If I had to give advice to a young person in the u.s. now it would be to not act responsibly when it comes to their finances because the government will bail you out.
I was responsible but it's put me at a disadvantage. I would have been better off buying a home that I couldn't afford with no downpayment, and once the market adjusted using this government bailout to adjust the mortgage.
I no longer live in the u.s. though and am much happier to be someplace where it's impossible to act irresponsible in that way due to minimum standards with the banks.
What country do you live in where it is impossible to make a mistake and then get societal help to recover?
Truly the US hasn't been the same since the government paid off all overly large student loans, irresponsibly spent credit card balances, desperately sought payday loans, and other avoidable, life-destroying debt. And since all of that debt has been canceled, I'm looking for a more responsible place to live.
I'm just glad that US banks don't allow truly predatory acts, such as the use of a pension as the down payment for a house, so that a borrower who defaults loses far more than their home. That sort of behavior is legal in some uncivilized regimes because it allows lenders to make bad loans without suffering any negative recourse; but fortunately it is not legal in the US.
And this right here is why we flag political stories off the front page. For those of you looking for the comment flag button, click the timestamp on the comment.
It's not just that political stories generate horrid comments like this. All stories do that. It's that political stories generate entire threads based on horrid comments. The stage is set for nastiness, and people act accordingly. More often than not, at peak nastiness, the people yelling at each other mostly agree with each other!
The wealth tax in Switzerland is quite low, the fact that capital gains are not taxed more than makes up for the wealth tax. Swiss passports are far more valuable than US passports, I'd be afraid to travel in much of the world on a US passport. Depending on income sources, renouncing US citizenship might be a good deal as the US feels it should tax citizens regardless of where they are earning their income in the world.
In order to keep things on topic I'll ignore most of what you wrote and just talk about purchasing housing here. My wife and I just bought an apartment in Zürich and found it very different than the u.s. One must put down a minimum of 20% always, but we ended up having to put down 30% because the bank calculates your payments on a much higher interest rate than reality as well as higher maintenance fees than reality. We also had to have life insurance.
The news article and my comments are about purchasing housing.
And we have permanent residence and are able to use our pensions but chose not to, other than pillar 3 which one does to get a tax advantage. Most people only use pillar 3 since the bank discourages using pillar 2. (basically, you funnel money through pillar 3 to the bank and get the tax break)
Saving taxes in Switzerland doesn't help us much though since we have to pay the difference to the u.s.
I think you may want to take a deep breath and go outside for awhile.
Dear NYT, what the fuck are you doing with your website? Opening a single tab of your page in Chrome instantly consumes 400+MB of RAM and my MBP fans go into 100% mode.
On mobile, it consumes a shitload of data and makes the entire phone next to unusable.
I don't know why everybody doesn't use something like Ghostery by default for all websites and then whitelist the ones they really trust. News sites are the worst as they take forever to load and have tons of crap added on.
You can usually get them working with some whitelisting (which can be temporary or permanent). Though I personally often welcome the video blocking as a feature and impulse control tool (anecdotally, it seems to mostly break social media click-farming bullshit).
Oh so that's why half the embedded videos I see are black boxes. Oh well, that's why I keep IE (with no Ghostery) around, for cases where I really want to see the video. Seems like a good arrangement so far.
Did you pull the same ad with mobile and your MBP? I don't have the same experience, but it makes me wonder if you inadvertently ran across a toxic ad...
I was responsible but it's put me at a disadvantage. I would have been better off buying a home that I couldn't afford with no downpayment, and once the market adjusted using this government bailout to adjust the mortgage.
I no longer live in the u.s. though and am much happier to be someplace where it's impossible to act irresponsible in that way due to minimum standards with the banks.