Posts tagged household income usa

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Bankruptcy Billables is an overview of bankruptcy-relevant coverage and discussion from various law-related blogs.

Holding a J.D. and an International Affairs M.A. from Marquette University, Matt Leichter (matt [dot] leichter [at] gmail [dot] com) is an attorney licensed in Wisconsin and New York.  Fearing the legal profession’s future, he has begun documenting the law school tuition bubble at his own blog, The Law School Tuition Bubble, where you can read his latest post, “Legal Education in New York: Top of the Heap or Dream Deferred.”

Law Shucks

• Weil Crushes Vault Bankruptcy Rankings

Credit Slips

• Why Is the Government Paying High Interchange Fees?
• Broke USA Tells Payday Loan Stories from the Ground Up
• Let’s Stop Praying to the Credit Score
• Rating Agencies on Strike
• The Code and the new Financial Reform Act
• HAMP Update: Still Ineffective
• Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB
• What’s a Poor (Corporate) Debtor to Do?
• On the Rangers’ Bankruptcy

Above the Law

• Job of the Week: BK in AZ
• Student v. School: Charlotte School of Law Sued by Student Seeking Admissions for Bankruptcy Proceeding

Going Concern

• Accounting News Roundup: Rangel Settlement May Be in the Works; IMA Launches New Website; Landing a Job with Uncle Sam | 07.29.10
• Accounting News Roundup: Bankruptcy Examiner to Investigate WaMu Failure; Ex-KPMG Tax Principal Pleads Guilty; UK Inspector Says Audits Need ‘Significant Improvement’ | 07.21.10
• Accounting News Roundup: Sue Sachdeva to Plead Guilty for Koss Embezzlement; AIG Settles Accounting Fraud with Ohio for $725 Mil; Some PwCers Are Hanging Out the Shingle | 07.19.10

NYLawyer.com (free registration required)

• NY Firm Sanctioned for Filing Involuntary Bankruptcy Petition Against Ex-Client Over Bills

WSJ Bankruptcy Beat

• Gems TV Remains Form Foundation of New Shopping Channel
• Lehman Seeks To Pay Former Execs’ Legal Fees
• The Daily Docket: American Safety Razor Files for Bankruptcy
• Weil Gotshal Tops Vault List of Bankruptcy Firms
• Tribune Examiner Finds for Law Firm in Lender Lawsuit Fight
• Bidders Snap Up Salander Possessions
• Cuban Offer for Rangers Could Mirror Balsillie’s Coyotes Bid
• White House Defends Elizabeth Warren
• Rothstein Feeder Fund Agrees to Surrender Assets
• Judge Orders Rangers Manager to Win World Series
• Law Firm Sanctioned in Bankruptcy Case
• Attorney Confirms Cuban’s Interest in Texas Rangers
• Brush With TV Fame Can’t Save Builder From Bankruptcy
• Nolan Ryan Learns Court Could Help Rangers Add Players
• Lights, Camera, Bankruptcy
• Mark Cuban Mentioned in Court as Possible Rangers Bidder
• Mexican Tourism Company Files for Bankruptcy in U.S.
• The Daily Docket: Innkeepers USA Files for Chapter 11
• CBGB Holdings Slams Kristal Estate
• From Bankruptcy to Tiffany
• The Daily Docket: Jennifer Convertibles Collapses
• Bankruptcy Trustee Wants Michael Vick to Return $2 Million
• Courtroom Drama Over Misplaced Comma

Did we miss a good recent bankruptcy-related post on another blog?  E-mail bill [at] bankruptcybill [dot] us to let us know.

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The other day Five-Cent Nickel sent an alert to the effect that he was posting a very interesting graphic on the changes you’ll be seeing in your credit-card statements now that the new law has gone into effect. It’s quite a creation, built on information from the federal government.

My AMEX bill came a few days ago. It took me a minute to figure it out—Nickel’s graphic with its mouse-over captions could be very helpful to the complication-impaired among us. But right up at the top is the “Minimum Payment Warning,” explaining in no uncertain terms what will happen if you just let your balance float.

If I made only the minimum payment on the $864.17 due and never charged up another penny, it would take eight years to pay this month’s bill! And the privilege would cost me about $1,456 in interest. The annual percentage rate for this loan is a  usurious 15.24%, and an even more criminal 25.24% for a cash advance.

Well, if that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

Those of us who are long in the tooth have known these factoids for a long time. But maybe forcing the credit companies to explain, quite literally up front, what a credit-card balance really means will forestall having so many young people end up in debt they can’t handle.

Because I pay my bill in full every month, not only do I not owe AMEX anything, it owes me $77.17 toward this year’s annual rebate.

Interestingly, the busy design of the statement makes it difficult to follow. AMEX has installed a ditzy, squirrelly background inside textboxes that present this information. The account summary, for example, is typed directly against this hectic pattern, small black figures against a dizzying gray background. The law must require credit-card issuers to print the minimum payment warning clearly, because that section lacks the eyeball-spinning textbox fill. But many other key pieces of information are obscured by this graphic device: the amount of the late fee, the account summary,  the credit limit, available credit, cash advance limit and available credit, the days in the billing period. And, most tellingly, the customer service number.

At least now the customer service number, hard to read though it may be, is on the front page of the darned statement. Before this you had to sift through the fine print on the backs of several pages to find a number to call.

This is an improvement. The fact that the credit card company is doing its best to make it difficult to figure out suggests just how big an improvement it is for me and you.

Related posts:

• How long will it take to pay off that credit-card debt?
• Toothless credit card consumer protection laws
• Time to dump the credit cards?

As expected, the economic recovery in the United States continued to slow during the second quarter of 2010. Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.4% in Q2, down from 3.7% the quarter before. These numbers were not a surpri...

So this afternoon I drove up to Home Depot to pick up the gas grill, which that worthy big-box store had assembled for free.

M’hijito allowed himself to be put up to helping me wrestle it out of the van and set it up in the backyard, in exchange for a share of the first dinner cooked on it. Yesterday I’d picked up some steaks at Costco, but today I wanted to acquire a few salad items and also some frozen veggies, to fit into the new scheme to eat better and live better.

My fevered little brain thought I could go up to the HD at Cave Creek and Cactus and then double back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, it being far too hot to leave food in the car for the indefinite period required to stand at the service desk and then wait for someone to come forward with the grill. (You can tell I’ve done business with HD before, eh?)

But then I realize, nooooo. I bought the darn thing at the HD at Thunderbird and the I-17. Damn.

Drive across Thunderbird to the I-17, an extra two-mile drive. No problem (quite) getting the grill. But this left me a long, long, long way from a decent grocery store. Or, as far as I could tell, from any grocery store. Truly I didn’t want to drive all the way back down to the Safeway at 7th Street and Glendale, seven miles out of my way, as the crow doesn’t fly.

Cruising back toward 7th Street from the HD on the I-17, I decided to drop into the AJ’s at 7th Street and Thunderbird. How overpriced could they be, anyway? This was directly on my way and would obviate having to drive an extra 5.8 miles to the south. A dollar or two to avoid having to fight my way through more of the homicidal traffic…so worth it!

Once inside the store, though, I could not believe the prices of the most ordinary vegetables: $3.69 for a small package of plain peas or corn. Holy mackerel! I could grow the stuff myself for less than that!

Moving on…and on, and on, and on.  At the Safeway, the same veggies—and even some so-called “organic” varieties of the same—were selling for $1.59 a package!

LOL! I was glad I’d made the extra drive. At a savings of $1.86 a package, the three bags of frozen veggetables cost something over $6 at AJ’s than at Safeway. Almost a dollar a mile! That’s how much the extra trip out of my way saved me today.

Sometimes it’s worth it to go the extra mile (or seven) to save a few pennies.

Related posts:

• Shopping in the Commissary: Would it save anything?

It’s true, sometimes—these days, often—the inner character of my state’s leaders shows forth in their faces, and too many of my fellow citizens reflect that inner character like dark mirrors, still…before humans came here this was a beautiful place, and despite the worst that the European variant of humanity has managed to inflict, it still is beautiful.

Last night Cassie the Corgi and I went for a stroll in the early evening, as the monsoon storms struggled to overcome the heat island effect of our fair city, whose beauty rivals that of the state’s governor. All around us mountains of clouds reached toward the stratosphere, the setting sun lighting them like absurd neon paintings. Truly. If you tried to paint it, no one would believe you. Here’s what we saw, only much, much bigger and much more spectacular.

Jan Brewer, image by Krantzstone. Link to Photobucket.

Related posts:

• A whole flock of chickens
• Estate-saling in a tropical storm
• Weather

According to the latest quarterly "AP Economy Survey", a number of leading economists believe that the US economy will grow slower than previously expected. The AP survey compiles "forecasts of leading private, corporate and academic economists"....

Be afraid, my friends. Be very afraid. If you have no fear, click on the image above for a larger, clearer picture of what’s slouching toward Bethlehem.

That thing came in a report from my money managers today. It tracks the value of a dollar invested in my portfolio from June 30, 2000 forward.

Now, if you take a ruler and lay it horizontally across the page so that it passes through the start point on the left-hand side of the page and stays parallel to the x-axis, you will see something alarming. In all that long, eventful decade, only a tiny little nubbin pokes up above the top of your ruler.

That’s right. A dollar invested in my vast holdings was worth a dollar or more for two out of ten years, between third-quarter 2005 and third-quarter 2007. For the other eight years, it was worth less than a dollar. Sometimes significantly less. In third-quarter 2001 it was worth about 68 cents. At the end of June 2010, when this report was generated, that year-2000 dollar was worth about 85 cents.

Suspicions confirmed. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the amount in my investment account was about the same as the amount I recalled coming away with from the divorce, some 20 years ago. Statements from those days have been packed away, and offhand I couldn’t say where they are. They may even have been discarded. But the figure that sticks in my mind is…well, just about the figure on the bottom line of the statement that comes in the mail once a month.

Still think long-term investment in the stock market is the way to grow your savings? Read on…

On the phone with the investment guru:

“Is there a reason to believe keeping money I will need to live on for the rest of my life (which we may sincerely hope will be short) in the stock market is a good thing to do? Unless these funds grow or at least quit losing money, there won’t be enough for me to live on. I can’t keep on forever putting in 16-hour days, 7 days a week to scrabble together $15,000 a year, which is what happens when  you’re ’self-employed.’

“Should we be considering some other investment strategy? Maybe we should take a chunk of dough and pay off that damn mortgage on the downtown house, so I don’t have to worry about where 10 grand a year is going to come from to pay for it. If M’hijito pays rent to me, then about $600+ a month would come from him to me, instead of me having to fork over $800 a month. After the kid moves on, I could probably rent that place for $1,000 a month. Or sell my house and move into it, banking $235,000 in the exchange.”

Well, of course, the very idea is anathema to an investment manager. Put your money in real estate, and he doesn’t have anything left to manage!

The conversation that ensued was eye-opening. The firm has moved large amounts of funds into income-producing instruments, which my guy says are returning 7 percent just now. So even though the apparent value of the securities appears to drop, they’re still bringing in cash.

Couldn’t prove that by me, but then you can’t prove much by me.

He then said that the consensus among his partners is that the future of investing is off-shore; that effectively the U.S. economy is done, and smart money is going to emerging economies. He believes China’s economy will surpass America’s within ten years. The jobs we have lost in construction and manufacturing—where the bulk of job losses have been—will never come back. Jobs in the service sector, which is where most of the remaining employment resides, are poorly paid and will never be anything but poorly paid.

If you thought the middle class in this country is disappearing, you thought right. A young person, he suggested, would do well to look for employment overseas. Americans are in demand in Hong Kong, he said, although given Americans’ reluctance to learn languages other than English, Canada or Australia is probably a better bet. He would, he added, seriously consider moving to Canada if he were younger (and hadn’t yet started his family and career) or older.

Not scared enough? Well, put on your 3-D glasses and look up your address on Zillow. For jacking up your adrenalin level, that beats any chainsaw movie.

My house, whose value held steady through the bubble-burst at $235,000, has suddenly dropped to around $200,000. The downtown house house is between $50,000 and $60,000 underwater. Real estate values have not stabilized; they continue to drop steadily. When I mentioned this to Investment Dude, he said yeah, his place also had fallen in value even more than it already had, which was plenty; he and his wife managed to get a refinance, but only because no appraisal was required—the lender accepted a recent valuation. If they’d had to have the house appraised, they could never have gotten a new loan.

So…how has your investment dollar been doing? Dollar, heck… Can you spare a dime?

Related posts:

• Real Estate: What does the future hold?
• Should you pay off your mortgage?
• Real estate prices, in progress

By the end of the recession, there will be approximately 1,000 bank failures.  Does this sound extreme?  It should but the numbers don’t cover the entire story.  Since 2008 the number of bank failures has reached 269 and this doesn’t include consolidations done through the FDIC where bigger banks ate up smaller banks before they officially failed.  Last week, 7 banks failed.  At that pace, we are looking at 364 bank failures per year and the actual number of closings per week has consistently gone up.  The FDIC is in a precarious situation.  The Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) is technically speaking, broke.  They have added additional cash reserves by front loading premiums on surviving banks but this can only stunt the financial bleeding for so long.  The problems in the banking system run deep and many of the smaller regional banks are failing because of commercial real estate loans going bad.

Here is the actual weekly trend of bank failures:

Source: FDIC

The trend is unmistakable.  The worse offending states are as follows:

Georgia:          40

Illinois:                        34

Florida:           34

California:       27

These four states make up 50 percent of all bank failures since the crisis started.  The current policy and momentum seems to be with banks ignoring balance sheet problems until they are no longer able to hide the dirt.  The too big to fail banks have already been chosen by the government and the rest will need to deal with the new economic landscape.  The FDIC, the seal of confidence and strength dates back to the Great Depression:

It is a game of confidence that we have increased the actual amount of deposit insurance to $250,000 from $100,000 at a time when the actual insurance fund is negative.  You would think that something this problematic will cause for a sense of urgency but the government is giving the FDIC until 2020 to get this fixed:

“WASHINGTON (MNI) – With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will now have until the end of September 2020 to bring its reserve ratio to the statutory minimum of 1.35%, rather that 1.15%.

This is more than the eight years provided under the current Restoration Plan that would have given the FDIC only until the end of 2016 to bring its reserve ratio to 1.15%, an FDIC spokesman told Market News International Wednesday.

The latest projections presented at a Board meeting in June, indicated agency did not expect to meet that deadline.”

While the government gives the FDIC until 2020 to get their house in order, this is how the deposit insurance fund is looking:

This is the third consecutive quarter in the absolute red.  The banking system is starting to look like an imploding ponzi scheme and Wall Street is capitalizing on this vulnerability.  How?  If you were a big time investor would you invest in a too big to fail bank that may be performing poorly but has full government support or a smaller well run bank that has no support at all?  The incentive is not necessarily with the best performing and that is usually a staple of a well run capitalist system.  We are not operating in a capitalist system but a corporate oligarchy based on political connections between Wall Street and D.C.  This kind of system has been prevalent for decades now and crosses both political parties.

As the FDIC digs deeper into a hole, the number of problem institutions grows:

Keep in mind that the above list also fails to catch many of banks that do fail.  It isn’t exhaustive.  So even just looking at the above, we already have the 1,000 banks that will fail.  And the problem of course is how the current banking system is structured.  We have close to 8,000 FDIC insured banks but in reality, a very few control the bulk of the assets:

The top 4 banks of Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank make up 55 percent of all banking assets.  Then there is another tier of roughly 100 banks that eats up another 20 to 25 percent of assets.  So you have some 7,800 banks basically fighting for the remaining scraps.  The FDIC is in deep trouble going forward and this means we are in deep trouble.  The taxpayer is on the hook for the bill.  The U.S. Treasury already extended a lifeline of $500 billion to the FDIC “in case” they need the money.  Looking at the above data do you think they are going to use that lifeline?  It is only a matter of time.

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On October 15th, 2002, President George W. Bush said: "We can put light where there's darkness, and hope where there's despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home." These ...

Do you believe there’s such a thing as an addiction to the Web? Personally, it’s the kind of nonsense I discount as pop-psych woo-woo. These folks, for example, claim Internet addiction is “a growing epidemic,” pretty alarming considering the whole concept stems from a satire. Dubious as the idea seems, sometimes I wonder. There’s no question I’m spending way too much time blogging and way too little time living real life.

It can’t all be blamed on blogging. About 99 percent of my work is done online, whether it’s editing or teaching. Last night I worked until 12:30 a.m. trying to finish the course prep for the English 101 class that starts next month. Got to bed around 1:00 and then, naturally, awoke at 5:30.

I’m getting fat because I’m not getting enough exercise, and I’m not getting enough exercise because I’m parked in front of the computer from dawn until the middle of the night. Day after day after day. To some extent that’s abetted by the heat: it’s just too darned hot to go out trotting around the park or the desert. But the truth is, this was going on a long time before summer arrived.

Normally I stumble into the office and start blogging the minute I roll out of the sack. This means starting some time between 3:30 and 5:30 a.m. Write from one to three hours. Then get up, feed the dog, feed myself, in summertime water the outdoor potted plants. Then it’s right straight back to the computer for editing, teaching tasks, Internet cruising, or more blogging. Stuck there till around 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. Get up, grab a snack, sit back down in front of the computer. Come 8:00 or so, realize the dog hasn’t eaten. Feed the dog. Maybe grab another snack; rarely fix a real dinner. Back to the computer until I can’t hold my eyes open, a state that usually occurs around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.  Sometimes when I get up I’m so stiff from having sat in one position for so long, I can barely walk.

Socializing with my friend KJG for a day and a half, I learned that she spends most of her at-home time on her feet. Her house is spotless and her acre of land is immaculate because she’s busy attending to it. My house—the parts you can see around the clutter—is awash in dust and dog-hair dunes because I’m too preoccupied with the computer to clean, and my yard is overgrown and tired-looking because I never bother to trim the plants and my idea of weeding is dribbling a few drops of Round-up here and there.

This. has. gotta. stop.

As I reflected a while back, too much of my supposedly entrepreneurial time is being spent on highly unprofitable endeavors. The teaching makes the most consistent return on time invested, but it’s not returning much. Blogging? Today I made $3 and change; that works out to about a dollar an hour. Editing pays $30 to $60 an hour, but only when there’s some work coming in, which just now is not the case because I’ve been too busy sitting in front of the computer to market myself.

This morning I decided to get up and do something instead of padding into the office. Even though the four-hour nap (these cannot be called “a night’s sleep”) left me struggling to keep my eyes open, I started in on the neglected yardwork. Repotted the long-suffering hibiscus and lashed it to a standpipe so it won’t blow over in the next monsoon wind. Dragged a bunch of pots whose plants have fried in the heat back to the yard-gear storage. Dragged the hose to various plants. Stuck a number of succulent cuttings into the pockets of the murderous giant strawberry pot, probably to be pulled out soon by The Yanker, a curved-bill thrasher with a fetish for small, juicy plants. Washed down the deck, after a fashion.

Then it was back to work on the 101 class, whose “couple” of remaining small tasks expanded to fill all available space. Midafternoon, I fell asleep on the sofa and stayed out till 5:30. Back to the computer; remembered to feed the dog around 8:30. Finally finished—finished!—the course prep and got the entire, endlessly time-consuming BlackBoard lash-up ready to go.

So it is that I write this at 11:19 p.m.

It’s time to consider whether this blog should continue at all, and if so, in what form. Next semester is going to be hectic. Each of my classes is just eight weeks long, and so students will be turning in stuff in every class meeting. Even if I succeed in controlling the time spent reading student papers—which you can be sure I will not—the schedule does not lend itself to spending two, three, or more hours a day writing and cruising the Web.

One option is to demonetize the site, so it no longer feels like a job, and so it doesn’t really matter much whether something gets posted every day.

Another is to change my work habits so as to spend evenings sitting in a more comfortable chair in front of the TV and writing on a laptop, instead of in a bone-crushing desk chair in front of a desktop. This is how Funny started: it was an idle hobby to cut the boredom of the awful, violent and mind-numbing fodder that is prime-time television. After shifting the blog-writing time to early morning, I stopped watching television altogether (because I’m now working into the night, every evening).

And is a third is to stop blogging altogether.

I’d be sorry to do that. Funny about Money has become part of my life (obviously) and part of my identity. But I’ve got to get up from in front of the computer. If I can’t find a way to do that in the very near future, some major changes will have to take place.

What do you do to keep this occupation, such as it is, from becoming a preoccupation?

Related posts:

• On blogging and money
• A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling?
• Learn a Skill—ONLINE—and Build a New Income Stream