Everything old is new again, buying on layaway

I remember getting a new coat when I was about eleven, we went to a shop in Swords village, next to a place that was called ‘Savages’ (in fact I think the clothes shop was owned by them too) and I tried on a coat and my mother paid part of the money for it on ‘layaway‘ and then we went back the following fortnight and paid for the rest and picked it up, in the mean time they made an adjustment to it too.

Will we see a return to some of the ideas from the past as the credit market contracts? Perhaps we will, layaway does have several advantages for both sides of the transaction.

Seller side advantage: The seller sells a product and gets cashflow into their business, if the buyer pulls out later there is normally a charge and the item can be re-sold. So if the person doesn’t go ahead then the …

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Where is my bailout?

The average investor has seen their portfolio decrease in value by about 20%, the average property owner is not far off that either. The economy is slowing down and everything seems to be more expensive, so today’s question is: Where’s my bailout?

I am not Bear Stearns, or IndyMac, I’m also not Northern Rock, Fortis or Bradford & Bingley, I am not any number of financial institutions that will soon be set to receive money from the Fed, and even by third world terms I am not ‘too big to fail’. The fact of the matter is that I’m all alone on this one, and I don’t have enough faith in our leaders that I would be comfortable ‘leaving it up to them’. Instead, I want a port in this storm.

Now we can sit back and face the inflation, the inflation that will one day ‘inflate away …

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Beat the bear that is beating the bull.

There are many lessons to be garnered from a financial crisis, the downside is that for most people 99% of the lesson is delivered only in hindsight.

Today we will look at some of the lessons you can take from a financial crisis and use them (or at least understand them) to your advantage. If we accept that risk (including upside risk – which is generally well loved!) is a reality then you can do your best to look objectively at this risk and what to be aware of.

1. The Government and Banks or Big Business are not there to help you or warn you: This is fairly straight forward but a surprising number of people feel that the government should have stopped house prices from falling, now we see people calling on the government to get the housing market kick started again and the singular binding feature is that in both cases nothing is done. Banks are just the same, in the USA Bear Stearns issued statements saying they were doing well only two days before being handed …

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