Finance


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Here's what I was thinking of:

    http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/Feds-take-over-student-loan-program-from-banks-3193888.php

    I guess they stopped giving guarantees on anything but the loans they sell. I think those old ones probably still have their same old guarantees, but someone bought them out and continue servicing them. I haven't followed that closely, since I don't currently have any student debt in my family, though that'll probably change in a few years.



  • @accalia said:

    viscous cycle

    That's a sticky situation if ever there was one.



  • Yes, the whole random-ass company thing freaks me out. I'm just supposed to start sending money to a random company just because they bill me? Who the hell is Navient?



  • Well, after reading that now I'm not sure. I know that the website/portal/etc where I pay has changed several times over the past couple years and I seem to be paying a different entity each time, but I don't know exactly what's going on.

    What does suck is I now have to go to three different websites to make my monthly loan payments, and consolidation is out-of-the-question because from my research my interest rates would go up.


  • FoxDev

    Is wondering if anyone would call that out. Swipe got confused an i thought it funny so left it in.


  • Garbage Person

    Yeah. Those are the management companies. There are one or two huge ones that are largely stable and a bunch of small fries that aren't.

    One particular company got a hold of some of my loans and NEVER ONCE MAILED ME A STATEMENT LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER THE DUE DATE. Six months of screaming at them about late fees later (can't send me a bill? You aren't gonna get paid) , they passed them off.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    NEVER ONCE MAILED ME A STATEMENT LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER THE DUE DATE.

    some companies use that as a business strategy. because for everyone that complains theres seven who don't*

    * statistics pulled out of my turtle friends cloaca



  • @loopback0 said:

    financially idiotic

    Been there, did that, paid off the loans (which sucked), and now I have my mortgage and my credit card, and no plans to rack up any further debts.


  • Garbage Person

    Fucking around with services performed on behalf of the federal government is kinda suicidal. I work with some guys who used to work for a company that handled certain customer facing things for the IRS in a less than scrupulous manner. They were not amused when tactical teams came straight through the walls and pointed guns at everybody's head.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    Fucking around with services performed on behalf of the federal government is kinda suicidal.

    not going to disagree.

    but capialism says profit today beats potention losses tomorrow, because they might never happen!

    which is stupid, but there you go.



  • @mott555 said:

    What does suck is I now have to go to three different websites to make my monthly loan payments

    I got out of school with zero student loan debt, but now that both my kids are in college, I've had to take out Parent Plus loans1. At least they were assigned to the same servicer, and they have an automatic payment option (which also saves me 0.25% interest).

    1 Apparently, the kids can't get financial aid unless I at least apply for a loan. Which is a PITA, because I have a foreclosure and an account in collection from when I was out of work for two years. Last year I was declined; this year I was approved, but I had to jump through hoops to prove "extenuating circumstances."


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    hell try breaking into programming without a bachelors degree. it's possible but way harder than it has to be to get past the HR gauntlet.

    I managed to, but I did have a few years of "just barely getting by." It helps to have a few connections, though.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @locallunatic said:

    If that is the reason you are attempting to get a degree then you are doing it very very wrong.

    The problem, of course, is credential inflation. 20 years ago my wife interviewed at an animal shelter. She didn't get the job because those idiots wanted a college degree for a person who was going to work part time making a buck or two above minimum wage, and who was basically just counseling potential adopters, which is probably 100% OTJ training.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Why is it that nobody considers becoming a tradesperson any longer?

    Because in the last 10 or so years everyone's been led to believe they should be working for a nonprofit that doesn't actually accomplish anything.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    which is usually a lot cheaper than a four year school

    Unless, of course, the President's latest idiotic idea ("free" community college) takes hold.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    it took me to my senior year of college before i found a company that even gave me a second look, and i'd been looking since freshman year.

    At my college, we actually had companies calling up every once in a while looking for students. That's how I got my foot in the door.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    Swipe got confused an i thought it funny so left it in.

    Sure, we totally believe ya!



  • @Weng said:

    I spent $6497.92 on gasoline

    Wha? That's like over twice the annual cost to fill up my $LARGE_DISPLACEMENT_SPORTS_CAR. Or are you itemizing gas outside of motorsport?



  • @FrostCat said:

    At my college, we actually had companies calling up every once in a while looking for students.

    At my university, we had "Cooperative Education," which was basically a 6-month paid internship, for which you also got academic credit. Experience, money and credit toward your degree, at the same time. The barrier to entry was pretty low, since the hiring company didn't expect you to know anything.


  • FoxDev

    @FrostCat said:

    Sure, we totally believe ya!

    Now that android is halfway performanti tend to post on mobile at night....

    I still make errors. They tend to be wrong word then typo.

    😝



  • @accalia said:

    performanti

    Is that like the Illuminati of performance?


  • FoxDev

    Should have checked that one more careful...

    Performant is not in swype's dictionary.


  • Garbage Person

    Only about $80 of that is tagged as coming from a track pump (we have a team card that we're supposed to use for race gas. I didn't have it on me one time.

    So, it's all street use. Call it 1800 gallons, 54000 miles at 30mpg.

    I put ~40k on my car, another ~15k on the truck, and that sucks down much more expensive diesel at like 10-15MPG. Sounds plausible.

    In other news: I have a really stupid commute.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Yeah, I spent ~$500/month on fuel. It is not that our of the ordinary to spend per annum what you do on fuel.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @FrostCat said:

    20 years ago my wife interviewed at an animal shelter. She didn't get the job because those idiots wanted a college degree

    Jobs that pay <$35K/year and require a college degree amuse me. Seriously? A person cannot afford student loans and food on that kind of money.


  • Garbage Person

    In Europe you can blow through US$6k worth of gasoline in a good weekend 😄



  • @Weng said:

    Call it 1800 gallons, 54000 miles at 30mpg.

    Holy balls that's a lot of miles. I'm not sure I've driven that many miles in my entire life! (My car has about 40K miles more than when I got it like... maybe 8 years ago now. I can chalk another 3.5--4K miles between two rentals. It's hypothetically possible I chalked up another 12K in misc miles, but I doubt it.


  • Garbage Person

    @Polygeekery said:

    Jobs that pay <$35K/year and require a college degree amuse me. Seriously? A person cannot afford student loans and food on that kind of money.
    Our Admin Assistant has two fucking masters degrees and makes like $40k. It's fortunate she only eats kale, because she can't afford anything more.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Some people just have no idea how much they really spend on fuel. A couple of years ago we took a vacation where we drove over to the east coast and etc. My wife said something about how vacations were not that expensive, etc. I pointed out how she was not paying for fuel on our trips, she did not believe me that we spent > $1000 on fuel on that trip, until I pulled the receipts.

    Fuel goes a lot more quickly than most realize.



  • @EvanED said:

    Holy balls that's a lot of miles. I'm not sure I've driven that many miles in my entire life!

    Insurance must also be through the roof.

    @Polygeekery said:

    Yeah, I spent ~$500/month on fuel. It is not that our of the ordinary to spend per annum what you do on fuel.

    Now that you mention it, I was near $300-400/month this summer. Now, it's a lot less. I would question the rapid price drop, but the effects are most delightful, and I suppose it's really none of my fracking business to complain.



  • For point of comparison, the average driver in the US logs 13,476 each year. In the state with the highest average (Wyoming), it's 21,821. So 54,000 is pretty ridiculous. (And yeah, I would definitely dispute "It is not that our of the ordinary to spend per annum what you do on fuel." You could drive half as much in a car that makes 15 MPG and you'd still be twice the national average.)

    I'd really like to find some percentile data, but the top Google result, the FHWA's site, is down.



  • @boomzilla said:

    As mentioned, Poland. And I think he's still in college. I also think he had some sort of indentured servitude sub minimum wage internship in London recently.

    Ha, someone reads my posts. To be fair, for Polish standards that was a quite lucrative gig - definitely not something an average student / fresh graduate can count on. I just got a little lucky since my company didn't want to let anyone useful go for three or so months, so they sent me.

    The problem is, my regular pay of roughly $4 per hour after taxes is actually quite decent given the country and the situation. And before that gig, it was $2,50, so.

    Also, it's a trainee, not some pesky intern.

    @accalia said:

    have you looked up how expensive a bachelors degree is nowadays? it's getting ridiculous!

    Well, at least that's not a problem here... Though that makes for a lot of people with a piece of paper and hardly any skills (incl. yours truly - though my piece of paper is still in the works).

    @blakeyrat said:

    So don't get one. Waste of time.

    Not an option. A bachelor's isn't a perk like it used to be, but in most professions an employer won't even care to interview you without it.

    Actually, scratch that. You need a master's.

    @loopback0 said:

    Experience

    Yep, but the primary path of getting first experience is a mandatory internship during your studies. If you have no experience and no education, it's hard to even get any.



  • OK, here's something that shows some distribution information. (Source website: http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php)

    54000 miles/year is 150/day. Here's a blown up part of the relevant part of the graph:

    150 miles per day is about the 99.5th percentile, according to that data.

    Now here's the funny thing about that data. What it says is that "It is important to note that only vehicle-days are included where the cars were used that day. As was mentioned before, 39% of cars owned by the participating households were not used on the Travel Day." This means that the number should be substantially lower.

    But if you cross check the overall result -- a weighted average of 39.5 miles/day = 14,417 miles/year, you actually get pretty close to the national average. So I'm not sure what is going on; there could be some weird bias in the days measured. But still, it should give you a kinda reasonable ballpark figure for how rare 54,000 miles annually is.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @EvanED said:

    You could drive half as much in a car that makes 15 MPG and you'd still be twice the national average.

    That's me, except change the calculation for 16-18mpg.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    Jobs that pay <$35K/year and require a college degree amuse me. Seriously?

    Oh, they were serious about those terms, but the job didn't need the degree.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @EvanED said:

    Holy balls that's a lot of miles.

    In one year, yeah.

    I put just over 200K miles on my last car between 1996 and 2008.


  • Garbage Person

    80 mile 1-way commutes will do that. So will a roadtrip-heavy hobby.

    The joke is that I drive a shitload every day, then go on a vacation where I drive hundreds of miles to go drive in circles for 2 days and then drive hundreds of miles home to return to driving a shitload every day.



  • How many audio books and podcasts do you go through? Have you exhausted your local library's collection? :-)



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    Not an option. A bachelor's isn't a perk like it used to be, but in most professions an employer won't even care to interview you without it.

    Actually, scratch that. You need a master's.

    Which of course will lead to a generation who are going to stay in school until they're nearly 30 and will come out with no actual experience in how things work and a lot of theory on how they think things work.

    Oh, that's now. Whoops.

    I went to University to get out of a social and career rut. Didn't finish, dropped it halfway. It did wonders for getting me out of a shitty lifestyle though. Didn't even study CS, did Linguistics.



  • @trithne said:

    Didn't even study CS, did Linguistics.

    Philosophy. When I interviewed for my first job (telephone support for a tiny WTF music software company), my degree was mentioned—"you have a degree; that's good", my boss said.
    A couple of years later, after doing some ad hoc hacking and bugfixing between phone calls, I had "ZOMG 1 YEAR PROFESSIONAL C EXPERIENCE" on my résumé, and was able to apply for "proper" programming jobs, as I have done ever since.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Weng said:

    54000 miles

    I had a company car at my last job and put 26000 miles on it in 5.5 months.
    Do about 24000 a year now, mostly personal.


  • kills Dumbledore

    I spend a little over £15 a week on fuel. A 15 mile each way commute and 50MPG+ bike are quite easy on the pocket.

    When I was working in the same town as I live, it was more like £15 a month.

    There's also the car to factor in, but tat's mostly in and out of town so doesn't really add that much in (I don't know the figures since I don't drive it much so am rarely the one refuelling.)



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Jobs that pay <$35K/year and require a college degree amuse me. Seriously? A person cannot afford student loans and food on that kind of money.

    How much do US student loans cost per year to repay?

    $35k seems like a decent figure to start off with, if you were paying a couple of thousand a year to loans it wouldn't be that bad? But I don't really know how expensive US schools are either.



  • Hate to be on topic, but... 👿

    @Weng You're a lot better off than +26pts for the year.

    You're just looking at your bank account, but you want to look at your total wealth, assets minus debts. Looks like you paid down at least ~22k of debt, so you're ~22k+26pts ahead!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Good thing Bill Gates wasn't talking to you when he was at university.

    We should all learn from Bill's example and exercise proper due diligence before choosing our parents.


  • Garbage Person

    I have basically exhausted Audible's entire Sci fi collection (skipping all the zombie trash) and a goodly chunk of fantasy


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    24k paid =/= 24k principal reduced.

    Especially on that mortgage, I would buttume that at least 30% of the payments are interest. So probably more in the 15-18k point range (which is still \o/, get thee hence to the thread of small celebratory cakes!).


  • FoxDev

    @izzion said:

    which is still \o/, get thee hence to the thread of small celebratory cakes

    i'll second that request!

    also... INUYASHA! SIT!



  • @izzion said:

    24k paid =/= 24k principal reduced.

    Especially on that mortgage, I would buttume that at least 30% of the payments are interest. So probably more in the 15-18k point range (which is still \o/, get thee hence to the thread of small celebratory cakes!).

    Gaaah! that's right, forgot about the front-loading of the interest.

    Oh the glee I felt when I my payments hit the tipping point and the share of principal was bigger than for interest.



  • Financial status: Internet argument with someone last night that said all mutual funds were garbage and you should use ETFs always.


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