i agree with you conceptually about only investing in thing you believe in, or rather in things you can stomach as most investments and industries have a downside if you look hard enough. eventually you get to exploited workers and poisoned rivers and solid waste. i personally struggled with the payday investment i made. the return was high, but i did not want to be associated with it. i said no for about 6 months. over that six months i learned how they (where my money is now) did business. after i understood it i had a hard time thinking of it any differently than a bank. they both loan money based on ones ability to earn money and pay it back. the only difference is the duration and the size of the loan. a bank allows me to spend money i don't have on a credit card and then charges me 13-18% until i pay them back while they themselves are leveraged 10 to 1 on those dollars loaned. the payday place will only loan me money that will be covered in my NEXT paycheck and charge me a flat fee of $5 or $10 while they themselves have a dollar for every dollar they loan out. when i look at it like that i really had no problem with the payday place, but started to have them with the banks. the payday places are not dragging the economy down because of their recklessness. they are also not enslaving an entire generation by offering them credit they cannot pay back. there are people who use them recklessly, and it is real easy to point them out because they are the fringe. it is a little harder to point out the middle class suburbanite who is a slave to their credit card and bank because they get up and go to work each day and keep a nice yard but are living on credit. both industries lend money and both are technically guilty of charging people who don't have money. they are in business to make money, not give it away. in the end neither is good nor bad just as fire is neither good nor bad. the good or bad all depends on who uses it and how they use it. the payday places service a far less afluent and unsophisticated clientele and therefore gives them very little wiggle room to abuse the system. if they want to stay one paycheck behind for the rest of their lives, that is about all they can do. the bank will let me get decades behind because they assume i am responsible and won't let it come to that but do little to stop me and recently have even encouraged me to do so. in my mind it is a match compared to the bonfire. both can be abused, but the potential abuse of a credit card is far greater. but there may be other payday places that have different policies than where i invested. mind you i don't have equity in the payday place�"they borrowed money from me to lend. in short my money is on deposit to be lent out just as if i put it in a savings account for the bank to lend out on a credit card loan. the main difference is my rate of return is almost 10 times higher but not FDIC insured. the only thing i do struggle with is the 10% they charge for cashing checks. this is outrageous in my opinion. i can't understand why anybody would do that unless they were unable to cash it elsewhere and i won't speculate as to why. but in the end they have their reason and are paying a premium for it. and with that i leave it. cigarettes are another issue and i am totally with you. i feel the same way about other products as well most are not as overtly damaging, but their products do carry liability and they push them with abandon to those who are hurt by them. not just talking guns and alcohol. a few minutes watching saturday morning cartoons was an eyeopener to the type of products marketed to kids. slap a mcdonald's logo on a bucket of mud and i think my kids would want to eat it. a friend of mine who is militant about his hate for phillip-morris and smoking in general (i think he lost a parent to lung cancer) holds half his portfolio in tobacco stocks. he justification was that it "those people" are going to annoy him with their smoke and take his taxes in healthcare, they are going to pay him for it. an interesting take on moral investing practices, but for him it makes sense. i respect your desire to not follow my practice of investing in payday lending. we not only have to undderstand our investments, but repect if not love them. i do not love payday lending, and to be honest would rather be elsewhere, but for the time being it is a good place and i am no so morally apposed to money lending as to not take the opportunity. i do however own no bank stocks for obvious reasons, i think their model is risky. i also think they are on the more unethical side of business. they have laws and loopholes that allow them to do things that are illegal to any other company. id it because we need their services and that is what it takes, or is it because they have power to influence if not make laws that favor them? i think recent events have shown us it is a little of both. before i sound too anti-establishment, let me say i think financial institutions are important and necessary�"ie. banks, insurance companies, the US government, the FED, and even payday lenders. BUT they are in busniness to make themselves rich, not us. if you do not understand what they are doing, how they make money, or worse, what you are doing, they will take advantage of you. thus education. it is through education that you can see the smoke and mirrors they use to make you feel good about making them rich at your expense. one of the most ubiquitous is the home mortgage. i am emphatic that the most expensive ways to buy a house are in this order; cash, paid off early mortgage, continually refinanced mortgage, a 15-year note, a 30-year note, ARM, variable rate, interest only, and deferred interest-AKA sub-prime being the cheapest. that said, i don't like differed interest as it assumes the risk in the real estate market and if used by the uneducated or irresponsible it can (and has) blown up in the borrowers face. what does the bank want you to do? they love you to take out a 30 year and refinance every few years or pay it off early. if you are going to take it to term, they prefer you take out a 15-year because it makes them more money and that is why they have a cheaper rate to take it�"they need to give you incentive to do what benefits them and think you are getting the better end of the deal�"if it makes them more money, how can it also save you money and show up in two places at once? this all sounds like hericy i know. but where do we get our financial education from? our bank? alan greenspan has a nice quote about the variable interest only mortgage being the best deal out there if people only knew how to use it and the 30 year not serving its customers as the think. i will see if i can find it. the mortgage subject was perhaps the most eye-opening and influential education i ever had in finance. it is the lesson that taught me to see the whole equation and not look at a financial strategy in a vacuum. it taught me to understand finance on a macro economic level to understand how to best use products on a micro economic level. it is painful and feels like you brain is removed and turned around and put back in. but i assure you it is all true and useful information, but it requires the user to be responsible for their financial life and some are not willing to do this and for them it is not wise to have control. just as fire in the hands a of one is destructive and to another the opposite. what i am talking about is basic business finance�"in short figuring out the lost opportunity cost and the taking the greatest margin. if done properly with understanding risk is minimized and growth is maximized. some will refuse to believe, but that does not prove those strategies wrong. i myself do not practice whole-heartedly all the strategies i know an believe because of issues regarding timing, my own laziness or whatever. this does not mean i don't acknowledge their strengths or potential. but it serves me to understand alternatives. there are many i have encountered on this forum and in other places who flat out throw up a wall and won't even try to understand that there are several strategies to use in every situation and they all have merits. my beef is with those who claim merits that are not truly there or ignore others. those who emotionally attach themselves to dogma that was sold to them without trying to understand. i have been guilty of this and still am at times and it only hurts myself. when i have a few hours to spend with a calculator, i will start a new thread and actually run the numbers on the most popular mortgage products side-by-side including paying cash. i will treat all as equals. it is amazing how different the outcome is from popular beliefs, but if you look at who is selling the mortgages and the information i guess it is not shocking. it won't prove anything other than which is the most expensive in terms of money and what risks are inherent in each scenario. the individual would have to choose which is best for them. the problem is that most choose the wrong thing for what they claim to want. if you know how they each work you can choose more appropriately for your goals whatever they may be.

dreamgarden, Here's an old NYT article I dug up from January 1981. It's discusssing the Feds policy changes during October 1979. It's a time I'll certainly never forget! In October 1979, I was at Notre Dame University attending my first American Bankers Association class of a 3-year program. We attended Notre Dame for a week's worth of intense classes & then peformed work at home for a year; then back to another university & another year of home assignments...then, one more year at another university followed by a presentation given at the end of our third year. Prime changed every few days...sometimes more frequently. We were studying the secondary market. Trading terminals had been set-up for our use. We were each given $1M of Monopoly money to trade with. Every single one of us was wiped out totally within TEN MINUTES because of the prime rate changes. It changed 3 or 4 times that day alone!! I was doing construction lending at the time. My borrowers paid a rate that floated over prime, usually 3%. I can clearly remember construction loan interest rates hitting 15%+. One of my builders told me it would be cheaper for him to build the house on his VISA card! He wasn't far wrong. Permanent mortgages were 12%+ on the open market. I had a subdivision to sell out in Thornton, CO of over 400 homes. We offered 'special' financing at 10.5% in an attempt to get those houses sold. I also remember the 1970's recession & gas shortage. My ex-husband & I took turns taking a day off work to wait in line for gas. I was in line at the station just off Alicia Parkway in Laguna Hills, CA mid-week...the line was probably 1/2 mile long. Suddenly, we all heard a sharp noise & knew immediately what had happened. Frustrations had reached critical mass & somebody had shot another person who had gotten gas just before the station owner put out the "No More Gas" sign. During the 1970's recession & housing bust...REITS failed by the hundreds & the market tanked. That's when I first learned about work-outs. The world is not ending today. We're going through a tough time, sure, but it's not time to buy wheat in 50 lb. buckets. The sun came up today & it will go down tonight right on schedule. In a few years you'll be looking back at this timeframe & remembering where you were when the Dow plunged. By the time you've been thru a few recessions they aren't as unnerving. Each has its own characteristics. IMO, this one will be remembered more for banking hitting the skids than subprime. Just like we remember the 1980's for the S&L crisis rather than the policy changes that precipitated the problems. Yes, I've assumed you've not been through many recessions. If you have & have been this skittish...I don't see how you've survived?? Deep breathes. This too shall pass. /tricia PS Your posts are very hard to read with all of those strange characters. How & why does that happen?

Those of you who are against the $1 glasses have never been prescribed bifocals. When you get bifocals, the upper portion -- your distance prescription -- is custom done for you and requires professional fitting. However, the lower portion, the reading glasses portion, is simply a magnifying lens. Your lower portion is just +1 or +2.5 or whatever. This means it's magnified once or 2.5 times or whatever. If you get drug store readers, you're getting JUST the lower portion (the +1 or + 2.5 or whatever) in the whole thing. They're even labeled +1 or +2.5 or whatever. You can't wear them around the house because you have no distance vision, bit for reading or close-up crafts, they're perfect. In fact, the readers are identical to the tiny sliver of reader glass at the bottom of bifocals . . . You're just getting a bigger piece of it. If you personally don't need bifocals yet, this isn't easy to understand.

Dad smoked a pipe, and cigars occasionally: one of my memories is of the cigar smoke in the car when we'd be going to town on a rainy day. During World War II, his friend in a watch repair shop in the city would comment that he wasn't smoking his cigar, Dad said he couldn't get tobacco, so the guy would get him some cigars or tobacco occasionally. Dad said cigarettes were "two puffs and a spit" ... and wouldn't let the hired men smoke in the barn. He used quite a lot of chewing tobacco, later snuff, as he never smoked when working on the farm. Mom was out of my life from when I was just under six, taken to mental hospital when youngest brother was about 6 mos. old, but I think she didn't smoke. I used to give Dad the devil for his smoking. He had breathing problems, visited the prairies for a bout 6 weeks one fall, leaving the farm for me to look after care at age 15, along with my two younger brothers. He was partly visiting relatives and friends and he worked for a couple of weeks in harvest. After he came home to the London area that fall, in the following spring, sold his cattle and other animals, plus most of his farming equipment and rented the farm out, planning to move out west to farm. I worked for the renter, my brothers and grandma, who'd come to live with us after Grandpa died, and who never smoked, but I think Grandpa may have, were farmed out to church friends. Dad had some things to do in the prairies through that summer, and came back to spend the winter in Ontario prior to moving out there, the following spring, when he'd arranged to sharecrop a farm. My Grandpa had helped that man and his brother, neighbours living within 5 miles of where I do now, get an education, almost 40 years before, and who had gone out there about 1910 and returned for a visit in 1924, telling of the great opportunities out there ... but Dad and Mom were engaged, married in 1925, and she had a brother out there who was trying to farm where it was too dry, so she wanted no part of going out there. Some friends and I picked up ciggie butts along the roadside, bought some rolling papers and tried smoking. I began buying some in packs, later. When I wrote to Dad, this new adventure was part of the news imparted. In his reply, he said, "Well! well!! well!!! (1) So the young man who's been giving the old man the devil for all of these years is doing fine, is he?" 1. There was one underline under the first "we'', two under the second, and three under the third! That was all that I ever heard from Dad about the smoking. So ... I think that it had something to do with declaring my independence, of choosing to live my life as I chose, and being out from under Dad's thumb, though it was not a demanding thumb. I was age 10 when World War II started and soon the farmhands went off to war, so what Dad and this 10-year-old (and growing) and a couple of younger brothers got done - got done, for the next five years ... and the rest didn't, so I'd learned about hard work from an early age, and responsibility when Dad had left operating the farm in my tender care for the six weeks in the previous fall. After about six months, including some time after Dad's return from the west, but with no input from him ... I decided that I didn't like the taste ... and having been trained to be frugal, the cost ... ... so I quit. Never took it up after. My ex- smoked, though that would have been a "No! no" when we were missionaries in Korea (4 years, for her) so she didn't smoke then, but began again following our return to Canada. I think that she continued through her later years, but she'd been employed as second to head, later head, of food service in a substantial hospital, so I'm almost certain that she couldn't smoke on the job. Will have to ask son about that. Ironically, she, who'd fed millions ... died of colon cancer, 12 years ago this month. At age 66, and when the young ones said that, in the ordinary course of things, she'd have retired the year before, I added, "and have been sick through most of that year". She'd taken early retirement, so had 10 years or so to enjoy her retirement. We never know at least a major portion of what tomorrow may bring. Son smokes - I'm fairly sure that daughter, who's spent most of the last 20 years in Phoenix, doesn't. Hard to believe that they're both over 50. Hope you're enjoying your (probably smoke-free) day. ole joyful