True Cost of Credit Card Minimum Payments

How much does an item purchased really cost you if you bought it on credit and only pay the minimum monthly payment each month? Answer - Depends on the credit card interest rate. Interest rates over 20% are not unusual. Here are two examples:

1. If the credit card interest rate is 18% and you only pay the minimum amount listed on your monthly bills, then your actual cost (interest paid plus principal amount still due) doubles after 4 years, triples after 8 years, quadruples after 12 years!!
2. If the credit card interest rate is 24%, then as above except instead of 4, 8, and 12 years, use 3, 6, and 9 years.

Black Economic Inequality - What News Media are Hiding

 Next time you see a news story about the economic inequality of Blacks compared to Whites, be aware of what they are not telling you that really matters and explains the difference:

1. Black educational achievements, despite up to $20,000 per public schools student invested annually, are much below the national average. Blacks can fix this themselves and nobody can stop them.

2. 3 out of 4 Black babies are born to single parent households while 3 out of 4 White babies are born to married households. Given the advantage of having two potential income earners and two potential parent babysitters versus one, it is no surprise that only 10% of married households with children live in poverty versus 50% for single parent households. Blacks can fix this themselves and nobody can stop them.

3. For decades, the crime rate for Blacks has been roughly 8 times the national average while the White crime rate has been below the national average, largely a factor of Black teenage boys growing up and having no father to guide and discipline them. Hard to earn income in jail and also hard to earn good income with a criminal record when out of jail. Blacks can fix this themselves and nobody can stop them. Blacks can fix this themselves and nobody can stop them.

Texts need to go the way of the Dinosaurs

 What is the fascination with texts and why does the entire world seemingly believe that every person has text capabilities? I don't and never want to. A text is essentially an email that annoyingly dings your phone. Emails and phone calls are far superior than texts. If you want to communicate with a person right away, then call them. Talking is much faster and easier than typing text messages. Plus with phone calls, you do not need to learn essentially another language consisting of text abbreviations. I sometimes see text abbreviations used on Facebook and often have no idea what is being said. With spam texts, from what I've read. you have to delete each spam text individually. With spam emails, you can elect to check the "all" box on the top of the first listed spam email and delete all of them in one step whether they be dozens or even hundreds of spam emails. Plus, with spam emails, you don't have the annoyance of each spam email dinging your phone as you do with spam texts. Who needs or wants that? Texts need to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Protect Our Police

 A cop is 25 times more likely to die in the line of duty than a Black person is likely to be killed by police. Most of the Blacks who got killed by police, including George Floyd, were resisting arrest and/or either fleeing or fighting with police, which in itself is a crime!. So Congress, your real job is to protect our brave police, who put their lives on the line everyday, so that we can be protected from criminals, by widely educating people, starting when they are public school students, on a national level to always cooperate with police and they will be fine and also there will be less cops killed on the job. That's a Win-Win for everyone!! If they do not cooperate with police including fighting or fleeing from police, and consequently get hurt or killed, than that result is on them, not the police.

House Mortgage Warnings and Guidelines

 Be careful on house closings. We've been unpleasantly surprised in the past when showing up to a closing and the closing costs were thousands of dollars more than we expected. Hidden fees and much more escrow for property taxes than we expected. Most mortgages - the bank pays your property taxes and adds that to the mortgage payment to make sure that the town doesn't foreclose on a home that the bank is financing. High escrow at closing protects the bank for a while from using their own money to pay property taxes when the homeowner is late with a mortgage payment. If you lose a job and can't pay your mortgage, sell it as fast as you can to prevent bank foreclosure. Banks love to foreclose because they, not you, keep the equity you put in your house when they sell it and do not return any excesses above the mortgage amount, but instead keep all that equity. Also, never voluntarily increase your mortgage payment to pay the loan off faster. If you lose your job or are in ill health and therefore can't make mortgage payments in the future the bank could foreclose and keep even more equity. Plus most of that extra payment pays down interest not principal. It's equivalent to you giving an interest free loan to the bank. Who wants to do that?!! Instead, invest that extra mortgage payment until it grows large enough to pay off the loan. Double advantage - if you lose your job in the future, that savings gives you more time to sell the house while continuing to make your mortgage payments before the bank can foreclose when you run out of money and stop making mortgage payments, plus by investing your money, you will likely be able to pay off the mortgage sooner than increasing your mortgage payment as your investment grows in value over time. Finally get a 15 year mortgage, not a 25 or 30 year mortgage. The mortgage payment isn't that much higher for the 15 year mortgage, and you will save lots of interest paid on your mortgage. Get a fixed rate mortgage, not a variable rate mortgage. People who got variable rate mortgages are getting huge increases in their mortgage payments with the recent large increases in interest rates. If you have a fixed mortgage and interest rates go down substantially, you can always refinance (usually closing costs are much less on a refinance). Finally, as property taxes increase each year, expect your mortgage payment to also increase. If the bank allows it (some do) structure your mortgage so that you pay it, not the bank. But be careful - its normally paid to the town in one lump sum per year which can be several thousand dollars, and you need to be prepared to have that money available. If your other tax deductibles are large, you can deliberately plan to pay two years of property taxes in the same year, by paying one year a couple of months early. This can raise you tax deductibles sometimes enough to "itemize" your taxes and get a tax refund or pay less total taxes. This strategy would be an every other year strategy. If it doesn't raise your deductibles enough to get taxes saved by itemizing your taxes, then it's not worth doing.

The Fair Way to Conduct Presidential Primaries

 Primary schedules have always been unfair and ridiculous in my opinion. There should be 10 primaries of 5 states each and each of those groups of 5 states should be spread out across the nation and be a mixture of "red" and "blue" states as much as is practical (some states are neither red and blue and there is not an even divide of red and blue states). Also should be a mixture of large population and smaller population states. Then every primary that follows should rotate those groups of 5 states up in the primary schedule and move the group of 5 states that were first in the last primary to last place. That's the only "fair" way to conduct primaries. All states rotate and there is never just one state that is the only state in the first primary. No state should ever get such preferential treatment in a national primary.