ARMs and interest-only mortgages are not a bad thing per se — whatever the potential pitfalls, it will be to your benefit to use home equity acceleration to pay down those type of mortgages *years* sooner than listed on the amortization schedule:

More and more folks are using a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) or a business-line-of-credit (BLOC) or personal-line-of-credit (PLOC) as an interest cancellation account to accelerate their home equity and payoff their home *years* sooner than listed on their mortgage amortization schedule.

Unfortunately, today’s Real Estate market means that folks can no longer count on appreciation to build home equity. Those who realize that they need to pay down their current mortgage debt are looking for alternate ways to aggressively (yet safely) build equity.

And they’ve discovered a perfect online system to do that; they can focus on their wealth accumulation goals while accelerating their equity simply by using a Home Equity Line of Credit to ‘power’ the Money Merge Account™ financial solutions program.

A typical 30 year loan (of whatever type) can be paid down in 1/3 to 1/2 the time — it’s a great way to save *huge* amounts of income by eliminating a mortgage amortization front-end interest load. (On a million-plus dollar home, I’ve personally seen where the Money Merge Account™ program will save the homeowner $750,000 in interest charges!)

And the best thing – homeowners don’t have to refinance their existing mortgage or, in most cases, make any adjustments to their lifestyle.

It is unfortunate that most of us were never taught to follow three essential principles: (1) Avoid paying interest, whenever possible, (2) Use other people’s money, whenever possible and (3) Find and use a financial system that will guide you, especially if you have the tendency to go off-track. The Money Merge Account™ software and the program’s counselors use these principles to keep each homeowner focused on their wealth accumulation goals.

I’d be happy to provide further details…

Yes, a mortgage is the largest obstacle that most folks have in being able to amass sufficient wealth for retirement.

Fortunately, more and more folks are learning how to use a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) as an interest cancellation account to accelerate their home’s equity and payoff their home *years* sooner than listed on their mortgage amortization schedule.

Remember, a home is not an asset until such time as it has been paid off “free and clear” — prior to that time it is simply a (very large) liability.

Today’s Real Estate market means that folks can no longer count on appreciation to build home equity. Those who realize that they need to pay down their current mortgage debt are looking for alternate ways to aggressively (yet safely) build equity.

And they’ve discovered a perfect online system to do that; they can focus on their wealth accumulation goals while accelerating their equity simply by using a Home Equity Line of Credit to ‘power’ the Money Merge Account™ financial solutions program.

A typical 30 year loan (of whatever type) can be paid down in 1/3 to 1/2 the time — it’s a great way to save *huge* amounts of income by eliminating a mortgage amortization front-end interest load. (On a million-plus dollar home, I’ve personally seen where the Money Merge Account™ program will save the homeowner $750,000 in interest charges!)

And the best thing – homeowners don’t have to refinance their existing mortgage or, in most cases, make any adjustments to their lifestyle.

It is unfortunate that most of us were never taught to follow three essential principles: (1) Avoid paying interest, whenever possible, (2) Use other people’s money, whenever possible and (3) Find and use a financial system that will guide you, especially if you have the tendency to go off-track. The Money Merge Account™ software and the program’s counselors use these principles to keep each homeowner focused on their wealth accumulation goals.

I’d be happy to provide further details…

If all credit providers are not allowed, by law, to vary interest rates, terms, or availability of credit according to credit records or income, except that they can restrict credit to a fixed, publicly-announced multiple of income, then what happens is that the good risks (aka rich people) subsidize the bad ones (aka poor people).

Hmmm, kinda like single-payer health care.

University Tuition in Canada? Even at elite universities, like McGill, it’s about 15K a year.

Most others run between 5-10K for undergrad tuition.

Financial aid is available.

This means that I can actually afford to send my kids to a good-quality university, and have health care without working myself into the ground or saddling them with 20 years of unmanageable debt.

It’s kind of appalling that the list of basic needs that should be within most people’s sights should seem “radical”. Human society is functional when most people have the ability to provide for their basic needs. The times when most humans have not been able to easily have their needs provided for have been considered times of great crisis (famines, depressions, etc.)

The fact that it’s suddenly extremely radical to envision a society where people can rent or own homes that are sufficient for their needs without going into insane amounts of debt or constantly worry that they’ll be pushed out really shows how appallingly fucked up it’s gotten.

We didn’t need socialism or otherwise radical governmental change in order for this to work out in the past. And obviously since it’s all being either caused or allowed to happen by the government, yeah, of course the government will need to be radically changed. But I’m not sure the response to that is to nationalize banking or anything that extreme.

the opoponax
August 10, 2007 at 11:10 am

Personally, I think the answer is smaller, not bigger.

A society where wages correspond to cost of living, and “cost of living” assumes certain basic truths would be a start, to be honest. If I made enough money to ensure that I could rent or buy a reasonably sized home, put food on the table, clothe myself, get around, educate myself and/or my children, etc. that would be enough for me, and in most cases it would be enough for the bulk of humans on this planet.

The problem, at this point, seems to me to be that in order to secure those basics, even middle class Americans must resort to massive levels of debt.

Wow, dear opoponax. These seem like mighty radical observations to me, and to actually implement these ideas will, I think, require at a minimum exactly the “bigger” things I was talking about–as mere first steps, mind, on the road to a truly socialist society.

In your earlier post, you seem to be suggesting that we should all strive to live simply–as the bumper sticker wisely adds, “that others may simply live.” Not like some kind of crazed monk or something, but recognize that luxury costs, both in human labor and toll on the environment. All very true.

But under capitalism, working people are paid according to the cost, under prevailing social conditions, of bringing their labor-power to the labor market. We are ourselves commodified. We are not, as we fondly like to believe, paid “for the work we do,” but for our ability to do productive work under a higher authority’s direction, that authority being the capitalist owners of the enterprise of course. The point and genius of capitalism is to make us into interchangible parts, to be replaced whenever either we fail or a cheaper source of comparable quality (from the enterprise’s point of view) becomes available. As a direct result, it is effectively impossible for working people, on the whole, to save up any significant sums. If a worker is being paid significantly more than they strictly need to maintain their socially defined minimum standard of living, including the cost of reproducing the next generation of wage-slaves, then that worker is in grave danger of either being fired in favor of a cheaper one–one who would be content just to be paid that socially defined minimum–or under that threat, to either suffer rollbacks in wages and benefits and continue working cheaper, or see their work days made longer and tasks more intensive for the same pay. Or any combination of the above.

The only way that the working classes participate in the general increase of productivity and accumulated wealth that capitalism creates (that is, that they create under capitalism) then, is by increasing that socially defined minimum standard of living. This is mainly done via collective bargaining in the workplace, aimed at raising pay and benefits deemed equivalent to pay, while moderating working conditions and hours. The standard of living can also be raised via public goods–that is, forcing the capitalists to pay higher taxes to fund “free” services and amenities, from schools and health care through roads and parks and libraries and including regulation in the public interest.

Thus, under capitalism, the environmentally and socially conscious working person has a severe dilemma. If we act like good proletarians, we must strive for more commodities, more taxes on the rich–more consumption all across the board. If we don’t, then the total weight of capitalist enterprise on the environment and our fellow workers will not be lightened one bit; it is just that the capitalists will capture a rising share of the same expanded social product.

Worse, wealth is power. If we are not to be ruled outright by an economic aristocracy, there must be some countervailing power. Under the typical parliamentary/liberal regimes of healthy capitalist societies, the only countervailing of the concentrated power of the owners of the enterprises is the distributed wealth among the commoners, which reflects our general level of culture and leisure time, with which we might conceivably organize democratic initiatives to counter the self-interested schemes of the very rich.

Thus, to forgo “our share” of an exponentially rising gross global product is to abdicate to the rule of the irresponsible, unheeding rich.

And yet, anyone can see that exponential growth cannot go on indefinitely. We are in fact straining the planet at the seams–and yet the vast majority of human beings are in much more abject poverty than all but the most extremely poor among us, and exposed at the same time to the wildly irresponsible and unchecked military power of our governments, which play Risk with their lives.

It seems to me that the only alternative is to develop a much more robust public sector, which can as it were hold the wealth of the world, and its direction of development, in trust for all of us. Then and only then can we talk rationally about voluntary simplicity–because frankly, there is going to be a whole lot of involuntary privation of some kind or other, the question is, who suffers it. Under capitalism, those who have least and work hardest will continue to suffer the most; those who have the most will become less and less accountable.

If we had, as I suggested, a nationalized (better, globalized) financial regime, accountable to the people as a whole, we could define acceptable ways of living within our means, and enforce them on those who might not want to comply.

As you say:
And later:

the opoponax
August 10, 2007 at 3:11 pm

Oh, and another thing I’d like to see disappear — this idea that your home is an investment, and that the money you put into it must “do something” for you. …In fact, the idea that your money, when handed over to the proper combination of specialists, should be magically multiplying itself, except not in any real liquid way, but only in a theoretical “on paper” way, should probably go the way of the dodo as well.

Indeed, it should. It may be that to some degree, capitalism, or at least the accounting for production and wealth in money terms, and competition between rival enterprises motivated at least in part by the desire to accumulate more money, is here to stay, despite its easily diagnosed hazards and drawbacks in general. But we should at least see clearly what it is–a system of managing the wealth-creation of ordinary working people, ideally so as to maximize their effectiveness at minimum human costs (including, of course, minimizing costs to things humans value, like the environment). If a system of private property can do that, well and good. I say it can’t, certainly not if unregulated by any countervailing form of social power, and I suspect any countervailing social organization capable of keeping profit-driven activity in humane bounds would be just as capable of doing the capitalists’ creative work just as effectively-better, from the point of view of most of us, if not of course the already rich! (They too might possibly come to see other ways are better, even for them.) So I could be too optimistic about socialism, or too pessimistic about the potential of private wealth and inititive, properly channeled. But we’ve had several generations to try that “mixed” path and the results are at best, well, “mixed,” and the system appears to be gravitating right back to unchecked wealth.

But let us at the very least recognize this–wealth does not grow itself. Human beings make it, and if money appears to be appearing for free in your portfolio–be sure, somewhere else in the world, maybe right under your watchful eye, some large number of people are sweating and being driven insane by stress and working their bottoms off, and not getting that very wealth they create–it’s going to you.

Now, doesn’t a nice regime of financial oversight and populist committees working on development plans sound better than an uprising of desperate poor people who know how to do everything but “make money”?

There’s a post to you somewhere…

Texas A&M will cost us $18,000/yr in tuition&fees/room&board when (HA! IF..) my daughter gets to go there. That’s undergraduate and doesn’t include books or living expenses beyond the room and the meal plan.