Once in a while I see advertising that is very manipulative and that makes me angry. As in, the anger caused by watching one person taking advantage of another person’s ignorance for their own gain. Today this happened when I opened the mail to find a “Certificate” from Gerber Life to offer me the opportunity to pay for life insurance for a child or grandchild.
I've been thinking about the root causes of many of the systemic problems we have in this country and what needs to change to fix the problems, instead of addressing the symptoms - police brutality being the biggest symptom - it is not the problem. Changing strangle laws won't fix the problem, it can only fix a symptom.
Unemployment insurance is our backstop for when people lose their jobs through no fault of their own. As the Covid-19 crisis has shown us, you don’t have to be a bad employee or not show up to work to no longer have a job, many of our friends and family members have been affected by workplace closures before, but none of us have ever seen anything like the number of industries that have been immediately affected this month.
Most of the posts we try to put out are to present information like it would be in a classroom setting or as part of a college course. But continuing to talk about buying a car or marginal tax rates hasn’t felt right over the past couple weeks, so we took a break to try and absorb what is happening in our world. This is truly an unprecedented time in our lives. We, nor our parents, have ever seen anything like this before.
Assuming you are following along with this series, you’ve read or listened through the buy or rent discussion, as well as that on leverage, and you’ve decided buying a home is a good decision for your financial future. Now what? You have followed all the steps in the planning process to buy a home and you have now found the home you want to buy.
Leverage is one of those financial words that gets thrown around a lot that most people don’t really seem to understand. People say things like “I’m over leveraged” or “leveraged to the hilt”. We more commonly understand physical leverage such as a teeter-totter or using a stick and a fulcrum point we understand how to physically move things. We talk about “leveraging our relationships” or contacts or followers.
Throughout the history of humankind, bartering, or trading goods and services, has existed. As early as 9000 BC there is evidence that the ancient Egyptians engaged in bartering, often with livestock or crops. Bartering was an effective system for exchanging things deemed of equal value, even though those values were negotiable.
