I normally would never consider writing about politics on this blog, but this is a clear case of a candidate potentially causing a direct negative impact on everyone’s financial situation. Unfortunately, this news has come very late, but, at the very least, I can look back 4 years from now and say I told you so

Quoting Senator Obama:

under my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t written skyrocketing electricity rates into my get out of debt plan.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also wants to bankrupt the coal industry.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant they can, it’s just it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted

These are his exact words and quotes- not mine! Watch the video or listen to the original interview to see for yourself.

Watching the video below will save you time, but I can understand if you aren’t a fan of getting your news from Fox News (this just happened to be one of the better videos on YouTube when I went there).

If you prefer, listen to the original interview from San Francisco Chronicle (rather long)

Perhaps you don’t think this will effect you or maybe you consider paying higher electricity prices a good thing as you tithe to the Religion of Al Gore. If so, I would just like to ask if you happen to work for a company that possibly uses electricity in it’s business? Or maybe you buy goods and services from a business that happens to use electricity? Yes, that was sarcasm. All business and commerce in our country would suffer horribly by these insane policies driven by environmental zealotry.

In an effort to keep this related to personal finance, if Obama is elected, I would strongly encourage you to begin preparing for 4 years of out of control inflation and a much higher unemployment rate than we are currently experiencing. I will be writing more about what I intend to do if this happens.

Retirement money needed within the next five years should NEVER be in the stock market. Any money needed for any reason at all within the next five years should NEVER be in the stock market.

I’m sorry, but I can’t watch any more ’sad’ stories on the news about people who suddenly can’t retire because the market has dipped. What in the world were they thinking? That the stock market only moves up and they could just sell off some stocks when they need to pay their bills each month?

For as long as I can remember, the conventional wisdom has always been to NOT invest in stocks if you don’t have at least a 5 year time horizon. Were these people being greedy or stupid? I don’t know the answer, but probably a little bit of both.

It’s time to take personal responsibility here. If YOU decided to keep your retirement money in an asset that can go down at any time AND you need that money to live on in the near future, you were either greedy or stupid. I’m sorry, that’s the way it is. Stop blaming the market and stop asking the government to bail you out. Learn the basics of investing in the stock market or don’t do it at all.

If you have money invested and need it within five years, you should put it in cash or CDs. If you don’t, I don’t want to see you on the news crying about your stocks dropping.

Fortunately, the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights passed the House of Representatives on September 23rd, though it still must pass the Senate and the President.

I’m glad it passed, but I’m also concerned about the 112 morons representatives who voted AGAINST this bill. What is wrong with these people? I don’t know if they are all in the pockets of the credit card companies, but really I can only assume these people are much more interested in the rights of credit card companies to rip us off than our rights to not be ripped off.

Check this link to see if your representatives voted yes or no and take action to kick out the fools who voted no on this bill. Three representatives who voted no are from Arizona (where I live), but none of them are from my district (thankfully). I did write to the one Representative who accepts email from someone outside of his district (I can see why the others don’t want to hear from anyone else). Please take some time to let these people know what you think of their actions.

From the Archives - September 2007

How Much Stuff Do We Need?

I don’t think I fully understood it at the time, but I was on my way to realizing the evils of American Consumerism and how wasteful it all is. I still feel like I have too much stuff today, but thinking back one year ago I can remember a lot more junk on my entertainment center shelves and I don’t miss any of it.

I think the other problem inherent with large collections of ’stuff’ is that we naturally must put less value in each individual item that we own. If you own 4 DVDs, there is probably a good chance you really like those 4 and you will watch them over and over. If you own 50, how many of those DVDs do you really like? Could you possibly name all 50 that you own? If not, what is the point? What if you could go back in time and turn 40 of those DVDs into $400 that was sitting in the bank right now or being paid toward your debt? I know which I would rather choose, though I probably would have made the wrong choice not too long ago.

Might as Well Lose Some Weight Too

This was just a short post announcing my intention to work on losing weight again. The said thing is, I mentioned how I canceled my World of Warcraft account and started to take back my time and become productive. I guess that was going well until I re-subscribed earlier this year.

Spending Too Much on Groceries

In this post I was just discovering the problems I had with wasting food and buying too much of it.

Just last week I threw out about $12 worth of old food from the refrigerator. A couple weeks before that I threw away a rather large amount of food from the pantry because it was expired, though I did not take the time to think about how much money was wasted then. It strikes me as rather ridiculous that I throw away perfectly good food just because I didn’t feel like eating it in time or I was too lazy to do so.

Looking back, I can see that I have made a lot of progress in this area. I don’t over stock the pantry and freezer any more and I work really hard to make sure I use up everything before it goes bad. I’m definitely saving a lot of money on groceries now compared to one year ago (and making much better use of basic ingredients to prepare my own food).

Apologies if you have recently sent an email to feedback@financeandfat.com, but I had to delete that email address. There was just too much spam and I didn’t want to dig through it anymore. I created a new address with Gmail, which has amazingly good spam filters. You can now contact me using financeandfat [at] gmail [dot] com.

Please feel free to send any questions, comments, or criticisms to that address. I check it once a day.