southsider2k5

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 12:03 PM) Now that is a good point, which we have discussed before. Much of the quick recovery from the 2001-2002 recession was NOT from any government program, contrary to what some want to believe. It was people taking advantage of really low interest rates to take out equity or re-fi their mortgages or get into bigger, more expensive homes. That particular ingredient will not be such a dominant force in the coming decade. Two things. #1, interest rates were low because a government program, the federal reserve bank, lowered them. #2 If housing is such a huge key to the economy, how can we have a quickly falling budget deficit which has been factored downwards at least twice now in the last year? Also if this is such a huge force, how are tax receipts growing so quickly, while the housing markets is seeing declines like it hasn't seen in a long time?

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,...76_3_0_,00.html Here are some theories and ideas from the 1st episode of season 3

Interesting polls from the Foley fallout... http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-fo...dlines-politics

Boy, I'll bet he is kicking himself for not listening to everyone who told him to LEAVE THAT CRAZY b****, when he had the chance...

QUOTE(Texsox @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:24 AM) I remember when I was buying my first house. I received some good intended advice to stretch a little a buy a little more house than was comfortable to pay for today, because each year my income would be growing. Because it was the owner of the company I was working for telling me this, I followed the advice. But there was a difference of a 30 year fixed and an ARM. I knew what my payments would be, I also had a good guess about the tax situation and figured on a couple increases over the next couple years. Bottom line, I was glad I did that. The extra room was great once we started having kids. Without stretching I would have been moving again in a couple years. I was also careful in staying within reason. I knew too many people that were house rich and cash poor. So I understand how some people fall into the siren song of a nicer house than they can afford today. I also understand how the seemingly logical statement of your income will be increasing every year works. It doesn't even have to be high pressure. Just have the person stand in the four bedroom house with the big deck, three car garage, and huge master suite then in the three bedroom, two bath, with the 2 1/2 car garage, and no deck and ask them which place they want to live in today for the same money? We got approved for double what the wife and I figured we could afford. Our realtor kept telling us to try a little higher price to find what we wanted. The appraiser valued our house at a number higher than what we paid for the place, so the banker tried to talk us into taking the extra money out for extra stuff... In other words, the forces trying to get you to over extend are pretty much everyone but yourself. QUOTE(mreye @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:27 AM) Don't lie. You built your first house with logs. Logs? They didn't have axes back then... His first house was a cave. QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:32 AM) wait, so to get a foreclosed home, I have to have a check ready to pay? I cant take out my own loan? It doesn't matter how you get your money, you have to have it that day at the auction.

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:25 AM) My jag uncle is running my grama's house into the ground and doesn't have the money for the taxes - which went unpaid last month - so I am on the hunt to obtain that property. It's commercial and I can turn a quick big buck on it. It does take a while for residential property to end up on the market, I want to say something like a year, at least in IN... I don't know if it is different in IL or in commercial property. I would call the courthouse of whatever county the property is in, because odds are the auction will happen there.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:18 AM) I would have to go see if its still true, but, at one time, you could trade futures and options on bankruptcy and foreclosure rates at the CME. SS2K5, are those contracts still out there? Any open interest? Bankruptcy's were delisted in 03. On the housing end they look like they only have contracts on housing and commerical real estate futures, but not foreclosures.

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:16 AM) Any idea on houses that the taxes aren't paid on...? That would be the ones (I assume you are talking about property taxes) What happens is in order for the city/county to foreclose they have to make an annoucement of their intentions, which gives the property owner their last legal notification. The notices are usually printed in a legal notices area of the classifieds of a local newspaper. Within that it will give the property location and the intended time of sale. Now the owners have up until that sale starts to pay their back taxes, so not all sales end up at the auction... I have no idea how the bank foreclosure stuff works.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:12 AM) Except they don't. And actually, I don't agree anyway. I learned that stuff from my parents because I needed to know. Great - I was fortunate. But secondary education is supposed to prepare kids for adult life. To me, finance is just as important as math or English or history. It should be included. I am NOT saying we need to teach home maintenance or meal plans. They have no clue. Why do you think the credit card companies are on college campuses nailing kids as freshmen away from home for the first time, during their first days on campus?

QUOTE(Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:12 AM) ANyone know of any good places to look for forclosures? Your local newspaper will list all auctions, and they usually occur at the county courthouse. Do your research ahead of time, because they are sold for cash, and they are all as-is.

QUOTE(Soxy @ Oct 11, 2006 -> 09:09 AM) So, it's okay for him to sleep with a 17 year old female page? I don't see that situation any different from Studds'. Not at all. In fact the whole differences of the way society views that its cool for an old guy to hit on a young girl is pretty discusting if you ask me.

QUOTE(beautox @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 10:51 PM) i thought the 40 man roster didn't have to be set till right before the winter meetings, i could be wrong though. It doesn't have to be... but that doesn't mean the planning and manuvering won't happen before then...

QUOTE(Steff @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 06:04 PM) Happy Birthday to all you guys.. And I'm gonna sneak in an almost HB.. My step-daughter and her hubby are about to be new parents with the birth mother of the baby they are adopting in labor right now! Hopefully all goes well. That has got to be an extremely stressful and exciting thing all at the sametime.

QUOTE(Queen Prawn @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 09:18 PM) Much better...the auctions were removed and the fees were credited. Passwords were changed all-over (in areas where money changes hands). Now if I can figure out who is behind (630) 260-7222 (I swear this isn't an old number I had - the only two I had were 630-985 and the other was work and I can't remember what it was but I would never have used it for ebay). First of all, if you have a phone number, call the police. This is an act of fraud, even though it happened in cyberspace. Second, hopefully you got something out of the live chat. When I had the samekind of problem, that was the most effective tool at actually getting ahold of someone.

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 09:17 PM) The caution is, you have to know your market - REALLY understand it. Most people don't. That's my point. They focus on the payment, and they aren't thinking about the other side. Listen to the ads for ARMs. Not now, but two years ago. (stupid announcer guy voice) Now YOUUUUUUUUUU can have a $500,000 mortgage for just $499 a month. Call me NOW to find out HOWWWW... (/end) That baits people. And it's a quick sell for realtors. Again, I'm not saying that it's NOT for everyone, but you have to be careful, and most people don't understand that. You do, Steff does, "finance types" do, but I think I said the same thing when this came up before, most people don't. And there you go. By and large the general public has no idea about financial tools. When they have their banker tell them that this is a good idea, and that the person can afford it, and you mix in a dose of appraiser who would say my ass is really a $500,000 condo, and you have a recipe for disaster.

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 06:33 PM) If I recall correctly, the only thing the Democrats could do, they did. They can't kick him out of the body because he didn't commit a crime. They DID censure him. They DID even go so far as hire an independent prosecutor to investigate the charges against him and found nothing. The Democrats made serious changes to the page program to protect the pages and give them more serious supervision. How many independent prosecutors have the GOP led Congress put forth to see what's going on? And furthermore, exactly who in the Democratic leadership of 2006 was protecting the jackass in the scandal back in 1983? That's like me using Nixon's dirty tricks in 1972 and 1973 to justify alleged wrong doing for the Clinton administration. Pointless, inane and misleading. It's just a tactic of people who want to deflect criticism from the Republicans because they can't stomach the fact that everything this leadership says they believe in, they don't actually give a s*** about. The only thing that they could do? Did they pull their support for him as a canditate? Did they allow him to caucus with them? Did they publicly call him to the matt and say he doesn't represent the democratic part and we don't want him running as one? Heck he got appointed to leadership positions, which means the dems had to support him. Heck he got reelected that 5 times and that doesn't happen without the support of your party, which I guess means the democratic leadership gives it tacit approval for having sex with 17 year old kids according to what I am reading here in another post. It also means they don't really seem to give a s*** about reelecting and empowering admited child predators/molestors, who just happened to be lucky they were in Washington DC and not another state, or they would have been imprisioned. I know Foley is a scumbag, who deserves his turn in prision. Heck I will lock his ass in there, along with anyone who protected him. But my point that we aren't seeing practiced, what is being preached, as usual. The way that this is being portrayed is that the entire republician party had real time access to all of this information, and decided to not only do nothing, they decided to conduct one of the worst coverups since I don't know when. Even if you believe all of the names bantered about in the media we are still talking about literally a handful of actual elected officials knew something, and we still don't know exactly what they knew. Even if we assume they knew the worst of it, somehow I doubt they ran back to all of the rest of their peers and said "hey guess what I heard about Foley!", which blows the whole systematic thing out of the water. Its kinda hard to give approval to something you don't know about. Its different. It's always different.

John Lennon would have been 66 today.... Imagine.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/09/real_estat...06100911cnn=yes

It will be interesting to see what his posting fee is...

Another random thought here.... if it isn't OK to group the radical Islamists as represently all Islam, why is it OK to paint all repubs are being a part of this scandal? Guys like Hastert I understand, but unless Dems are calling the entire party coverup artists and child molesters, this should be affecting anyone except the few people who have been named, right?

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 02:24 PM) I wasn't talking about Social Security. Compared to Medicare, Social Security is perfectly fine. We only have a Social Security problem in the sense that we have a general fund problem - because we're running a deficit right now, we're not saving up money like we are supposed to in order to deal with that program. Medicare on the other hand is an absolute disaster and shows no signs of getting better without serious and massive health care reform. Medicare is the perfect example of why the government shouldn't get into business where the private sector is much more effecient. There are a few ideas I have to help the system outside of medicare... First of all there is an employee shortage in most of the medical sectors. Lots of it is self-imposed because of things like litigant happy lawyers suing the system dry, a big part of it is the huge expense of becoming anything in the healthcare industry, such as the price of medical school. Another thing that would cut medical errors and fraud by a HUGE percentage is to get the entire health and pharma industries onto an electronic system for all drugs and prescriptions. A couple things would be at work there... #1-stupid things like handwriting errors would be elimated, as everything would be electronically entered by the doctor. It would be emailed to the pharmacy of the patients choice, where it theoretically could be waiting for them by the time they get there. #2-Doctor hopping would be eliminated because the persons file would have information on all of their perscriptions #3-Drug interactions would be instantly flagged, instead of depending on incomplete information from a doctor or a pharamcy who might not know everything the patient is on. #4-no call approval needed for narcotics, because by sending the script the doc is giving it his OK. There are some other things I have thought about in the past, but can't remember right now... I am sure I'll have more later.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 02:14 PM) Ok, I see your point on the things that would help better and agree with you (although, would this president actually use a line-item veto?) that those would work better. I am still going to argue though that the deficit right now is a major concern, not as much because of the size of it now, but because of the size of it in the future. In my view, we're sitting there staring at a bill which is guaranteed to come up in a few years to pay for the baby-boom retirement. There's simply no way around it...we aren't going to be able to suddenly deny them health care after taxing them for Medicare for all those years. That bill is going to come whether we like it or not. So here's the metaphor...you've just bought something, say a car, that you don't have to pay for until the start of 2008. Do you a.) save up money in 2007 to make those payments easier, or b.) pretend you don't have that bill coming up, and keep spending and spending and spending in 2007? No one has the guts to actually fix social security. People who think they are going to be able to retire on full benefits without getting their taxes raise are just naive. Everytime it gets talked about the AARP and special interest groups like that fly into action, and rally the troops... In reality there are only two ways or a combination of two things that will fix the system 1- Raise taxes on FICA 2- Reduce benefits on FICA Anything that doesn't include those at least one of those two things in some way shape or form is a complete waste of time. The sooner we do it the better, but neither party wants to alienate the voting seniors to get something right done. I harbor no delusions about getting government aid when I retire. I don't expect a dime to be around by then.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 01:33 PM) 2. the Federal Reserve is also much smarter in removing that stimulus from the economy when it is no longer needed (i.e. right now), First of all we have had a surplus for exactly 4 years in the last 44. Its not like we are talking about something that is brand new here. The US government has historically run deficits to support the economy, mostly in the form of government employees and entitlement programs. Next up, did you miss the latest article about the deficit? The deficit has fallen from $413 bln at its peak, to now an estimated $250 bln for this fiscal year, which is down about 35-40%. Even getting past the big scary deficit number, you have to put the number into context to understand it better. The estimated GDP for the US in 2007 is about 13.7 trillion, which means our deficit to spending ratio is looking at about 1.8% or from a historical perspective is lower than all of the 1980's, 6 years in the 1990's, and 4 years of the 2000's so far. We have had 7 years at lower than 1.8% deficit to GDP ratio in the last 36 years (starting at 1980.) Guess what, the deficit is taking care of itself, and removing the excess deficit by turning over tax receipt surpluses way past anyones expectations, dispite the collapse of the booming housing market. You want to really take care of the deficit, there are a couple much smarter things you can do vs the pay as you go fallacy... #1, do not allow spending riders to be tacked onto other bills, if you want to spend something it either goes in the budget, or a new bill. #2, any spending item must have the person who added it to the bills accounted for publicly. #3, give the president a line item veto. You don't take away the ability of the government to spend, you take away the ease and the annoumousness of it.

Actually it isn't two different things in the grand scheme of things. Money supply is directly related to both interest rates and government spending, especially where government deficit spends.

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 11:49 AM) The Democrats along with the Republicans voted to censure Gerry Studds. It's not the Democratic party's fault that his district chose to re-elect the scumbag. It's the people in his district's fault. Did he caucus with them? Was he on the committees they were involved in? Did they really do everything they could to get him out of a position of power?