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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2023

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  • You guys are talking about different things.

    Credit utilization of 0% doesn’t mean paying your cards off on time every month so you avoid interest. It means paying your cards off before the statement period even closes so nothing is reported to the credit agencies.

    I do this. All my cards have a statement period ending on the 19th or 20th. Around the 17th every month I pre-pay so my statement is $0 on every card.

    When I use a card after doing this and the charge goes through before the statement closes, my FICO score goes up (vantage doesn’t seem to do this).

    For the last 18 months or so my FICO has been going up 22 points every time there is at least a little balance to report and down 22 points every time my credit utilization is 0.0%.







  • Vote and volunteer in local elections. I think most people would be surprised how few resources campaigns for state legislature have. You and a few friends can make a huge difference. Volunteer for the Dem (out of necessity) primary candidate that wants to replace ftp voting with ranked choice or another similar system, and show up to meetings regardless of election cycle to give input. It wouldn’t take much to get their resources up to the level of establishment candidates.

    If a few good sized states could get this the others would get jealous about them having real choice and I believe it would start a snowball effect. It has to come from state legislatures though.



  • If you want to know how bad we’re being fucked, search for the PPI, the producer price index. CPI, the one we always hear about, is the measure of inflation to us, the consumer. The PPI is the measure of inflation to producers, what they pay for goods and services to produce the goods and services we buy.

    The PPI has been back to “normal” for a while now. Pretty much as soon as the post COVID logistics issues were mostly ironed out. The difference between PPI and CPI changes is pure profit.

    We don’t get daily articles on the PPI though, I wonder why.

    Edit: tell people about PPI whenever you can, online or off, the more people know, the better. It’s easy enough to say inflation is just down to greed but being able to back it up by comparing two simple charts will help people really understand.



  • You can’t get it in the boonies. I live in a city and my insurance, with an earthquake rider, is only a few hundred a month. My coworker lives in sparsely populated area (by the standards of this metro area) and his insurance costs a little over 7x as much, and continues to rise.

    And it’s deserved too. These people move out there because they’re the type that want to “own land,” but then none of them maintain it. I’ll go over to his house for a party and be in the backyard and everywhere I look, his property and every property it touches, as soon as you go beyond the area immediately around the house that is actually used, the entire ground is covered by kindling. One dropped cigarette and his entire neighborhood is gone.





  • No they’re not the same. The multinational conglomerate is far better.

    Chores for the neighbors and the paper route paid peanuts. Once I was old enough to work for the conglomerate (where I received food safety training) my pay after taxes more than doubled (a little more than minimum wage, which did, and does, exist), I started contributing to my future social security check, I received paid breaks, and there was a maximum amount of hours I was legally allowed to work.

    Flipping burgers beats the hell out of lugging Sunday papers around the neighborhood or knocking on doors to mow lawns in the summer heat or shovel driveways in the freezing cold. Back then I counted the days until I was old enough for a “real” job.


  • Right?

    Learning things a little at a time, when the stakes are low/non-existent is the way to go. From early teens to partway through college when you get an off campus apartment you can learn how to apply for a job, how to interview, responsibility, managing your money, responsible credit use, professionalism, bill paying. All this over the course of years, with a support system when you make mistakes (hopefully).

    I guess some people think you should just have all that dropped on you like a ton of bricks the day after you get a diploma.


  • I had a paper route when I was 12.

    The work itself wasn’t important but learning responsibility and the value of money was important.

    It was the first time I did anything completely on my own without being directed in some way by a parent, teacher, coach, etc. Without that job and after-school/summer jobs I had when I was older there is a good chance I would have made poor financial decisions in early adulthood.

    With 18 year-olds getting credit cards shoved in their face the day they show up for orientation, after probably signing up for student loans, it’s probably a good idea for them to have earned money on their own for a while.



  • The footprints of chargers and gas stations aren’t the same though. A lot of places I go have a row of 8-10 spots with chargers. No added footprint really, just installed at the front of the spot. Compare that to an 8-10 pump gas station, even without a convenience store. If you removed a gas station and replaced it with rows of spaces with chargers I think you’d get more cars through over a given period of time.