rkbabang

I've had UTMA accounts setup for my kids for years. Instead of retyping everything I'll just link to this discussion here from 2009 where I wrote about how I set them up. I've been actively managing their accounts for them and they each have over $6K in them now. My kids are now 13 & 12 yrs old. Yes, being a UTMA account means the money will be theirs on their 18th birthday to do with as they please. This isn't a college fund, it is their money, from birthdays, Christmases, doing jobs/chores, and anything else they can scrape up. We have a large property with animals(chickens, goats, rabbits, and a dog), they do earn their allowances. Re: How Do You Teach Your Family About Finance or Business?

I always buy before the bottom and need to watch it drop like a rock, then I always sell too soon and need to watch the price of what I no longer own skyrocket. If that was really the secret, I should be a billionaire by now. If you will read Baron Rothschild's statement carefully, you may discover that your buying strategy is the opposite of his. The fact that he never bought at the bottom means that he never bought on the way down. Had he done so, occasionally he would have bought at the bottom when such a purchase coincidentally could have been at what after the fact proved to be the bottom. Therefore, Rothschild certainly avoided falling knives and only bought after a substantial decline had stabilized and a stock had risen off the bottom. :) So rather buying something that is sufficiently undervalued as to have a reasonable margin of safety (even if it doesn't turn out to be the bottom), I should learn to time the market better? :) All kidding aside, I get your point. I tend to buy on the way down rather than on the way up and that is probably a mistake.

I always buy before the bottom and need to watch it drop like a rock, then I always sell too soon and need to watch the price of what I no longer own skyrocket. If that was really the secret, I should be a billionaire by now.

Wow, I didn't realize they weren't in the Hall of Fame already. That's ridiculous.

unbundled. I have Comcast again, but for years I had direct TV and used Comcast for internet. At the time Comcast's high speed internet was something like $60/mo, but it was $40/mo if you were a cable subscriber. So I subscribed to the smallest cable package they had, which was basically the local channels only for $8/month. So I got the Internet and local channels(which I didn't need or use) for $48/month rather than $60/month for internet only. You may want to look at your options to see if you can save some money. The only reason I have pay TV at all is because of my wife. I never watch TV other than a Netflix movie once in a while. I'd be perfectly happy without a TV at all. I hate paying Comcast what I pay them.

Sorry, I missed that one. Thanks.

I suppose that when you are the part of the ruling class which makes the 'laws' you can make something illegal for everyone else in the country then explicitly make an exception for yourself. Congress Quickly And Quietly Rolls Back Insider Trading Rules For Itself

Someone did a good deed. BostonMarathonConspiracy.com

The best possible outcome of all this Bitcoin business is if it increases the interest in digital currencies and creates a competition to create a better one (more secure, more decentralized, better privacy, faster, etc...). Bitcoin Isn’t the Only Cryptocurrency in Town - Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick. and another one: Big-Name Investors Back Effort to Build a Better Bitcoin - Some of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture funds have backed OpenCoin, a startup with a new digital currency called Ripple.

From: Taxed for Life:

I sure hope he enjoyed it. I like the post shortly after where he withdraws his offer and says "I can't really afford to keep doing it since I can't generate thousands of coins a day anymore". I wonder if he saved any or he spent it all on pizza?

Oh good, gold is still on top. I don't want to have to listen to people talking about the Bieber standard.

It still looks pretty good when you click the "6m" view though.

Yes, the feds leaving something alone doesn't make much difference if all the state and/or local governments are busy regulating it to death. The founders of this country had a great idea when they demanded the separation of church and state. I just wish they had also demanded the separation of medicine and state, science and state, education and state, transportation and state, banking and state, money and state, ...

Just look at the US Federal income tax, the top rate of a whopping 7% didn't kick in until your income was over $500K per year which is almost $12M in 2012 dollars. "people supported the income tax because it was originally meant to impose only very low tax rates on only the highest incomes. Proponents argued that the 16th amendment to the U.S. Constitution would force the so-called "robber barons" to pay taxes. It was not supposed to provide a mechanism for Washington to reach into most Americans' pockets...high-octane fuel for the growth of government spending. Between 1913 and 1994, inflation-adjusted federal government expenditures increased by 13,592 percent! Over this same period, personal and corporate income taxes grew from 7 percent of total federal revenues and 0.1 percent of the economy, to more than 54 percent of total federal revenues and over 10 percent of U.S. GDP." Original Intent and the Income Tax

So did I. Imagine, if you will, a system where the government made it hugely advantageous for employers to offer auto insurance to their employees. Soon constituency groups formed to express their "outrage" that some employers didn't offer this insurance and laws were passed to mandate it (at least for full-time employment). This would remove the average consumer completely from knowing or caring about the cost of such insurance and because companies are mandated to purchase it it for them in a third party type situation they have no control over how their employees use it. Would this not be ripe situation for insurance companies to raise prices? Now as deductibles started being limited by law and the number of things insurance was required to pay increased (oil changes, tuneups, fuel, and eventually even elective modifications to vehicles) wouldn't the price of such things sky rocket as the consumer ceased to care what any of these things cost? What if mechanics needed to go through extensive education and government licensing to do even the most basic work to any vehicle massively restricting the number of experts? Would not the cost of even the most basic and simple vehicle maintenance skyrocket? Then imagine someone on an online discussion board in such a world pointing out that the "private" system has so obviously failed and asking why the government doesn't just take over the whole damn thing?

Private system? Please tell me about this unregulated private system? I've lived in the US my entire life and didn't know it existed. All this time I've been using the inefficient highly regulated system which gets worse and worse every year. I'd love to know where this private system of which you speak is and how I gain access to it?

Yes, probably not this year. But this is an indication of what they are thinking. Maybe it gets through in two years with the cap at $10M rather than 3, in some kind of compromise. That will be a foot in the door to loot a little out of these accounts. They can reduce the cap in the future and of course inflation will be reducing the cap passively year in and year out, allowing them to loot more and more each year. This is why I've never trusted the Roth IRA. I want my tax break now, while I can get it. I don't want to have to trust that these accounts will work anything like they do now someday when I retire.

Eric, I think you'll find that (all campaign rhetoric aside) Republicans aren't all that keen on reducing taxation. There's billions of people in the world in need of bombing and that takes cash. Lot's of it. The two party system is a ratcheting effect for increasing the size and scope of the state. The D's create programs and raise taxes which the R's never repeal, the R's pass drug laws and start wars which the D's won't end. Back and forth, up and up, and on and on it goes, with both of the constituencies always blaming the other side, and neither ever realizing that both sides are really just two faces of the same coin. Government is what it is, it does what it does. This has been the case for over 5000 years. If you have it, this is what you get.

The government is looking at the huge pile of money sitting in these accounts and is salivating at the prospects of getting their hands on it. This is just the fist salvo in a process that will lead to just that. There is no escape from the looters. None.

The poll asks if bitcoin is a safe store of value. To which I answered "No". Your first post asked "Would you ever consider holding/trading Bitcoins?" I have considered it, but haven't done so yet. I've been watching bitcoin since the exchange value was well below $1, but have done nothing but watch. If bitcoin catches on it will be worth many many multiples of where is now, because there will never be more than 21Million bitcoins in existence. People will be trading with small fractions of a bitcoin for most items. What has stopped me is that I am not convinced of the safety of the whole thing. There are flaws in the way bitcoin works that I'm not comfortable with. When Uncle Sam wants it to stop they will stop it. One such flaw off the top of my head is that everyone needs to keep a copy of the blockchain on their computers for bitcoin to remain decentralized. This blockchain contains every bitcoin transaction. I won't even get into the fact that this file is already huge and will grow significantly over time. But hackers have already done things like structure transactions in such a way as to encode pictures in the blockchain. What if someone did this to encode childporn into the blockchain? This would effectively shutdown bitcoin as a legitimate currency, as no one would want to be caught with this file on their computers. I've read about other flaws, but this is the easiest one to pull off for anyone who wants to shutdown bitcoin and drive it permanently underground. I hope something like bitcoin will eventually become a replacement for government money, but I don't think bitcoin is quite robust enough to manage it.

After reading your summary I was hoping the link would be from The Onion, not the Washington Post, but I should have known it had to be true. You just couldn't make something like this up.

Not really the same as charging a membership fee. Once you pay your Costco fee you can walk in and browse around everyday (or multiple times per day) if you want at no extra charge. And I'm not sure, but I think you can go in and walk around Costco anytime you want, you just need to be a member to buy something. I've never been in a Costco, but BJ's wholesale club in my area works this way. You can go in and look around anytime, they only check for your membership card at the register before you checkout. They want you to look around so that you will see what you could get if you were a member. This store is the exact opposite. If you do not already know what is in there, you'd have to pay just to find out.

I had to laugh at this: If that were true the problem wouldn't exist. Why would people buy elsewhere if they were already in your store and your prices were just as good? And how could people possibly buy elsewhere if the product isn't available anywhere else? I wouldn't pay someone $5 just to enter a store, unless I already knew what I wanted and was sure I wanted to buy it there. In other words, they will no longer have any customers at all in the store who are "just looking". Idiots!

Elon Musk at TED Video