I want to wish everyone who reads my blog a Happy New Year!
I think 2009 is going to be a much better year for me—economically, that is. I have lined up several “ducks in a row” for the new year.
I hope you have as well, and will be making things better for yourself in the new year!
See you next year! 
One of the websites I like to visit often is the Daily Reckoning. These guys are the author of the book Empire Of Debt. A book I recommended on my blog post titled Paper Money.
This I think sums up how bad government bailouts are for the economy:
It is amazing to us that so many people have so much faith in so much humbug.
We’re talking about the bailout…the fix…the save…the plan to revive the world economy by giving it more of what it least needs — more debt. The idea is to make the pain of the correction go away by encouraging people to act as though they had nothing to correct. They’ve borrowed too much. And they’ve spent too much. But the feds aim to make them borrow more — by bringing the cost of borrowing down to an all-time low — and make them spend more…by causing prices to rise. (When money loses its value…they’ll be glad to get rid of it.)
This is akin to giving a drug overdose victim more of the drug that almost killed him in an attempt to save him!
Joe Nocera has a post on his blog by an anonymous banker who tells the truth about the incoming credit card business crash.
The Worst Is Yet To Come: Anonymous Banker Weighs In On The Coming Credit Card Debacle
The line that I like best about that article is when the anonymous banker wrote:
And credit card rates, which are quite often above 22 percent, is piracy.
Piracy indeed, and now the government has sanctioned this piracy for another 18-months. See my previous post.
Just imagine an interest rate that high (or at 31%) and then the bank turns around and uses the double-billing method to screw you even more.
Sorry consumer, no justice for you for another 18-months — complimets of your humble servants, the Congress. LOL! Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.
New Bankruptcy Law
Well, greed can also be detrimental to the person or institution that practices it. As the banks have found out. In their zeal to force consumers to keep paying their credit cards while in bankruptcy they forgot to include mortgages.
So guess what people who have gone into bankcruptcy did?
You guessed it (come on that was easy). According to a recent post on Creditbloggers.com: Bankruptcy Law Forces Consumers Into Foreclosure
After a $25-million lobbying campaign in 2005 by Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan & Chase and Washington Mutual, Congress passed a law forcing people to continue paying their credit card debt even after they file for bankruptcy. The banks got what they had wanted…and more than they had bargained for.
What wasn’t protected under the new bankruptcy code were mortgage payments. So now, instead of defaulting on their credit cards to keep their house, hundreds of thousands of Americans may be forced into home foreclosure, according to a story by Bloomberg News.
But! “regulators would give card issuers until mid-2010 to comply with the rules.”
Just like the government to finally move to take care of an egregious problem but not put protections in place until 18-months later!
New Limits Imposed on Credit Card Companies
This is the reason why the voters always get shafted by those we vote for. It doesn’t matter what party they are from. These rules are coming but not after the big banks, who have Congress, The House, and the President in their pockets to allow them almost two more years of indiscriminate theft.
Makes you wonder doesn’t it? The economy has already collapsed, people are loosing their jobs and are being harassed by collection agencies, etc., but yet these protections, which were needed yesterday!, are going to be put in place in 18-months from now. You know what? Lobbying really works.
Back in May I posted about the new changes being proposed by the Office of Thrift Supervision and Congress to curb credit card abuses by credit card issuers: Do I Dare Hope?
Today I read this news:
Fed moves on credit card crackdown
Bank regulators approve proposal to eliminate industry practices like ‘double-cycle billing’ as banks push back. New rules could be in place by end of year.
If approved, the Fed’s rules will mean an end to double-cycle billing, which averages out the balance from two previous bills. That means that consumers who carry a balance can get hit with retroactive interest on their previous month’s bill - even if they’ve already paid that off.
Consumers would also be given a reasonable amount of time to make payments, and payments would be applied to higher-rate balances first to reduce interest penalties and fees.
Credit card statements would clearly list the time of day that a payment is due, and any changes to accounts would be in bold or listed separately.
And, finally, no more universal defaults, a policy which allows credit card issuers to increase the interest rate on one card if a customer misses a payment on another card.
The biggest changes discourage piggybacking and penalizing infrequent delinquencies.
By next spring, two of three credit reporting bureaus will use a new model. Fair Isaac, the developer of FICO scores, has made the biggest change to its mathematical credit score model since it was introduced in 1989. Scores will still be on a 350- to 800-point scale. But the company estimates that 40% to 50% of borrowers’ scores could go up or down by more than 20 points because of how the new model fine-tunes the variables it uses to evaluate consumers’ credit use behavior.
For creditors, the new FICO score promises to reduce the risk of defaults, improving the predictability of defaults by 5% to 15%. Delinquencies are at their highest rate since 1992, when the economy was also in a recession. The revised scoring method “has a few more gray areas fleshed out so it gives us confidence in credit scoring models,” says Ginny Ferguson, a member of the board of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers.
Recently my server got hit with three nasty rootkits.
I know how it got infected, I turned off the firewall to help me setup a particular program and I forgot about it. I also opened up the ports to use with that software on the hardware router. Oops.
I know, I should be shot.
To help me clean my computers of nasty spyware and malware I always use Spybot Search & Destroy in combination with Ad-Aware. But after using these several times the nasty rootkits would continue to download stuff to my server. That’s because Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware were not finding the rootkits.
After finally understanding that something else was still creating havoc with my server, I went searching for an antispyware that could help me remove whatever it was.
I am happy to say that I found it in Super Antispyware. This software can find rootkits and eliminate those as well as spyware and malware. Click here for an updated list of what Super Antispyware can find and eliminate. Do a search for rootkits on this list and you will see the number of rootkits Super Antispyware can find and eliminate.
Rootkits are notorious for being difficult to remove from a computer once it’s infected. The best course of action, if one isn’t so stressed for time is to just reinstall Windows (or whatever the operating system that got infected).
I am satisfied that my server is clean and I kept a close eye on the services that are running on the server via the Task Manager and I don’t see the nasty rootkits there anymore. The makers of Super Antispyware claim that it can remove over a million threats, it sounds like an exaggeration, but I am satisfied with the results and I saved time not having to reinstall Windows.
Super Antispyware offers a free version, which is the one that I am using.
Just like the big banks to take TARP money and then not even use that money for what Congress had intended it for; extend credit to the markets and small businesses. Instead the big banks, like Bank Of America, have taken that money to buy other banks in trouble and they have played Congress just like they have played with their credit card holders’ livelihoods.
Too bad Congress is not going to even get a clue and not do these stupid deals in the future. But Congress will always be members of the “club of the inept.”
I am of course talking about Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago having to close its doors because Bank Of America “, our country’s second largest bank, did indeed take $25 billion dollars of ‘bailout cash’, then gave the shaft to that company and its workers by refusing to renew and extend it any operating credit to stay in business through the economic downturn.”
Well I’ll be damned! Isn’t that what the TARP money they received was for? To help the economy?
I bet Congress is feeling just like a credit card holder whose interest was raised simply because Bank Of America decided to squeeze the livelihood out of their victim… I mean customer.
Do yourself a favor, forget the big banks, find a small bank and work a relationship with that bank and get the respect you deserve. That’s exactly what I have done and I haven’t looked back.
Update (Dec 18th, 2008): OK, I was incorrect. It seems that TARP was created to purchase illiquid, difficult to value assets from banks and other financial institutions. TARP also allow the Treasury to purchase whole loans and make direct equity investments in banks themselves. The targeted assets are securities backed by mortgages, sometimes described by the government, media, and others as “troubled” or “toxic” assets. It was never intended for the banks to loan this money. Except that Paulson has been changing his stragety and changing what the function of this money is to help with.
I haven’t posted at all since July. I can’t believe time has flown by so fast. The year 2008 is coming to an end in a few weeks. Wow.
I haven’t done that great a job posting on this blog. I want to change that for the new year.
I just came to the realization that I am not going to make my goal of being debt free by July 1st, 2009. I have only paid down 17% of my debt so far since starting to blog about my debt. So that got me down as well, part of the reason that I fizzled out on wanting to post more on the blog.
My new attitude is that, at least, I am not in that much of a bad state, it could be worse. Many people have lost their jobs, and so far I am still able to make a steady income. I have brought down the debt on my highest interest rate credit card down to $1,900 dollars. I have been attacking this card the most and as soon as I see a zero balance on that account, I will cancel the credit card, I am hoping that will happen in about four- to five-months. I have learned my lesson on banking with the big banks, no more! I will have a lot to say about them in the future and right now, I urge anyone who is thinking about opening a credit card or mortgage with any of the big banks to run away as though you have seen the devil himself, because that is exactly who you will be dealing with.
The greed of the officials running these big banks has gotten so bad that they are now being bailed out by uncle Sam (a mistake in itself, but what can you expect from a government that has ignored the citizen and did not help us when it was needed the most, instead uncle Sam made it more difficult for an individual to go into bankruptcy, but forgot to pass legislation to stop these banks from raping us with double-billing, interest rate hikes for no apparent reason, except greed, and on and on). I bet that in a few more years we will be back here with a bigger financial mess.
Slowly but surely. That’s how this is going down.
This month I managed to only bring down my debt by $266.19. This is due to my declining income this month and the high interested rate credit cards. I have two of those right now. But I will not for much longer. This week I asked for and got a limit increase on my 6% interest rate credit card to $10,000. Giving me $5,000 more on that card. I immediately did a balance transfer from the 30% interest rate card.
I will only have about $2,500 dollars left on that awful Washing Mutual credit card. The interest on that card will not be as bad form now on, as it was this month, a whopping $175+. I will do my best to get rid of that and cancel the card. I am making progress, slowly but surely.
