I've always beens somewhat ahead of my time in my thinking about things. I don't know if I'm psychic (some say I am), or if I'm merely an observer of patterns. After you get to be my age you put the patterns together more rapidly than you did in the past.
For instance, way back in the 50's, I was all gungho on mini skirts ten years before they became the thing to wear. I kept trying to wear mini-skirts to school, and the teachers kept sending me home. Back then the skirts were being worn to about 8 inches from the floor! Yuck! I couldn't stand it. I loved wearing mini skirts & high heels.
I saw a pattern developing in the 90's with regard to the mortgage mess. I was working as a paralegal doing bankruptcies for people, doing divorces, and in the process they were getting appraisals on their houses, so they could remortgage them to split them up or for the bankruptcies. I noticed houses were being way over-valued for their location, and for the normal price of housing in our area. At the time I figured my house might be worth about $60,000 (Fort Wayne has traditionally had very reasonable housing costs) at the very most, but a house exactly like mine (built by the same builder with the same floor plan) was appraised at twice that! And I thought my estimate for my house was high! Time after time, I kept seeing all of this over-valuing going on. I saw people who only earned $20,000 or less a year getting mortgages that required payments per month that would require 50 to 75 percent of their take-home pay! I thought it was irresponsible for them to take out those mortgages, and at the same time I thought it was irresponsible of the banks to give those mortgages.
My father always taught me you shouldn't pay more for your housing per month than you take home in one week. I've always adhered to that policy.
I knew in 1993 that the housing and mortgage industries were going to go belly up. If I'd been a little more prudent with my health, I could be a multi-millionaire by now!
Nevertheless, I said in 1997 that the credit card companies were going to go under. They should have gone under by 2007, and perhaps they did and just didn't know it. At any rate, the credit card industry is going to go under very soon. I don't know of any way for anyone to profit off that, and darn it, I cut up all my cards in 1997.
In 1996 I also observed that whereas one used to be able to have health insurance for one's family for a minimal cost of perhaps 1% of your take home pay, I discovered that for me to buy health insurance would cost me more per month than my mortgage payment!
About 1998 a part of my job was doing due diligence for an attorney who represented a large insurance company that was buying up smaller insurance companies. I went through a lot of records, reading things, absorbing knowledge, and filing it away in my head for later. At some point in that year I came to the conclusion that a lot of things had happened since 1976 when I was on my ex-husband's employer provided insurance.
Back then companies provided health insurance for an employee and his family either for free, or for a nominal amount per week. I think we paid something like $6.00 per week toward the premium. It cost less than $600 for my nearly one week hospitalization when my son was born (I was in labor for 3 days & they wouldn't let me go home once my water broke, and they thought he was jaundiced so they kept us for 6 days.) The insurance paid for everything. I think my husband earned something around $20,000 a year in 1976.
I saw insurance premiums skyrocketing, medical costs skyrocketing, and I wondered why. When I was doing the due diligence investigation I started to have an inkling! The insurance executives were paying themselves outrageous yearly bonuses! Some of them were getting $20 million a year in bonuses!
I reasoned that the doctors and hospital and pharmaceutical companies began observing that the insurance companies were paying for everything and had deep pockets. So they all raised their rates, doctors charged more, hospitals charged more, and pharmaceutical companies said "we can tell them it's the research that costs so much, and we can charge more". Unmitigated GREED!
So when the insurance companies saw the medical providers charging more they saw their bonus checks dwindling in size, so they raised the premiums. More unmitigated greed.
I harkened back to my first job selling greeting cards. I had sat down and figured out I could buy a saddle for my pony if I were to sell 500 boxes of greeting cards. Problem was, there weren't 500 people who would buy the boxes of greeting cards. I had built a pyramid scheme of sorts in my head, and being an eternal optimist I had let my dream mushroom into gigantic proportions. I had also filed that lesson away in my head. I don't know if I ever thought of it before now, but the lesson I learned was that sometimes the mountain can get so high that it will topple over on you. Well, people, the mountain of debt is toppling.
If your mountain is toppling, it's not the end of the world. There's always hope. I have written a couple of books. One of them is Unconscionable Contract: What Credit Card Companies Don't Want You to Know, available at Amazon in paperback or on Kindle, and the other is Winning at Wishing, a primer for the beginning positive thinker, also available in paperback or on Kindle at Amazon. Buy one of each! Or buy more and pass them out to your friends. There is a way out. And it isn't going to come from the government.
Pray positive: Thank you God for getting us through whatever lies ahead, and thank you for preserving our freedoms and the Constitution of the United States of America.
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