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I heard the most incredible thing yesterday. One of my co-workers has a son who’s about my age and the son has a girlfriend who has – I’m not making this up - $100,000 in student loan debt.

A hundred thousand bucks.

Apparently she went to law school, but didn’t pass the bar exam and was working as a legal assistant earning maybe $20,000 a year. Note I said was. She got canned from the job.

A hundred thousand bucks.

Luckily, if you can call it luck, she managed to get into a fixed 4%, 30 year loan to pay this off.

A hundred thousand bucks. A hundred freaking thousand dollars in student loans?! Thirty years to pay it off? Thirty years?  If she’s lucky, she’ll have this paid off in time to retire…

I didn’t go to a big bucks school so this just blows me away. I attended the local community college, got a great education, didn’t have to take out a student loan and my entire time at college cost my parents less than five grand. Of course, I lived at home and commuted but still…I just can’t fathom having that much in student loan debt. I mean, $100,000 to buy a house, sure. But…student loans? Good Lord. I hope that diploma had some gold leafing on it.

And why, I ask, is secondary education so damn expensive? Okay, she went to law school which is big bucks no matter what, but one of the reasons I went to the local community college instead of the state university is because I couldn’t afford the university. But does the bigger price tag really mean a better education? 

Hell. President Bush went to Yale. Lookit where that high price education has all of us now…

Heh! I’m like….ah, waaay behind in terms of keeping this blog updated.

So I’ve decided to try to make an effort to post something, anything, to this blog more regularly (daily if I can, otherwise at least several times a week) until such time as I totally blow up my brain and can’t come up with anything else to yammer on about. I’m gonna try to update the LJ blog too. Problem with that is I’ll talk too much about Bill, which, although would save me from talking too much about Jack and dropping any “K5 Through Infinity” spoilers, I’d end up dropping too many spoilers about this upcoming Bill story (tentatively titled “Crossfire”) and I…can’t…reveal…anything! ARGH!

I think my brain’s gonna blow up sooner than I figure.

Now, I could talk about MaryAnne but then Jack and/or Bill would find their way in to the conversation somehow.  See above. Repeat.

Maybe I won’t worry about the LJ blog for the time being. I’ll just focus on this blog and whatever commentary I can come up with on the Never Ending Saga of Human Misery and Suffering.

And speaking of the Never Ending Saga of Human Misery and Suffering…how about that housing bill that’s comin’ down the pike? Eeeeyaaugh…

I made the mistake of reading up on this thing today. No wonder the President has decided to sign it. It’s junk! About the only good thing that’s gonna come out of this housing bill is that more folks will qualify to deduct their property taxes on their income tax return.  The only way you could take the deduction before was if you itemized your deductions on form 1040. And even then, you had to have enough deductions to actually qualify to take deductions at all. So if you were on a fixed income and owned your home outright, had no deductions to take, yet forked over, say, $4000 a year on property taxes, you were SOL.

Of course, you can only take up to $1000 extra on the standard deduction under this new bill, but this is still good for those folks who actually busted their asses, paid for their homes, worked hard and are now retired and have a reduced income. They played by the rules, dammit they oughta get something for it!

I should note as an FYI, if you’re on a fixed income and have a high property tax bill, you can check with your local city/town tax collector about maybe getting a credit or exemption from your property taxes if you meet certain qualifications (such as age, veteran status, income, ect.). 

The other tax benefit (and that’s debatable) is first time home buyers will get a $7,500 credit. Now there’s a difference between a deduction and tax credit, the biggest of which is the credit has to be paid back.

No kiddin’. If you take that $7,500 credit you have to pay it back. $500 bucks a year for 15 years.

This is the kind of stuff ol’ Boss Hogg would have loved. Only he would have added interest to that $7,500. As this is a tax credit, it’s interest free. (Isn’t it nice of us taxpayers to loan $7,500 interest free?)

The housing bill does now put mortgage brokers under regulatory scrutiny, which is long overdue. Although that doesn’t immediately fix the current problem, it should help prevent the kind of shady deals and such that we saw that led to the mess we’re in now.

On the other hand, there’s provisions and such in the housing bill that could just open the door to new kinds of fraud and such. And this legislation’s attempt to fix the immediate problem, however, I ain’t so sure is gonna fix anything.

Click here for a good overview of the housing bill from Bankrate.com and check out the Bankrate.com Mortgage Matters blog here for a complete overview of all the good, the bad and the ugly of the housing bill.

So I signed up for an account over at MyYearbook.com a few months back because a long time acquaintance from my college days was there and had sent me an invitation. I didn’t do much with the page until recently as there’s a couple of things about this site that just…freak me out.

First of all, for those of you not familiar with it, MyYearbook is a social networking site similar to MySpace. You set up a profile (like MySpace), you get a collection of “friends” (like MySpace) and you can spruce up your profile with pictures and music and links (like MySpace). Basically this place is MySpace but, in MyYearbook’s words, isn’t as “creepy.”

Well, I dunno about that. Yes, MySpace has taken a beating over the past couple of years for various things but at least MySpacers can’t “own” other MySpacers. At MyYearbook, you can be “owned” by others and the whole “own” thing just freaks me out. Anyone can arbitrarily buy you at any moment, provided they have the “lunch money” to do it. (You earn “lunch money” by putting together your profile, logging in each day, referring friends, ect.)

I haven’t figured out yet what the point is of being owned by anyone but I’ve been bought and sold twice already.

Yeah, bought and sold. I mean…that is just weird! All I can think of is the old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie “Road to Morocco.” While travelling across Arabia, Crosby ends up selling Hope to a slave trader to get some money. Now that‘s being owned.

I’m sorry but nobody puts baby in a corner! So, I’ve now opted out of the whole being owned thang and I’ve started sprucing up my profile there to continue with my shameless self promotion.

The site really makes a big deal about being safe and discouraging cyber-bullying and all. Which is great, I’m all for that and I’m sure their efforts are good and true. But they really oughta reconsider that “owned” thing.

And I’ve already come across one user who’s just as creepy as anything ever seen on MySpace. His profile stated something about enjoying dipping a certain part of his anatomy into the toilet.

Charming.

Here’s the other thing about MyYearbook that I find…odd. Relationship status can be listed as the usual (single, committed, engaged, married, ect… Mine says “leave blank.”) Anyway, if the person has “married” for their status there’s a link to click next to it that says “notify when single.”

So much for encouraging the sanctity of marriage!

As it is, the place seems to really want to foster an atmosphere of safety and non-creepiness. I do, sincerely, wish them luck with that.  Because there’s all kinds of weirdos out there and they’ll find their way into the site easily enough.

Heck, I did…

I’d call this a new regular feature for this blog but…nothing’s regular about this blog. I got enough screen caps now from various shows/movies I could probably do this each week for the next erm…uh, well for a long time. I dunno if I’m going to do this each week but it might prompt me to post to my blog more often if I have a particular screen cap I wanna share. (And at that point it would be  a regular feature! Brilliant!)

So here you go! Kicking off with our first Screen Cap o’ the Week it’s Robert Culp as Bill Maxwell from The Greatest American Hero episode “It’s All Downhill From Here” (I like to think of this one as “Squaw Valley Serenade”). Bill sportin’ the grey three-piece suit, a nice scarf, black winter gloves (as they’re up at a ski resort – no overcoat, Bill?) and….two guns.

Frankly, the two gun thing almost borders on being over the top but….holy crap, the look on his face alone gives pause. He means bidness. GAAAAHHH!!!

Speaking of more screen caps, long time readers will recall back in January 2008 I did a Dukes of Hazzard slide show, using screen caps from the first season and set to Willie Nelson’s “Georgia On My Mind.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeDbXFTi0SA .

Well, I’ve made another slide show dedicated to the Super Fed, Mr. Maxwell.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SKcIJt8dvk#. I call it a first draft as I may change it around but I haven’t received any comments on it (outside of close friends). In fact, neither slideshow has gotten so much as a “this sucks!” comment or a poor rating. Not that I’m looking for bad ratings, but…gee whiz.

Yes, whine whine. No, I can’t afford the cheese to go with it, the economy being what it is.

Couple o’ topics on the brain here…

1. Camera Phone

You realize that’s a contradiction in terms don’t you?

On Monday, in the late afternoon, I was driving home after a rain storm had passed through. The sun shined through and I saw a rainbow. It was neat! I’d never seen one before except in pictures. In fact, I was so enthralled with it I thought, “Dang! If I had my camera, I’d take a picture!”

I was telling a friend about it and she said, “Can’t you take pictures with your cell phone?”

Well. Duh. Yeah, I can but…why the hell would I think to take a picture – with my CELL PHONE?!

Long time readers of this blog can figure that that’s not a mentality I can get into. To me, a cell phone is a cell phone is a cell phone. It’s supposed to be for making phone calls. But who the hell cares about making phone calls with a cell phone anymore?

2. Issue #1: Bedlam – Follow up

I turned on the TV during my lunch hour (which was before noon) on Monday and decided to change the channel from CNN. I watched The View and … she was there. On The View. Gerri Willis! AAAAHHHH!!!! 

And she was continuing the scare the crap out of everybody! And when asked by the ladies on The View who was to blame for the mortgage meltdown she cited lax lending guidelines and the banks.

Woah. Hang on. Let’s not lump “The Banks” into one big group and lay the blame at their collective feet. Yes, lax lending guidelines contributed greatly to the blow up of the mortgage market. No doc loans, no income verification and no down payment requirements spelled disaster from day one. But no one who originated these loans was concerned with any of that. Afterall, they had no intention of hanging on to those loans for the next 30 years. The loans were sold to the likes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Countrywide, IndyMac, ect. who more than likely got a package of loans and may or may not have had any idea what they were getting. Or they did and figured to play hot potato with it and turn around and sell the loan again to someone else.

Not all banks did this. And there were a lot of fly by night mortgage companies that originated these loans, then sold them to investors elsewhere. The fly by nights are gone now, or being investigated by regulators and/or the FBI for fraud. Trust me tho’, they made their money while they could.

The fly by night mortgage originators/brokers/companies were not subject to the strict regulations that traditional banks are. Now Congress is considering tightening regulations to cover these mortgage brokers/companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if banks, as a whole, also end up with tighter regs. Like we need more! And like Congress really has a clue as to how to do it? Shall I cite RESPA? 

I won’t bore the non-bankers out there with what that is specifically, but Congress, in it’s attempt to protect the consumer, came up with a set of rules and regs for banks to follow and requiring banks to disclose various things to borrowers upfront. Which is great, I whole heatedly endorse this. But it would have been nice if they had come up with something that the average lay person could understand, and that the average lay banker could explain.

Folks, there’s a lot of places to lay blame for the mortgage mess, but let’s not, as it’s not going to change anything. Instead, let’s call this a lesson learned – a hard lesson learned for that matter. Changes in the system will have to be made to help protect consumers and help them so they can understand better what the hell they’re getting into. Changes also will have to be made to better combat fraud and to not take advantage of the sub-prime mortgage market in order to turn a quick buck.