budget

Habits That Improve Your Financial Situation

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financial situationIt’s important to stay out of financial trouble best you can if you want to be able to live more freely and not be stressed out about money on a daily basis. Be glad to know that there are certain habits you can adopt that will allow you to improve your financial situation so that you can experience better days ahead.

It may take some time to change your behaviors and find a method of tracking your finances that works for you, so remain patient throughout the process. Look forward to the days when you won’t have to worry about every penny you spend and can secure financial freedom once and for all.

Create & Follow A Budget

One habit that will improve your financial situation is if you create and follow a budget. This will help you to see what money is going out and coming in on a regular basis. Otherwise, you risk overspending and not having enough money for important matters such as paying bills and rent or your mortgage. Documenting what you’re spending will help you to see your overall financial snapshot and what your monthly expenses are. Continue reading →

Entire Federal Budget Now National Security Secret

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Skidmore Greg Hunter – Michigan State Economics Professor Mark Skidmore made a stunning discovery late last year. Using publicly available government accounting reports, he revealed there was $21 trillion in what he calls “missing money” from the Department of Defense (DOD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The data he used has been scrubbed, all accounting records are heavily redacted and now the federal government has declared its accounting falls under “national security.” Dr. Skidmore can no longer get the government to respond. Dr. Skidmore explains, “At this point, they are no longer responding to any of my inquiries. They are just not answering, and that is very astounding . . . and you can go on and look at the report yourself and see all of it blacked out.

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Former U.S. Comptroller: National Debt is $65 Trillion, Not $18 Trillion

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trillionMichael Tennant – In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put the U.S. government’s debt at a staggering $18 trillion. But according to a former U.S. comptroller general, the actual debt is $65 trillion — more than triple the official figure — and it isn’t going to improve as long as politicians continue to put their personal and partisan interests ahead of the nation’s.

David Walker, who served as the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008, told John Catsimatidis, host of “The Cats Roundtable” on New York radio station WNYM, that there’s much more to the debt than just what the government currently owes.

“If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it’s growing automatically absent reforms,” Walker said Sunday.

Even Walker’s calculations may understate the seriousness of the situation. Earlier this year Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff told the Senate Budget Committee that when all future financial obligations are taken into consideration, as of 2014 — when the CBO claimed the national debt was $13 trillion — Uncle Sam owed a whopping $210 trillion.

In truth, it is impossible to know just how deep the pool of red ink in Washington is. All projections of future debt are based on certain assumptions about economic growth, tax rates, interest rates, entitlements, discretionary spending, and so on. If any of these changes — and all of them probably will — the actual debt may end up being considerably larger or smaller than forecast. Nevertheless, even by the CBO’s reckoning, there is a serious problem.

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Collapse: Things Fall Apart

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budgetCharles Hugh Smith – As noted earlier in this series, collapse is not an event, it’s a process, a process we experience as things fall apart. The phrase famously appears in William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Why do things fall apart? I have addressed a number of dynamics in the first four essays of this series, but there are many more expressed in Yeats’ few brief lines.

1. Magical thinking dominates all discussions. The truth, being too fearful to contemplate, is sidelined in favor of magical thinking:

— we can grow our way out of debt by expanding debt

— if we simply print enough money, we can pay for everything we want

— a miraculous new technology (insert current example) will provide limitless energy/food at near-zero cost

— if we tweak the system with some minor reforms, all the big problems will go away

— new technology always creates more jobs than it destroys

and so on. Continue reading →

Scathing Assessment: “The UK Economy Is A Ticking Time Bomb

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Simon Black – Despite being an otherwise staid, traditional news service, the professional banking division of the Financial Times recently released an utterly scathing assessment of the British economy.

budgetIt was entitled, “The UK economy is a ticking time bomb,” and the editor didn’t pull any punches in completely shattering the conventional fantasy that ‘all is well’, and that advanced economies can simply print and indebt their way to prosperity.

I’ll quote below, emphasis mine:

“What is the problem? Quite simply, the key numbers are terrible. According to the OECD, after five years of ‘austerity’ the UK’s budget deficit is 5.3%, down from 11.2% in 2009.

“In other words, it has gone from being close to meltdown to a situation that is merely dreadful. Continue reading →