Steadfast Finances

 Economy         2 comments

Some people say middle class America is alive and as healthy as ever… Pfft!
As the chart clearly shows, 60 plus years of declining manufacturing sector jobs say otherwise. I’m not an economist, but it doesn’t take quant heavy math or grad level economics equations to forecast that data like …

 Politics,Real Estate         1 comment

I’m not a political strategist, but it would appear that gentlemen like Blodget, Ratigan and Schiff, are not leading our country because because their ideas make way too much business sense, the popularity of letting Too Big To Fail banks and austerity measures aren’t as popular as funny money and …

 Banking,Consumer Education,Real Estate         1 comment

I’m often amazed at how little the importance between the interest rate on a mortgage and the APR on a mortgage is discussed within the realm of personal finance.
Basically, the interest rate is the eye candy for the home buyer and the APR is the number the lender/mortgage broker hopes …

 Business Ethics,Real Estate         No comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for 2010, strategically defaulting on your mortgage is a growing trend among Americans. Both by business owners who strategically default because “it’s good business“, but also by Joe Public homeowners who, somewhat disingenuously, have been psychologically conditioned to believe that it’s immoral to …

 Business Trends,Personal Finance,Saving Money         1 comment

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Internet is the greatest disintermediation force the business world has ever seen and middlemen the world over are being eliminated.
Yesterday, Google announced it has added a “you can call any phone right from Gmail” feature into it’s extremely popular free …

 Real Estate         No comments

There are multiple reasons why real estate prices continues to fall back to Earth, but one of the most important reasons why homeowners are continuing to lose their homes and adding new short sale/REO/foreclosure properties to the market, at least in my opinion, is that homeowners debt to income ratios …

 ETFs,Humor,Index Funds         7 comments

Now that the investing world is moving towards a world of total ETFification, I think it’s time we begin giving these fee generating, cash cows catchy ticker symbols that we can actually remember.
The easiest way, in my opinion, is to associate each sector or macro investing goal with commonly known …

 Infographics & Chartology,Investing 101         No comments

Not surprisingly, the plethora of negative economic news and pessimism has investors fearing a double dip recession and/or a second Great Depression. Few metrics exist that can express this bearish sentiment better than the money flow numbers (e.g. where the money is moving and what investors are buying).

One can only …

 Business Trends,Investing 101,Politics         No comments

George Celente of the Trends Research Institute is among the top 5 people in the world I’d like to have a beer with because he’s a master of big picture thinking. He’s one of the most pragmatic, read between the BS analysts in the world who can take information from …

 Business Trends,Economy,Infographics & Chartology         No comments

I’m a subscriber to the thesis that one can gauge how a population is thinking, and what they may or may not do, by using Google Trends or Google Insights for Search. The premise being that, if you can peer into what people are searching for, you can get an …

 Economy,Financial Planning,Real Estate         2 comments

If you don’t know hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, you should. He correctly called the real estate bubble, the obfuscated delusion that housing prices could never go down in value, and subsequently, made killing off of it by betting it would eventually pop. (See David Faber’s House of Cards documentary …

 Banking,Infographics & Chartology         No comments

Excellent infographic by the Financial Highway blog on how credit card companies make their money off of folks like you and I. And in case you thought the only way they made money was just off of the interest rates they charge on your total balance — think again!
[click to …