Anyone else out there broke

My self we are ok for now. Wife drives 2 mi to work so no big deal there. I drive about 200 mi day for my work but have a company vehicle and they pay the gas. Thats ok for now, but I cant see them taking it in the shorts for ever. Our work volume is down 20 percent. No one is building new houses this year. And we hired hard off of last years numbers adding 10 percent. Some things gona give soon.

• Look here

I was just notified that I'm the poster child fer "Broke". :>(

Allan

Why? Because I found out just how much money I was wasting on junk buys, meaning pop, candy, tools, etc;

What got me to finally do this was the pay phone I was using (before cell phones), the owner decided to change to a private pay phone company so he could make a few pennys. Well his phone provider sucked big time so I decided to complain to the owner. He didn"t care that my family was spending $1250yr on pop from his store and that"s not counting all the other money we spent there, gas, food, munchies, etc: BTW he let me use another pay phone down at the next mini-mart for those few penny"s he was making on the phone.

Then it hit me, $1250 in pop a year??? I must be freaking nuts.

I"ve always been a good money manager on large sums of money but that wasn"t where the problem was. The puter money manager showed me I was wasting 30% of my income on BS buying between the four of us.

For $30 buy a copy of Quicken/MsMoney and start tracking your daily expenses. You might just get the shock of your life of where your money goes.

T_Bone

If you say something smart-alec like, "Yeah, I quit looking because there's nothing out there..." then you're not unemployed since you took yourself out of the labor market.

There's other anamolies hard to account for to make a strict apples-to-apples comparison.

For example, we have another million or so in prison today than 30 years ago. So they're not out looking for work.

On the other hand, we've trimmed the Military by a million or so over the last 30 years. So a bunch of guys who used to go in the service are out and looking. Or in jail. ;)

Oh so many ways to try and slice and dice your way through these statistics!

I can say this: My personal use of gas is down somewhat, especially for recreation. My spending on other "luxuries" is off quite a bit.

The *one* thing helping the U.S. a lot right now is partly from company cost-savings over the last 20 years, and partly from workers rolling over for the most part and being to scared to ask for raises: In 2004, U.S. corporations sat on more cold, hard cash reserves...even adjusted for inflation...than any time in U.S. history.

While consumers have been running credit through the roof, the corporations have been saving their profits. Economists where scratching their heads trying to figure out why...was there nothing out there the companies wanted to invest in? Since cash usually doesn't earn much interest.

Along with the Gov't printing money in the form of the national debt, companies have been able to dig into deep pockets to keep buying at high prices rather than stop spending.

Matt

And price of gas, over $3.00 gal and price of parts, we're so broke can't even pay attention!!

If I two nickles to rub together, I sit up all night and guard them. :>(

Keith & Shawn

I'll just end with that and not go into specifics...