gas today and was only $2.89/gallon!

They are closing one of the huge General Motors manufacturing plants near us on Dec. 23rd. So the local economy and joblessness is looking pretty grim around here lately.

We have no investments or savings to speak of, but we are moving soon to a house with less rent, albeit we'll have to fix the roof and furnace and other fun home repair things in the near future, it should even itself out soon and we'll be able to start saving at least a little bit.

wavemeister wrote:I beg to differ...currently, my job is also on the line as the outlook on the near-future business isn't very reassuring. The more people trying or being forced to keep their few bucks together, the less they are going to spend it - that's it. All German car makers with exception of VW had already shortened the production, and they are also already talking about substantial layoffs - just one effect of the uncontrolled financial market which is hitting average persons even if they don't own anything more than an bank account.

I suppose it is true that the effect of businesses losing money and having to cut costs will transfer to people who are looking for work. I get the feeling that the job market was already crap in a lot of sectors even BEFORE the current financial crisis, though. If it's not the stock market, it's oil prices. If it's not oil prices, it's something else. There's ALWAYS something else.

wavemeister wrote:And especially in Soviet Germany, the aid for the ailing rich is always being paid by the ordinary Joe. 400 billion € doesn't come out of nowhere, but at least the rich will once again get away with as much as a mild scare while our schools are continuing decaying. Hey, and the ten cents we are currently saving on the litre of gas could easily being raised up again as "tax for the poor banks", so the crooks disguised as bankers won't have to leave their Benzes in the garages.

Now THAT is what pisses me off about the whole current situation the most, quite frankly. The US government decides to spend $700 billion to try and keep these giant lenders from going under due to all the bad mortgages, but where the hell's the accountability? These companies give out tons of extremely risky loans of their own volition, but instead of having to face the consequences of their own greed when it comes back and bites them in the arse, the government bails them out? The only message that sends is "Oh, I don't have to worry about taking ridiculous risks with my money! The government will protect me from my own stupidity!" While I understand that it'd be bad for a lot of normal people who have investments with companies like AIG if they went under (not to mention everyone who works for AIG), maybe if the government just said "You know what? This is your own damn fault. Go reap what you've sown" and let them fail, it'd set an example for the REST of the industry and maybe prevent this from happning again in the future. As long as taxpayer money is always going to end up being used to put up a bailout safety net, this idiocy is going to continue.

I just thank God the Republicans in Congress managed to keep the initial emergency draft of that stupid bailout bill from passing. It would have essentially written a $700 billion blank check worth of taxpayers' money to Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, to spend however he wanted. This is a guy who is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs; he's exactly like the Wall Street execs who lets things get this bad in the first place. Giving him that kind of unprecedented authority would have been an absolute disaster, but the final version of the bill that passed put at least some measure of oversight on it and broke the $700 billion into installments, as far as I know. I think if a chunk of it isn't spent properly, the next chunk won't be issued. ZOMG, some common sense for a change.

Of course, lost in all this are the individual people who took out these subprime mortgages that they couldn't afford. If you know you won't likely have the money to pay off a mortgage and you're not sure if the rate will go up or not, don't sign your name to it in the first place. Fookin' irresponsible morons.

</rant>

Somewhat, but only in the sense of being less
of a spender compared to previous ways.
But only thing I have learned is that
it is not healthy to worry about
that which you have no con-
trol over - for stress will
be the outcome. Inst-
ead, make prepar-
ations the best
that you can,
that is w-
hat I s-
ay!!

I'm not worried about things either. Since I am not about to retire I know my investments have plenty of time to recover their worth before that happens. Like Frog said, the ones that are really taking the hit right now are the people who are withdrawing their funds for retirement.