It shows that Americans are still really struggling, and it actually takes a lot to withdraw for hardship. In order to qualify for this type of withdrawal, you have to prove that you are having a very difficult time paying medical bills, or you are under threat of foreclosure on your home, or some such financial distress that warrants this withdrawal.

Not only that, you STILL get hit with a 10% early withdrawal fee, plus you have to pay taxes on the withdrawal at the end of that year. I mean I guess I get why they do this. They do it to deter people from dipping into their nest egg or any little thing, and they also do it to prove a point, that Uncle Sam doesn’t stand for giving you tax free money for years only to have you squander it away before you have to pay higher taxes on it down the line.

I think that’s sort of why they went with charging the 10% early withdrawal penalty, to discourage people from getting their money out in a lower tax bracket/lower tax times. The average age of the people who are having to use these early withdrawal options is reportedly between about 35 to 55 on average.

This is a huge shame, because this means that these people still have earning potential in their lives, and they are probably still contributing. Thanks to the hardship though, they may have had to stop contributing all together, or perhaps they had to reduce their contributions, missing out on years of interest building, and putting themselves behind the eight ball big time.

But hey, tough times are tough times, and I’m sure I’d do the same thing if my back were up against a wall. The earlier you start saving for your retirement the better. Uncle Sam may not be able to take care of us folks, especially for those of us, like me, who are years and years away from collecting social security.

That’s right, even though we’ve paid into it since we had our first jobs at sixteen or eighteen, we may not be getting jack squat, or we may not be getting nearly what we think we are. Of course, this is worst case scenario, but it’s really best to be prepared for the worst.

What I really love is that if you politely turn them down, sometimes they look at you as if you’re crazy for turning down such a great deal, or great deals to come. Well, hey guess what, my overall credit score means a lot more to me than getting ten percent off this order right now, ok? And all the coupons in the world aren’t worth potentially adding too much credit to my repertoire, alright?

I’ve gotten to the point where if they get pushy after I say no the first time without explanation, I then say, it’s too much to keep track of and I don’t like having more credit cards than I need, and that one they can usually identify with. Albeit, there are still a few that get pushy even beyond this point at which time I totally tune out their sales pitches.

You see, if you give in to every little sales pitch about how great a store credit card is, then you just may be damaging your credit score. Try to only sign up for the ones that you’ll truly use, and more importantly, pay off before the intro rate wears off or the zero percent deal goes away so you aren’t paying any interest.

Basically, I only have a few of these store credit cards, and most of the time it was so that I could finance something large into monthly payments with an introductory zero percent rate so I could break down the lump sum over six months or more. That’s the only reason I have them.

Either that, or if it’s a place I happen to frequent, say a place I always buy clothes from that offers great discounts only to credit card members, then I’ll do it. But not if it’s a place I barely go to, do I sign up just to get some great bait deal! It’s not worth it, and in the end, if you give in to every one, you really could be damaging your credit score, so it’s just not worth it.

And yet, he was always the one to get more credit card offers. It’s been going on since before we were married, and the situation was the same back then too. I think that he had a lower amount of debt on paper and also happened to have just the right credit to debt ration, whereas I was the one who had the credit lines and the loans opened in my name. Therefore, they probably viewed me as a bit more of a risk because I had a higher debt to income ratio.

However, the facts couldn’t contradict what you see “on paper” with us any more. He actually has more revolving debt that I do, and I actually have more free cash flow than he does.

We still split the bills, like we did before we were married, because frankly we are both just used to it and it just works really well for us. I know some married couples are all about combining money and checking accounts, but we’ve found there’s less clashing about money when the accounts are separate and we can mind our own financial business.

Yeah, it’s not the most romantic idea, but neither is fighting over money and balancing checkbooks a certain way. It’s different for everyone, and everyone should just do it how they are comfortable.

My credit reports and scores must be getting better, although why I don’t know. Perhaps the credit agencies or the powers that be are seeing that I’m paying down our house and other debts quicker than they need to be paid down. Maybe this signifies an extra free cash flow in the household and reflects well on what your disposable income might be. It is probably a good predictor of what kind of credit risk you are.

So, I’m getting credit card offers by the gross again, just as I used to get before we owned a home and socked a lot of money into the mortgage payment. It’s funny because I don’t even think about applying for any of these credit cards. I just put them in the paper shredder and ignore them. I have one United Airline miles credit card, and one United Airlines debit card for personal use, and that’s all I need at this time.

I feel that I know enough about stock basics to make informed decisions and “calculated risks” to buy stocks that I believe will hold up well over time, and balance out all the losses they are almost certain to suffer in this awful, see-saw economy. So, we ditched any mutual funds we had, got into cash (Thank God we did this before the terrible stock market crash in 2008), and decided to stay in cash for a while and then bought stocks at what we felt were fair prices.

Well, needless to say, many of the stocks we bought, although they are solid blue chips with good dividend payouts and great performance futures, have gone up and down, and up and down and …..you get the picture.

If you are one of those people who pulls out whenever a stock goes below what you bought it at, then you really probably are not meant to own stocks. Especially in a rocky economy such as this one. It’s gut wrenching to watch your investment lose value, I’ll admit that, but as long as you have faith that you bought a solid investment, then it’s really not that hard to let it ride over the long haul and make bucks on it in the future.

I’ll admit, I’ve had itchy fingers before when I see a stock I bought really take a hit, but I know that how finicky investors are right now, and how itchy THEIR trigger fingers are, I just have to wait out this horrid market volatility and hope for smoother sailing in the next few years. But I’m intelligent enough to know that it’s going to be a few years yet until everything stabilizes and stocks enjoy what is called a “secular bull market”.

Right now, the volatility is too great, and the sentiment is too unstable. Every day stocks seesaw up and down and the slightest bit of economic data can send stocks soaring or flopping. There is a lot of emotion going on out there right now, and that is what the stock market is built on – emotion.

My husband and I make a good living at our jobs, but we also are careful not to spend above our means. We rarely eat out, and when we do, we tend to feel that post-eating out guilt that thrifty, practical people tend to feel. I will splurge on thinks like skin care and makeup, but rarely will I splurge on expensive clothes.

I will also splurge on things to fix the house up, but I don’t feel so guilty about that, since I view the home as your largest investment in your lifetime, even though home prices are currently stagnant and actually losing money, I know that will eventually turn around.

We are very careful to put away generous amounts of our income into automatic retirement and tax sheltered savings plans, to the maximum that we are allowed, because we look at it as money that we never had. Out of sight, out of mind is the best theory when it comes to socking away money for retirement and that best thing about it is that it is also tax deductible.

With about half of every generation being unprepared for a comfortable retirement, and social security’s future at risk and highly questionable, I’m not taking any chances. I want to put my money in relatively safe investment vehicles, and know that I will not touch it until I can do so without any penalty.

We live a nice life now, we just don’t over do it, and spend our money on unnecessary things and pure pleasure things a whole lot. It’s this sort of perceived deprivation that gets you ahead in life and makes your savings balloon over the years.

Plus, I’m not gonna lie, I don’t want to work in corporate America until I’m old and grey, I want to be able to retire early and enjoy life and do the things I didn’t get to do when I was young and working all the time toward something!

To put some perspective on that statement, I am 35 years old, and I plan on retiring when I’m 65, or perhaps earlier, when I finally hit that million bucks. I’m not even 1/10 of the way there though, and that’s what concerns me, especially since I’ve been saving a lot of the money I make for at least five years now, more than I probably even need to.

Because of the lukewarm returns I’ve gotten on my money thus far, I may not reach that million dollar mark 30 years from now unless we have a big secular bull market again. So what does that mean for those of us with fairly lofty retirement goals?

Well, it means that you basically have to save a lot more since the big interest earnings aren’t there any more – at least for the time being. It used to be that you could easily make an 8-10% return on your money, but now that is all a question that is up in the air, and it’s really hard if not next to impossible to “guarantee” that type of great return on your money.

Hence, the power of compound interest is something that it’s a lot harder to get to work for you. Compound interest is the most powerful asset you have when you’re saving for retirement.

Therefore, you should start saving as early as you can for retirement. Ideally, as soon as you hit the market place of jobs, you should be socking money away in your retirement account, whether it’s a 401k or some other form of retirements fund that is tax sheltered.

Better yet, you should maximize your contributions so that you can maximize both your tax savings and any matches that your employer may be offering to donate to your account.

If you can get both compound interest to work for you by starting to save and invest when you’re in your early twenties AND you can sock away more money yourself and have your employer contribute as well, and of course providing you make good, solid investment choice, you are golden for the future. And another important point is to DIVERSIFY.

This way, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and risk losing them all to any investment that totally flops, something that has happened to far too many people.

Well, the secret is that I actually have one I use for personal purchases, which is linked up to my Chase checking account as a debit card, and I have one that is a real charge card that I use for business purposes.

My business purchases are pretty hefty every month, and when I add that in to my personal purchases, which I try to make just about every one with my airline miles credit card so I can rack up the miles faster, it really makes for a fast path to free airline tickets. I absolutely LOVE the fact that now United has partnered with Continental and they have even better flight choices to pick from on their free flight menus.

It used to be that I’d get the bottom of the barrel, least desirable departure times and also the worst when it came to layovers, but now that they have partnered with eachother, every flight pretty much has a really good departure time and you can actually find SOME flights that you don’t have to have a million hour layover for.
It’s really great, and I didn’t think that getting free flights a couple times a year could get better, but it really did.

Airline miles credit cards are probably one of the best credit card rewards programs going today in my opinion.

My husband has a separate checking account with Chase bank, and he uses their rewards program for their debit card, which he really loves, but I still think I get more bang for my buck by using an airline miles credit card. It costs me $75 per year as a maintenance fee, but it’s well worth the free tickets I get in the end.

And that seems to be the common theme here in the US that is killing us on a robust economic recovery – NO ONE wants to spend their money. That includes us “civilians”. People are saving their money at record rates right now, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

It seems that everyone is hesitant these days to part with their cash, and they are more content and rest more easily when the money they do have is stashed somewhere safe that they can access it for a rainy day.

This has caused a two pronged continuance of the recession. First, companies aren’t hiring and instead are hording their cash, making for a horrid job market for us, and second, consumers aren’t spending as much, so they are creating less demand, and this is making the corporations that provide goods and services nervous.

It’s totally a self perpetuating problem, and that’s what the conundrum is. You can’t change everyone’s way of thinking and make them start spending money, so the government has been trying to pump money in to help it turn around. It’s not enough, we need a consumer and jobs led recovery.

The latest news on jobs is that more were cut this past quarter than were expected, but most of them were government jobs. Hello – government jobs! Couldn’t they find better ways to save money after the massive stimulus spending put them years in the hole!

Instead they choose to lay off people and put us in a further hole as far as jobs growth. More people are now out looking for jobs thanks to that decision, which just makes things worse.

Or, who knows, maybe he did. Maybe he had this idea concocted in his head for quite a while that he was fed up and wouldn’t take any more crap from people. Let’s face it, we all have those dramatic job-quitting fantasies. Unless you happen to have a dream job where no one ever pisses you off, makes you feel stupid, or makes you feel like you work for less than you’re worth. In other words, if you have a job that doesn’t exist, you may not have had this fantasy before!

The truth is, while this guy is facing criminal charges, he did exactly what most of us dream of doing when our jobs or someone at them is really rubbing us the wrong way. We all dream of suddenly winning the lottery or getting a windfall of cash, finding out at work, and biding our time til someone irks us and we can tell them off and leave in a dramatic way.

Especially in this economy, where people are stressed to the max at their jobs, taking on the responsibilities of peers and people that have been laid off or let go, because companies simply can’t afford to hire the right amount of people and are understaffed. I’ve heard this story a lot from my friends and family, and yet a lot of my friends and family are also either laid off themselves, or are not having luck finding anything if they’re looking.

There’s no doubt there is a lot of financial stress and pressure on people, both with families to feed and without, because people still aren’t spending money, and until they do start spending like free wheeling consumers again, we will still be suffering with sky high unemployment rates. That, and low morality across the board. Apparently the rich are the only ones holding up the consumer end of the economy now if you believe most reports.

Maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Heck, what this Jet Blue employee did is pretty much something straight out of a movie. Something like “Take This Job and Shove It”, that movie from the eighties!

But I digress, what I’m talking about here is Cleveland’s loss in their court plea to make the banks they feel were responsible for the predatory lending and lax rules that led to the housing bust in their area, pay up on housing market woes that they felt could be pinned on the deep pocketed banking system. They actually named several high profile banks in their suit.

Many areas of Cleveland have been really hard-hit when it comes to housing troubles. It wasn’t too long ago that you’d drive down some roads that barely had any actual residents in them, you’d just see a bunch of for sale signs and vacant properties thanks to foreclosures and home sales of people trying to get out of Dodge before their real estate prices sunk even further and they lost out big on their investments.

Even in 2007, before the true nature of the recessionary beast had shown itself, Cleveland had one fo the worst foreclosure rates in the country, and actually had almost one fifth of the bad loans in the nation, accounting for 1/5 of the zip codes that were on the “worst of” lists.

Even though you have to give them credit for giving it the good try, they lost their court battle, as a court could not find convincing evidence that the banks themselves were responsible for this terrible outcome and the ruining of neighborhoods, loss of jobs and more.