The smarter thing to do is to watch Puppy Bowl III on the Animal Planet channel during Superbowl commercials.
The smartest thing to do is to skip the Superbowl halftime show and watch the Puppy Bowl.
Do you want tacky or do you want cute? It's your choice.
Be blessed!
RB
BTW, you don't want to miss the Animal Planet extravaganza, the Kitty Halftime Show!
We started holding Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University seminar in our home. The first lesson was about saving. I always find the concept of compound interest amazing. My favorite example is about the two twin brothers. One starts saving $2000 per year at age 19 but stops saving at age 26, not touching the money and letting it grow. The other twin starts saving at age 27 and continues saving $2000 each year until age 65.
Question: Guess who ends up with the most at 65? The first twin who saved $16,000 early or the second brother who saved $78,000?
Answer: The first twin who started early winds up with substantially more. They both end up retiring as millionaires but the first does better since his money had more time to grow exponentially. With time, the principle of compound interest becomes the miracle of compound interest.
I understand the math. I can do the math. I can even teach the math. However, I have trouble getting my brain around the results of the math.
The lesson? Anyone who saves and invests consistently will do well, but if begun early, the results will be even more spectacular.
Last fall there were some young men taking the seminar. They saw this same lesson. They each had audio CD’s of the lesson to listen to later and a book that showed step-by-step, year-by-year how the money grew. They were told that they had just been taught how to become millionaires. They could end up as millionaires in terms of what the dollar buys today. They could do so without much sacrifice or trouble. Older people in the class exhorted them to start saving NOW.
They were even told how an undisciplined person could save in a disciplined manner.
If these young men would just consistently save 10 to 15 percent of their income, they would all become multimillionaires. They could live comfortably when retired, no matter how long they live, and still have loads of money to give away or to bless their children and grandchildren. They could create a legacy and change their family tree - the pattern of their descendants for generations. The possibilities are endless.
This is mathematics, not theory.
This is a no-brainer!
Did these kids start saving and investing? I doubt it. I can only speculate as to why. Maybe they are so imbued with a spirit or attitude of poverty that they cannot believe this or take it seriously? Maybe they are too immature to appreciate minor delays of gratification for huge future gains?
I admit that my generation is dumb. Most of us did not know these things when we were young. Which is worse, to not save and invest due to ignorance or to not save and invest despite knowing better and being without excuse?
Which is the dumb and which is the dumber generation?
THE GREATEST. A few years ago, my children gave me Tom Brokaw’s best-seller, The Greatest Generation. I wouldn’t say it was a fascinating read but I did enjoy reading it because it brought back a flood of good memories. The people and their recollections were people like my dad and the men of his generation who I remember from my childhood. These were guys who came of age during the Great Depression and WWII, then went on to accomplish great things in the post-war era. There was a certain quality, an attitude, a mindset, that they shared that I never thought of before, let alone appreciated, until I read the book.
They had character.
DUMB. This week came the announcement that savings as a percentage of after-tax income, the U.S. savings rate, is at the lowest level since the depths of the Great Depression. Now savings rates tend to be lower during bad economic times. If so, the current savings rate should be high. The economy is doing quite well, thank you very much. National income is growing strongly and we are at or very near what is considered full-employment. Although not the best indicator of the economy, stock markets are strong as well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is hitting record levels and the other stock market indicators are very high.
Now there are technical reasons why we must be careful in comparing savings rates between different time periods, but I will spare you the details. However, the difference in rates is so great that there no need to quibble over the fact that the U.S. savings rate is at a very low level.
The following graph shows the US savings rate over the past forty years. Notice that it has been trending downward (i.e., dropping like a rock) over the past twenty years. What happened?
The demographic bulge known as the baby boomers were in their thirties back in the mid-1980's. The oldest ones were starting to hit forty. This is a period in the life cycle when households start saving more, not less. As the bulk of the baby boomers aged even more and entered their forties, the savings rate should have gone even higher, and then even higher during their fifties. My generation, especially since there are so many of us, should be drawing the average savings rate up, not down.
What happened is the pathetic behavior of my undisciplined generation (including me). Never had a generation been so rich. Never had a generation in this stage of their life cycle acted so immaturely, not saving for the future and not delaying gratification like they were teenagers rather than adults.
This is not a proud moment.
DUMBER. I’ll save that for my next post.
I received this from an LT in IQ today. Only the names have been changed to protect those blessed by God:
“[O]n Monday [January 22nd] my Platoon Sergeant (SFC Shadrach) and two other guys (SGT Meshach and SPC Abednego) dismounted on a road when an IED detonated from underneath them. SFC Shadrach was standing directly on top of the IED when it exploded and he was thrown 10-15 feet in the air and landed in the 7-foot deep crater surrounded by sharp chunks of asphalt. He has nerve damage to the right side of his face and lost hearing in his right ear. Doctors are saying he has a 50/50 chance to regain hearing. The other two guys have blown eardrums and may have to get surgery to repair the damage. Other than damage to hearing, everyone emerged with only scrapes from this incident.
“An analysis of the area showed that my guys had been standing on top of 200 pounds of explosives placed inside of a culvert that ran under the road. There is no reason that any of them should have survived 40 pounds of explosives let alone 200. I think this is the answer to prayers from people in the church and some may want to know the real results of their prayers. People could also pray that SFC Shadrach's hearing returns and my guys’ eardrums are healed without the need of surgery.”
Now that is a miracle. At least everyone in the platoon sees it that way. Using 200 pounds of explosives when 40 pounds would have done the trick was going a little overboard, but I guess someone wanted to make extra sure. The timing of the detonation was perfect: the platoon sergeant was standing directly on top of the explosives. It was a can’t-miss, they’re-as-good-as-dead, sort of thing.
Can you imagine the reaction of the devil, his frustration, when he saw the three young men emerge from the devastation?
A long time ago in what is now IQ, not too far away from where this occurred, another three young men survived another can’t-miss, they’re-as-good-as-dead, sort of thing (see Chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel).
This stuff must drive the devil crazy.
Be blessed!
RB
P.S. I received a call this afternoon. Sergeant First Class Shadrach can now hear some low level sounds. The doctors cannot operate, the nerve damage is something that requires healing, so we need to pray for complete healing. Please also pray for the eardrums of Sergeant Meshach and Specialist Abednego to be healed without surgery. Thank you.
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Our 1LT uploaded three pics that you can see on webshots. His internet connection is slow and it takes a long time for him to do this.
I believe these photos were taken soon after he arrived in IQ last fall, during the transition between the 1-61st CAV of the 101st Airborne Division and the 3-61st CAV of the 2nd Infantry Division. Note the shoulder patches in the photo above. The guy on the left has the "screaming eagle" patch of the 101st Airborne while our LT has the 2ID's patch with the Indian head in the star. (Just click on pic above if you want to enlarge it.)
Be blessed!
RB
Reading a weekly news magazine today, I came across an article about an economist and two psychologists who teamed up to study how the brain operates when people purchase items (The ECONOMIST, 13 January 2007, p.73). They did experiments which found that the reaction to the desirability of the product and the reaction to the price are processed in two different parts of the brain. This suggests that people’s brains ultimately may be balancing the immediate pleasure of possibly possessing the item with the immediate pain of paying for it.
A hypothesis coming out of these studies is that the abstract nature of using credit cards, coupled with the deferment of the pain of paying, alters this balancing of the benefit and cost by reducing the felt cost. Thus, people are then more likely to purchase the item. More studies are planned to directly test this hypothesis.
In short, the brain is not set up to function as rationally, to make good decisions, when using credit cards.
Then I thought: this problem is not going to change and is part of the long-run nature of humans. Since using credit cards and spending too much does not disadvantage people in the procreation process (in fact it may help!), evolution will not favor the genes of those who can make better decisions with credit cards.
Unreason triumphs!
So much for evolution....
It is not yet official, but a new and improved version of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University should be offered at Christian Fellowship Center (Madrid, New York) Thursday nights, beginning February 1st and continuing through May. (New and improved means the teachers/coordinators learned some things from doing the beta version of the class.)
I learned a few things during last Fall's class that have already saved me a few hundred bucks.
I like this course.
BTW, this will not be an economics seminar.
