Voters in the state of California spoke loudly and angrily last Tuesday. After years of convoluted budget fixes, exotic borrowing schemes and skirting tough issues, Californians just said “no” to another series of band-aid fiscal ballot measures that just seemed like more of the same. Voter frustration has risen to such new levels that now there is even a movement to completely rewrite the State’s constitution to prevent the politicians from operating like credit drunk consumers.
Author Archive for JS Wolff
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A few weeks ago I referenced the “Miracle on the Hudson” and how Captain “Sulley” Sullenberger’s Flight 1549 heroics can guide us during financial emergencies. You may recall that Sullenberger safely landed a commercial airliner on the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese and losing both engines. I was intrigued by his success enough to study a few of the attributes that led to this amazing outcome.
I’ve talked to some pretty nervous investors recently…even with this latest uptick they’re not sure if they can ever trust the stock market again. With their fears being totally understandable, I decided to research an historical worst case scenario to help them evaluate the length of time they needed to be in the market to be reasonably assured that they wouldn’t lose money.
I’ve heard it said that you can tell a lot about a person by what they do with their wallet. In our life, I would say that’s pretty accurate. A few years ago if someone went through our checkbook and debit card receipts, there is would be a pretty consistent pattern tracking what we value most highly. Repetitive expenditures after essentials are traveling to hang out with our adult “kids”, charitable stuff and keeping my wife’s horticultural degree in bloom by regular visits to the local nursery.
All of us have a distinct financial personality or what we call our “Money Pulse”, that is probably different than anyone else’s. What you do or don’t do with your money in tough times says a lot about your core financial beliefs. Often we get caught up in a herd mentality and we gravitate toward what others are doing. Consider Bernie Madoff and the famous people who invested millions without asking fundamental questions. An economic crisis is not a time to follow the crowd…it’s a time to know yourself extremely well.
According to the 2008 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, money is often on the minds of most Americans. In fact, the results revealed that money and the state of the economy are two of the top sources of stress for 80 percent of Americans. And symptomatically, one third of Americans reported losing sleep over the economy and personal finance concerns, according to a recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation.
Turns out April is “Financial Literacy Month” and the National Foundation for Credit Counseling is weighing in by releasing the initial results of their third annual Financial Literacy survey. As this is currently a hot topic nationally, Congress will be briefed with the full report later this month. They will hear, among other alarming statistics, that fully 41% of respondents gave themselves a grade of either “C, D or F” when it comes to understanding money and/or making good money decisions. We are definitely not making the Dean’s List here.
Last week, I mentioned that two of the clear differences between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression are the interactive ways we now communicate and the staggering amount of data that is literally at our fingertips via the Web. Collectively these phenomena contribute to what I termed the, “data invasion”, meaning that, unless we have a way to filter, simplify, and personalize financial information we will probably not be much better off than they were in the 30′s… sort of dazed and confused.
Seems like a repeat question that keeps coming up in my financial wellness sessions is, “what was different about the Great Depression than what we are experiencing now?” How about for a start…communication and data!
On January 27th, 1927, two years before the US economy fell off a cliff, inventor Philo T. Farnsworth applied for a patent that is now considered the official birth date of the television. Because this medium was still in its infancy in 1929, radio and newspapers were the only tools with the ability to reach the masses. But as we know, all of these mediums are only good for moving information one way.
This week the government announced a new plan to rid the financial system of so-called “toxic assets”, a general term for assets that have exposed their holders to large losses. It is these assets that have paralyzed both the credit markets and the investor community from moving forward because, to date, no one has been able to determine the extent of their poisonous reach. So to restore some semblance of confidence, the government is proposing to build an entity to capture, hold and somehow try to sell these blemished instruments.
