Student loan tsunami on the horizon: Of $847 billion in Direct Loan program, only $535 billion is actually being paid back at the moment.
The amount of student debt continues to grow like a skyscraper reaching for the clouds. There seems to be an unlimited amount of student debt that college students are willing to take. As of today, there is $1.44 trillion in student debt outstanding. But how much of this is being actively serviced? After all, if you take out a mortgage or auto loan you start paying on it right off the bat. You will be surprised at the small amount of student debt that is actually being paid back at the moment. Young Americans that are already cash strapped are going to get even more budget tightening once they graduate and need to pay back the large amounts of loans they have taken on.
How to live on $25,000 a year in low wage America: A guide to living on the per capita income.
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. We hear stories of people waiting until midnight at the end of the month so accounts can get filled with funds simply to buy food. This shouldn’t come as a shock given the per capita income of a working American is roughly $25,000. Does that seem like a lot or a little? Well we are going to find out in this article when we actually look at a full monthly budget at this level. Most Americans don’t have money saved for retirement because most of the living expenses are already eaten up by simply being alive.
The new retirement model revolves around dying broke and realizing that the 401k model of investing is a sham for most Americans.
The new retirement model means working until you die. Most Americans are broke and living paycheck to paycheck. Yet the stock market is near a modern day peak. What is going on? Wasn’t the 401k experiment that launched in the early 1980s to replace pensions supposed to be a panacea in terms of building out nest eggs for the masses in their golden years? That was the idea but unfortunately inflation has eaten away at the standard of living and many Americans simply did not have enough to save when it came to retirement. We know the drill – sock away X percent a month and after 30 or 40 years you will have seven figures. Well here we are, nearly 40 years from that experiment and most Americans have little to nothing in their retirement accounts and the pension (a forced 401k in a way) is virtually extinct. So is dying broke the new retirement model?
The canary in the asset bubble is popping: $3.8 trillion bubble that you are probably not aware of.
The death of retail as we know it is real. People are shifting their buying habits online in a fast and furious way. The only retail outlets that seem to be thriving are dollar stores but they are thriving because many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and online shopping is too expensive for some. So it should come as no surprise that the way things were once done is being upended again by technology. Giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart are cannibalizing entire industries. Back in 2012 Amazon had less than 10 million Prime subscribers. Today it is over 80 million. So the big bubble that is now imploding is that in commercial real estate. There is $3.8 trillion in commercial real estate loans outstanding and the bubble in this market couldn’t be peaking at a worse time.
The Inflation Nightmare: How inflation is slowly consuming your income since 2000. The four horsemen of inflation include college tuition, medical care, housing, and stagnant wages.
Inflation has a slow destructive impact on your purchasing power. Most people don’t think twice about inflation. They just assume that the price of goods will go up because that is the way it has always been. Yet that is not true. The type of inflation we are seeing is debt supported inflation which has made the cost of normally affordable goods inaccessible for most Americans. It has also been a big reason for why retail is getting severely hit. Yet where does most of your money go? For most households it is housing and most Americans are too broke to afford a home. For younger Americans the biggest expense is college tuition. And inflation in tuition has gone completely out of control because debt has been disconnect from ability to pay (does this bring back memories of the housing bubble?). There is an inflation nightmare going on and you only have to look back to 2000.
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