Posted on 11/25/2007 5:15:20 PM PST by Travis McGee
Oh I will. I'll also think of you every time a farm bill is debated in The house of Representatives and how your social security is indexed to wages and not the CPI. I'll also be thinking of how my kids are going to pay for all of it since the surplus has went to the purchase of account-gimmik assets. Further, I'll be thinking about you as you collect that SS check until the day you are no longer living, assuming that you began collecting it in your mid sixties. Just curious here, but before you started collecting, if someone were to propose a hike in the age necessary to collect those benefits, would you have been on-board with the proposal?
I’ll be watching mail! Good to hear from you too! :-)
That is an excellent point, but in that case you could still pay off your loans if you had saved the money. Let's say you owe $100,000. Instead of paying off your loan, you purchase $50,000 in goods and hold onto the rest. Then hyper inflation hits and runs upto 30%. When that happens, CD's and MoneyMarket accounts will be paying out at around 30% as well. That allows you to pay off the fixed rate $100,000 loan using your invested $50,000 in less than three years.
Or you can go out and purchase $100,000 hard non-depreciatable assets, and after five years of 30% inflation, sell it for $371,000 and pay off your debt, which has now decreased in value by almost 75%. Of course that remaining $271,000 in your pocket would only be worthe $75k in today's dollars, but that's $75k you would not have if you had paid off the loan early.
Inflation kills long term debt lenders. Quickly paying off long term debt because of a risk of inflation doesn't make sense.
Done and done. Bought and paid for enough land to grow all the food we need and enough firepower to protect it if it becomes necessary.....
I’m an elderly retired rancher on SS. Trust me, retirees like me can only afford food and energy.
Both of your statements? I'm confused now. Which is it?
The question was whether to pay off debt or not. However, the low savings, high debt rate would actually mean a lot of people would benefit from high inflation, at least in that sense. The people that get destroyed during periods of high inflation are those with lots of liquid savings.
It is far better to be deep in debt at the beginning of high inflation than it is to have a lot of money tied up in long term, fixed investments (which are generally loans to others).
fwiw-
Sorry to confuse you.... if one is rich, it’s because they have everything on their side of the ledger——the “black” side. In my case, I’m land “poor.” I don’t owe a soul, but unless I sell my land, cattle, gold, etc. I have little to spend on day-to-day “stuff.”
It was probably the hardest concept I tried to pass on to my children. With a lot of sacrifice, I managed to send my three girls to private parochial school. We commuted 100 miles a day to get them to the city. While there, they noticed their urban counter parts lived with a great deal more affluence than we. They lobbied all the itme for expensive cars, clothes, and other trappings of affluence that their friends had, but we could not afford. It was very hard to convince them they’d someday be well off with the hundreds of acres of pristene ranchland we planned to pass on to them. It was hard to convince them their friends were not really “rich,” just terribly in debt.
They’re in their thirties now, (and we have one foot in the grave and the other on a bannana peel,) It’s really amazing that unlike many children, they now believe their parents are genuises.
It may come as a surprise to you that there are thousands upon thousands of farmers and ranchers who have never collected a dime in the form of farm subsidies. We’ve never recieved any kind of payments, nor would we accept one. We sell our beef on the hoof for about fifty-one cents a pound. At one time, only seventeen cents a pound. A fat steer weighs about 9 to 1100 pounds. If there are those that are paying as much as 16.99 a pound for prime beef, they need to start looking to cutting out more of the middle men.
As far as SS checks go, we both paid into that ponzi scheme for 49 years and are still paying into it. That’s the problem with it. We thought it was being invested, not stolen, but since many retirees of our generation thought we’d have it, we didn’t make many other provisions. Keep in mind, our generation did not have 401Ks, etc. There was no such thing.
You’d be wrong if you think many retirees don’t feel bad about SS. Like someone said, “It’s too late to do anything about it, but too early to start shooting the ba$tards.” Our only consolation is that we have four working and contributing grown childrem. The amount they pay in SS more than pays for us since it’s pay as you go.
As far as raising the retirement age, it already been done. Have to wait two extra years if one was born after 1950. Oh, and many of us are still working some, health permitting. We may be collecting, but we’re still paying into SS.
"When I was 17 yrs old I didn't think my parents knew anything...When I turned 22 yrs old, I realized my parents had learned quite a lot in 5 years."
bmflr
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Why the smart money is on Duncan Hunter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926032/posts
Posted on 11/15/2007 3:43:17 AM PST by Kevmo
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