Top 10 music videos of the month: Making Money Fast

This guest post from Jacq Jolie is part of the “reader stories” feature at Get Rich Slowly. Some stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success — or failure. These stories feature folks from all levels of financial maturity and with all sorts of incomes. You can read more about Jacq’s story at Single Mom Rich Mom.

On 31 December 2009, I finished what I hope will be my last full-time, permanent job. I’ve worked a bit here and there over the past year, but it’s on my own terms, and not because I have to. I’m now semi-retired at the age of 45. But what does that mean?

About nine years ago, after reading Your Money or Your Life, I changed from an under-earning, confused woman to a woman with a mission: to never have to work again (unless I wanted to). In November of last year, I reached the Crossover Point, where the income from investments exceeded my expenses. (I think it actually happened sooner than that, but I hadn’t been paying attention.) At last, nine years after first figuring out what I wanted to work hard and save money for, I’d reached Financial Independence.

I’m fortunate that in the last few years, I’ve managed to raise my income so that I can work a few months a year and earn the same amount as I have working full-time (and overtime!) in previous jobs. I’m also fortunate that my wants remain relatively small and I never succumbed to lifestyle inflation. I’ve never wanted a big house, a fast car, or exotic travel.

In a “normal” year, I can easily live on about $36,000, including mortgage payments of about $15,000 per year (that I’m prepaying). So I knew that my Crossover Point was somewhere around $20,000/year with a paid-off house. In the next year, I intend to downsize and move to a (mortgage-free!) townhouse that will be close to public transit for those times I choose to work, and, more importantly, be low maintenance to allow for periods of long travel during the summers.

I’m trying not to plan too far in advance. I want to be flexible. My hope is that I can continue to work part-time or a few months a year for the next 5-10 years until a part of my pension is eligible for withdrawal. My net worth is somewhere around the $500-600k mark, not including pensions. Since I don’t have any intention of touching my savings for the next ten years, I’m hopeful that it will last as long as I need it. If not, I’ll go back to work full-time for a couple of years.

I think what Financial Independence has given me has been a confidence in life itself — that I can handle anything that comes up. If life is difficult, sometimes throwing a bit of cash at a problem resolves it. It’s also given me the freedom that I first dreamed of when reading Your Money or Your Life — that I could work because I enjoyed working, and that I could have my life be about more than work. I have the flexibility to leave any work situation that doesn’t contribute to my overall happiness.

Having lived very frugally for long periods in the past, I experienced frugality burnout earlier this year. I’ve consciously been spending more lately on the things that I’ve “deprived” myself of over the last almost 30 years I’ve been working. For example, my bed was over 50 years old and desperately in need of replacement. A new bed is being delivered this week, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve also stopped thinking that I should DIY everything; I’ve had house cleaners come in this last month — something I would never have considered doing just six months ago.

Part of me still worries about the future:

What is it like to be looking for a job and networking once I get over 50?

Will it be hard — or impossible — to find work if I stay out of the job market too long?

What if the stock market falls again?

Are my investments too aggressive or not aggressive enough given that I hope not to draw down on them for quite some time?

Am I jumping too fast? Should I keep working full-time for a few years and get to that magical million and give myself even more of a buffer?

I only have a year of semi-retirement under my belt, so I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a “success”; I’m still just learning what works. I do know I’ll never go back to a regular job again though and definitely not go back to driving myself as hard as I have in the past again. My hope is that my approach is flexible enough and that I’m resourceful enough to survive and thrive through whatever lies ahead.

This is the final in a three-part series. Read Part 1 here and Part II here.

In the previous two parts of this series I have recounted the multiple frauds perpetrated by MERS: it defrauded counties out of billions of dollars of reporting fees, it defrauded homeowners by destroying documents that provide a clear chain of title -- facilitating its foreclosure frauds, and it defrauded securities investors by failing to adhere to PSAs (pooling and servicing agreements) -- making their securities invalid. Now, in order to cover the trail of deceit MERS and the banks are stealing homes as fast as they can in the hope that no one will notice the fraud. Meanwhile, they are destroying real estate values and adding to the headwinds that are pushing our economy into the first great depression of the 21st century.

In this piece, let us step back and examine the big picture to answer the question: Why did Wall Street create this crisis? For the answer, we have got to go back several decades. I do not want to give a long-winded history lesson, but it is necessary to understand the transformation that has taken place since the 1960s. Back then, the financial system was small, simple, regulated and relatively unimportant. Banks made commercial loans; thrifts made home loans; and Wall Street handled investment finance. Households had jobs and rising wages so they didn't need to go into debt to finance rising consumption. With robust economic growth, each generation could expect to have roughly twice the living standard of the previous generation.

Things began to change in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s as growth slowed, as median real wages stopped rising, and as financial institutions were unleashed to expand activities into new areas. At first households coped with stagnant incomes by putting more family members to work (especially women), but gradually they began to rely on debt. Banks created new kinds of credit and gradually expanded their views as to who is creditworthy. I can still remember one conference I attended at which someone from the financial sector proudly announced that the banks had discovered an untapped market for credit cards -- the "mentally retarded". The argument was that this group would be just as safe as college students, since parents would bail them out in order to avoid having their kids' credit ratings suffer. This was not a joke -- it was a business model.

With slower economic growth, it had become harder for American firms to make profits. They shifted their focus from actually producing goods and services to making money on financial products. GM and GE became primarily financial institutions that happened to make cars and light bulbs as a sideline business. Yes, you could buy a car made by GM, but the company made most of its profits on the auto loan. (It then branched out to -- you betcha -- mortgage backed securities and all other manner of risky assets. I hope readers understand that that is what the "auto" bail-out was all about.) As everyone got into the act of indiscriminate lending, banks found their own business dwindling -- so they had to continually innovate with new products and to find new activities to finance.

The economy became "financialized", as financial institutions inserted their activities into virtually every aspect of American life. Health care morphed into financialized health "insurance", given a huge boost by "Obamacare" legislation that for the first time in US history mandates that Americans turn their incomes over to private financial firms. Even death became financialized with "peasant insurance" (employers take out contracts on employees) and "death settlements" (life insurance policies on those with fatal illnesses are securitized and sold to gamblers betting on early death). Retailers increased the financialization of consumer goods -- they couldn't get enough profit on the sales or even on the consumer credit, so they offered "extended protection" on everything from TVs to toasters and then tried to scare customers with an unusual marketing pitch: the products they carry are so shoddily produced that insurance is necessary to protect the purchase.

Every kind of debt or insurance product became a financial commodity, packaged into a security and sliced and diced and bought and sold. At the same time, "insurance" (often in the form of credit default swaps) replaced underwriting (credit assessment) to make these loans more marketable. And then the credit default swap insurance, itself, became a way to bet on the death of securities, companies, and even nations. It is not a stretch to say that Wall Street's capitalists returned to their roots as "undertakers" (the old term for entrepreneurs), with death becoming their main line of business.

Debt grew. In 2007 just before the crisis hit, total US debt reached five times national income -- the previous record was just three times income, a level reached in the propitious year of 1929. In other words, each dollar of income had to service five dollars of debt. In the decade previous to the crisis, American households spent more than their incomes in almost every year. For every debtor created there is a creditor. Not surprisingly, creditors are richer than debtors. Over time, the proportion of Americans who were debtors grew, and the proportion of creditors fell. The rich got richer and every one else either got poorer or at best just managed to break even. In other words, the debt train fueled a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the very top. It is no coincidence that inequality in the US has returned to its previous peak -- reached, not coincidentally also in 1929. That is what President Bush actually meant when he talked about the ownership society -- a society in which a small elite would own everything.

Banks became giant one-stop casinos that facilitated every kind of crazy bet. They would make a loan to you, but then simultaneously securitize it to sell-on to an investor plus place a bet that you would default on your loan so that the security would go bad. For a fee, they'd let a hedge fund manager choose the riskiest loans to bundle into a sure-to-fail financial product that they would then sell to their own customers. And then they'd join the hedge fund in betting against their customers. The more loans they made, the more fees they collected; the more bad loans they made, the more bets they would win. The more debt they piled on households, the greater their profits; riskier debt meant even higher fees and more defaults and thus greater wins from gambling. Prospective death was a booming good business for our undertakers.

America became "Bubbleonia" -- with a "bubblicious" economy that moved from one bubble and crash to another: A commercial real estate bubble and crash in the 1980s that killed the thrifts; a series of developing country debt bubbles and crashes in the 1980s and 1990s fueled in part by American banks; a US stock market bubble and crash in 1987; the dot-com bubble and crash at the end of the 1990s; and then the US real estate and global commodities markets bubbles and crashes this decade.

Increasingly, the bubbles were managed cooperatively by Wall Street and Washington. Chairman Greenspan and President Clinton made a pact with Robert Rubin's Wall Street to pump up "new economy" internet stocks through "irrational exuberance". When that failed, Greenspan extolled the benefits of adjustable rate mortgages, while President Bush hawked the "ownership society". Wall Street turned America's residential real estate sector into the world's biggest casino -- $20 trillion worth of property that could serve as the basis for many tens of trillions of dollars of bets. Bernanke promoted the bubble by assuring markets that America was enjoying the "great moderation" -- a new era in which stability dominates -- and that in any case, the Fed would protect markets in the case of any hiccups.

The home finance food chain was fundamentally changed to facilitate the rapid pace of gambling that would be necessary to feed Wall Street's appetite. Real estate appraisers were paid more to over-value homes; mortgage brokers were rewarded with higher fees to induce borrowers to accept unfavorable terms; mortgage lenders got better fees for riskier loans; securitizers wanted more junky loans to increase the projected returns spit out by their own internal models that presume more risk is always rewarded with higher profits; credit raters got paid to rate trash as AAA -- as safe as treasuries; and investors shunned "plain vanilla" securities in favor of risky structured products that were so complex no one could understand them -- so that they could have any value desired. No worries, AIG sold "insurance" on all this garbage!

That homeowners would default on the unaffordable mortgages was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it was the desired result of the business model. The preferred marketed loans tell it all: Subprimes! NINJAs! Liar's loans! Washington helpfully changed bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for a homeowner to get out of mortgage debt in preparation for the wave of defaults that everyone knew would result. Wall Street would get the homes, and homeowners would still have to pay on the debts. Then the foreclosed property would be resold, with more fees for everyone in the finance food chain, and the whole process through to default would begin again -- a nice virtuous cycle.

It might seem strange that banks would actually want default. But that is the beauty of a casino -- the house always wins, and homebuyers were gambling against the casino. On the way up, fees are collected, and on the way down fees are still collected on the foreclosures and as houses are resold. And if anything should go wrong, Washington backstops the casinos.

But it was necessary to streamline foreclosure to make it as fast and cheap as possible. Enter MERS -- another link in the food chain -- created by the banks in 1997 in preparation for the boom and bust. MERS was set up to be a foreclosure mill. It would break the centuries-old custom that protected property rights by requiring every sale of property to be publicly recorded, and requiring that any creditor claiming a right to foreclose to demonstrate clear title, with an endorsed note in the creditor's name and a record at the county office showing transfer of the property.

The banksters did not want to go through all that paperwork, and needed to subvert the transparency that would shine light on their crimes. Hence, they set up a fraudulent shell corporation that claimed to be the mortgagee; while the original sale would be recorded at the county office, subsequent sales and purchases of the mortgage would be recorded only by an "electronic handshake" between two "members" of MERS. Even that record was considered by the banksters to be purely voluntary -- MERS did not require members to actually record transactions. If they found it more convenient to conceal the transfers, that was permitted.

MERS even farmed out its name -- for 25 bucks anyone could buy the MERS trademark and use it. And in a touching display of fraternity, everyone got to be a certified vice president of MERS. (Sort of like those 1950s marketing campaigns advertised on cereal boxes -- for 25 cents, you too can be a Super Fraudster with a nifty membership ring and all the benefits of membership in an international criminal conspiracy!)

MERS deliberately undermined the legality of the loans and the records. Homeowners could no longer search the public records to find out who actually held their mortgage -- the record would show MERS as owner, but MERS was a shell corporation with no real employees. It was not a servicer, so the homeowner could not make mortgage payments to the purported owner. As a result, checks were sent to the wrong servicers; servicers credited the wrong accounts; servicers claimed delinquencies on homeowners who never missed a payment, and piled late fees and delinquencies on the wrong borrowers; sheriffs were sent to break down the doors of the wrong houses, and threw belongings out on the street in front of homes on which there was no mortgage at all. MERS purposely created the mess, at the behest of banksters who do not want mere legal technicalities to get in the way of stealing homes. The undermining of the public records was not a mistake -- it was MERS's business model, created by the member banks.

And MERS helped banksters to defraud securities holders. Banks not only separated the mortgages from the notes, but they even destroyed the notes as they entered the mortgages into MERS's electronic data base. MERS told servicers that it is "customary" practice to retain notes, not to endorse them over to REMIC trustees as required both by federal tax law and by the PSAs that govern the trusts. This made the securities a "nullity" -- as the Supreme Court ruled over a hundred years ago -- because a mortgage without a note is unenforceable in foreclosure. At best, the securities are unsecured debt, with no real property behind them.

In any case, the mortgages put into the trusts did not meet the representations made to investors -- so even if the notes had been properly endorsed over to the trusts, the securities could be turned back to the banks. By creating a completely fraudulent electronic registry system -- in which data would be entered only if banks found it convenient to do so, and in which data could be modified at any time by any member of MERS -- MERS made it easy to conceal the securities frauds. Destruction or forgery of the paperwork was absolutely necessary to cover the trail of fraud from origination of the mortgage to securitization and finally to the inevitable foreclosure. Again, destruction of documents was not a mistake. It was the business model.

bench craft company scam

Top 10 music videos of the month

Thursday 23 December 2010

Making Money Fast

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