take my money.

[fiver]

me and the wife drove down into the valley this afternoon to find out how much we owe on the house and pay them off.
the guy behind the desk looks at me for a minute and say's I gotta call the loan branch/office or sumthin to that affect.
[okay they have some figuring to do, since I just made a payment like a week ago]
mind you I have the check halfway filled out and just need a number to write in the blank.
so he gets off the phone, and his computer, and say's i'll be right back I need to go get a fax.
he comes back and hands me some papers, and says you need to do a wire transfer and it will take 10 day's for it to go through.

wait 10 day's?
um yeah.
so they are charging me interest the whole 10 days?
uhhh yeah it looks like it.
if I hand you a check right now they will take 10 day's to cash it?
no they hold it for 10 day's then cash it.
what about the wire transfer?
well that is 10 day's too.
umm you know I pay like 4 dollars a day in interest? [most people don't' figure their interest in a daily amount]
well,,, uhhh, yeah
[that's why they do the 10 day time frame, gotta get those last couple of dollars]

so I guess tomorrow I haul all the paperwork over to my bank and have them do the transfer and wait..

oh sportsmans warehouse quit taking checks too, so don't try paying with one their either.

 

[358156 hp]

It makes a guy wonder if they even want their money. I think all anybody wants anymore are the payments.

 

[Brad]

They want the interest. They don't make money when you pay things off, they make money when you borrow.

Dammit fiver, you are personally destroying the entire banking industry. Shame on you. What will Wall Street do now?

 

[smokeywolf]

Reminds me of an interesting little factoid I learned back in the '80s. If I deposited my paycheck on Friday, it didn't get posted until the close of business on the following Monday. If I included a one dollar bill with my payroll check, the deposit got posted that day at close of business. They were not permitted to hold currency overnight without posting it to your account and they weren't allowed to separate the deposit based on part check and part currency.

I've always thought that the banking industry employes people who do nothing but dream up new ways to take more of your money without providing any additional service.

 

[RicinYakima]

This is how it works; they charge 14% interest, 5% are dead beats, the Fed gave them 3 trillion dollars at 0.001% interest. You figure out how they make money, the banks are the highest paying stock on Wall Street.

India the day before election day here made 85% of all cash worthless. You had to turn your money into a bank and get a debit card. No tax cheats and everybody got taxed. Coming here next!

 

[fiver]

I don't know what they are gonna do.
but I'm getting out of debt except for 2 medical bills as of tomorrow.

and I'm paying the no interest medical bills off so slowly i'll be adding to them before they are even close to halfway paid.
I was just gonna write them a check at the time then they got snotty about stuff.
so I set up a payment plan.
it should take about 30 more years to pay them off at the rate I got them to agree to.

 

[RicinYakima]

Thou art a wise man, fiver! Own a place to live, have no debt and the three legged stool (SS, pension,401K).

 

[Rick]

but I'm getting out of debt except for 2 medical bills as of tomorrow.

What a great feeling it is too. About 7 years before I retired I paid off everything and cut up the credit cards. Don't owe anybody anything for nuthin.
.

 

[fiver]

I'm down to just an IRA at the moment.
I have been out of work for 9 months now and figured I better spend the savings and get things leveled out.
the oil patch should be coming back again shortly and when it does i'll get those ducks sorted out and start the savings cycle again.
if I can clock in another 3-4 years of 16-18hr days and put @ 20% of that away pre-tax plus the extra 6-K a year allowed, things will be better when I get to the retirement point. [in another 15-18 years]
dropping the monthly house payment will speed up the savings account money.
and I should be able to buy a 'newish' car in 2 years with money.
hopefully like when I bought the mustang that had 2400 miles on it for 50% of new by using the one payment plan and getting the manager to throw out a stupid number he thought was funny until I wrote the check and handed it to him.

 

[Ian]

I check my credit periodically, more often now since there are a couple places that do it for free. The last record on file is a card I payed off in 2007. No idea what my "score" is. Only thing I owe right now is a $5 bet I lost to a friend last month on his six year battery failing at the first cold snap (it didn't). and my annual lease payment (what the school district and appraisal district call "property taxes").

 

[Rick]

if I can clock in another 3-4 years of 16-18hr days and put @ 20% of that away pre-tax plus the extra 6-K a year allowed, things will be better when I get to the retirement point. [in another 15-18 years]

A word of warning about that. It is what I was doing and I learned the hard way what an ugly beast sleep deprivation is. 34 years in the motion picture/TV industry where 16-18 hour days are the norm. I retired a little early, had to it wasn't really a choice. Docs said sleep deprivation is probably what gave me Graves disease and most likely the diabetes came from the Graves disease.
.

 

[fiver]

I don't know if it's sleep deprivation if you never seen the other side.

I still don't sleep more than 5-6 hours at a time and can roll through sleep times even when I don't have to.
I might get up at 5 am for a week or so then stay up till 3 am and sleep till 9 for a month, then switch back to going to bed at 9 no problem.
it's also no big deal for me to go to bed and just watch tv until 7 am and get back up again and start my day.
I might fall asleep on the couch for a few hours in the afternoon if I sit down for a while then go do stuff in the shop all night.

 

[Rick]

Yeah, I thought I was bullet proof too. Learnt my lesson.

 

[fiver]

I don't try to be that way it just is.
I don't drink coffee to wake up or anything like that, and you'd think the pain killers or muscle relaxers I take would put me out.
but I just don't get on any kind of sleep schedule for very long.
day's night it's all the same except when I want to go do something and it's 3am, or the neighbor comes out and complains because I'm running power tools, or framing, or something at midnight.

 

[smokeywolf]

Motion Picture Industry is feast or famine. You've got to get the work while it's there, cuz next month there may be no work.

At times I did work for productions, but unlike Rick, much of my labor was for the studio's film laboratory, sound, optical and camera dept and others. Although there were 16 hr. days here and there, my overtime rarely went beyond 80 hrs. a week and never for more than 3 months at a time.
I too was forced to retire earlier than planned. Partly because of NAFTA and partly because of the transition from film to digital.

Following the collapse of my first marriage I burned the candle at both ends (and the middle) for over a year, but got away with it because I was still in my early 30s.

My sleeping now is often in two shifts because I tend to be a night person, but get up at 5 AM to make breakfast for the boys and Mom (Mrs. smokeywolf) before school.

 

[Rally Hess]

I once had Wells Fargo try to charge me for counting cash! I'd had a good convention and most of it was cash. Seems they thought you shouldn't have that much cash and wanted to charge me $7.35 to count it. After danceing on my bankers desk, and a phone call, I didn't have to pay it.

 

[Intheshop]

Some extremely difficult to comprehend wheeling's/dealings are going on at the upper engineering end of finance these days.PHD(physics,math) son is employed by some $$$institution that I don't even care to remember their name.....stretching and bending the,can't really say "rules",although some do.As there aren't rules for the chit he comes up with.

It's "life as we know it"....or some such quote about how,given time and enough lube,the public will get used to anything?

Got reams of banking stories,90% good.Do not "really" approve of what my son does,but he's a big boy and will have to figure it out for himself.I'm a cash man,so his biz can go pound sand,haha.

Fiver,good for you payin off the ranch.

Edit,breakfast.....yuuumy,grits and eggs with my best bud,wife of 35 years.

 

[Bret4207]

I don't know if it's sleep deprivation if you never seen the other side.

I still don't sleep more than 5-6 hours at a time and can roll through sleep times even when I don't have to.
I might get up at 5 am for a week or so then stay up till 3 am and sleep till 9 for a month, then switch back to going to bed at 9 no problem.
it's also no big deal for me to go to bed and just watch tv until 7 am and get back up again and start my day.
I might fall asleep on the couch for a few hours in the afternoon if I sit down for a while then go do stuff in the shop all night.

You'd have made a perfect Trooper back int he old days of changing shifts on a weekly or within the week basis. I always felt bad for the guys that rode with me on nights. I couldn't sleep in the day at all and by the 3rd night I was a zombie.

 

[Kevin Stenberg]

Next Aug. we pay off our house. At this point we have no CC bills. The only planed upcoming bills will be a trip to see our daughter in Hawaii .

 

[Ian]

.I'm a cash man,so his biz can go pound sand,haha.

That works until cash only works on the black market. Like Ric observed, it's coming.