I Used To Be Rich

Hey, send me a photo of someone wearing an I Used To Be Rich tee shirt and I’ll send you one free!

amster888 — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 02:57:06 +0000

Biggest paychecks on Wall St.

marvin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:06:13 +0000

The financial world, after almost destroying the world the rest of us live in, was most generous to their own leaders in 2009. Why not buy any I Used to be Rich products – tee shirts, golf balls, bobbleheads, or coffee mugs and send it to one of these fat wallet fellows and respectfully, in return for your generosity, ask them to donate 50% of their big pay checks to people who need money to live, not to keep score with? As a role model to these morally challenged masters of the universe, Iusedtoberich.com will donate 50% OF ALL PROFITS OF “I USED TO BE RICH” PRODUCTS PURCHASED BEFORE 2/28/10 to the World Hunger Year (WHY).
To see the top salaries in 2009 check out the following Huffington Post article:

http://bit.ly/ddwG7N.

Their mug shots really belong in the post office.
PS We’ll donate the 50% even if you decide to keep the products for yourself.

Conspicuous consumption is good for America!

Andrianq — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:32:45 +0000

You haven’t been affected by the recession. You may have even made a fortune shorting the damn thing. You still have plenty of dough. Lucky you. Now step up to the plate and do the right thing, the patriotic thing.

Spend, damn it, spend. Not a little mind you, but spend like a sailor on speed. Spend irresponsibly, tip extravagantly, flaunt it! Buy a pimped out Hummer (just keep it in the garage though, we don’t want you burning all that gas.) Buy a second home, a third one, a fifth one. Start combing your hair like Donald Trump. Buy Donald Trump! (Supposedly he’s going through his own money problems so you could probably pick him up cheap). Buy all the shoes at Henri Bendel. Eat at Masa every day for a year. Bail out California. Go from Tall lattes to Grande. Put another topping on your pizza. Spend, spend, spend.

I promise the less rich won’t be jealous. We’ll be grateful. We’ll look up to your extravagance. You’ll be our new heroes. The 21st Century’s version of Tom Joad. We know conspicuous consumption might seem a little silly nowadays, but we’ll make an exception in your case. Conspicuous consumption looks good on you.

Hoarding your cash is adding to the problem. And the last thing you want is for your kids to call you a capitalist hoarder. You uber rich can help us get out of this economic mire. You really can, so get going.

So spend baby, spend!

For a related article by Daniel Gross check out, http://www.slate.com/id/2182353/

The meltdown and insomnia. Bedfellows for sure.

Andrianq — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:03:02 +0000

I haven’t seen a study on the subject, but I bet that the average amount of sleep people are getting since the meltdown last September has gone down dramatically. Now, the stock market may have made a nice move up lately, but how many of us have increased our own dream time? Worries about money lead to worries about all sorts of things and worry is the universal anti-Ambien. I have no suggestions to help my fellow insomniacs, but I did come across an interesting cartoon/commentary that at least made me laugh about my sleeplessness. I hope you get a smile out of it as well: http://bit.ly/rn80P

Is retirement out of the question?

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:41:11 +0000

The financial safety nets in our country seem to be doing about as much good as the proverbial screen door in a submarine. Nearly 40% of Americans over the age of 62 have delayed their retirement because of the recession. Our retirement dreams are slowly fading away into the horizon like a bad movie, or worse, turning into nightmares we can’t wake up from.
For the typical American, only 45% of retirement income is funded by Social Security. That’s not not nearly enough to live comfortably on, let alone bankroll even the most modest dreams of what life would be after retirement.
Unless you’ve been fortunate to have socked away a lot of money, or have a decent pension (or, better yet, fabulously wealthy and generous offspring), retirement is not something you are looking forward to. That IRA you’ve been counting on is probably still circling the drain, even if you were conservative with it. A lot of us were not – a study found that nearly a quarter of Americans ages 56 to 64 had more than 90 percent of their 401(k) balances invested in stocks instead of bonds, against financial advisers’ standard advice for people nearing retirement age. That’s 90% that’s been unmercifully hammered.
So what the hell are we going to do but keep working, if we can, that is? Problem is the more of us that keep working the less job opportunities for others who need to find work. That means more unemployment, a longer recession, a more meager recovery and lousy retirement prospects. How’s that for a depressing mouthful?
It wouldn’t hurt to take a look at how some other countries are faring during this downturn. Especially how people at retirement age are doing. We still may be the smartest, richest country in the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a little from looking around a bit – there are safety nets out there with a lot less holes in them than ours.
For a more detailed look at this problem, take a look at the following article: http://bit.ly/2XTwV

The recession continues to slam the super rich

CaphwarmChume — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:07:08 +0000

Well, a great deal of the super rich, the really, really rich are really, really not so rich any more. Seems like the recession has cut into their fortunes far more than they ever thought possible. And it looks like they’re not coming back in the near or far future. Doesn’t matter if you had tons of money or just ounces of it if you invested in the likes of Lehman Brothers bonds you are out of luck. The money is gone, for good.
Question is do the rest of us – the less than super rich – feel sorry for the once high flyers. Are they worth our empathy? Do we really care if someone who once had north of $100 million has only several million left? Good question – the answer to which is perhaps not as simple as one would think.
There’s a well done piece written by David Leonhardt and Gerald Fabrikant examining the plight to the uber rich. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/10GBoW

Show us your empty pockets, America!

CaphwarmChume — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:08:08 +0000

Joe Maloney of New Hampshire snapped the picture below in front of the Treasury building in Washingoton, DC. Thanks, Joe!

Could it be that, “I used to be rich,” is becoming a movement? A national urge to share the fact that we are all in this crappy, leaky economic boat together. A way to realize that we’re not alone, that we are more alike than different. This tee, this goofy, cute little tee shirt can be the very thing that brings us all together. The tee the nation has been looking for. The tee that ends loneliness. The tee that helps us become the people we always knew we could become. The tee that makes Rush Limbaugh shut the hell up!!!!

Being that virtually all of us have less than we once had, we’re all entitled to wear the I used to be rich tee shirt – the whole country! Every man, woman and child. Everyone! Well, maybe not Goldman Sachs.

I used to be rich fan sited in Washington, DC

Healthcare reform and the duping of America…again.

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:35:09 +0000

“First of all,” Mr. Obama said, “nobody is talking about some government takeover of health care. I’m tired of hearing that. I have been as clear as I can be. Under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. These folks need to stop scaring everybody, you know?” It’s all falling on deaf ears.

Once again, the onslaught of advertising funded by the Republican Party, the insurance companies, the healthcare monoliths, and a slew of right-wing billionaires, not to mention biased press coming out of the likes of Fox (how unusual!), CNBC, and a pasty-faced, fat, dick-wad, drug addict crouching behind a radio microphone have scared the crap – not to mention common sense - out of people. Once again, the people that need healthcare reform the most are deciding that any reforms would immediately turn the country into one big socialist gulag , even though they have no idea what that means.

Once again, the prospects of a reasonable, fair, less expensive, more efficient healthcare system are fading away as fast as our stock portfolios. Once again the country is being scammed, by the very same techniques used to sell fried chicken, and margarine and sub-prime mortgages. We are being duped, being made suckers of and being made to vote against our best interests. Once again we are going to fall farther behind the rest of the industrialized world in all sorts of minor things like life expectancy and infant mortality.

I understand Obama’s desire to keep the rhetoric down and to try to find the areas of possible compromise. He’s probably right to do so. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow that same path. As for me, I’m sick and tired of trying to reason with the throngs who are sure healthcare reform will bleed them and the country to death. Instead of using logic I am going to shorten my response to them. How about, ” Are you a freakin’ moron?” Nothing better than getting to the heart of the matter.

For a more articulate, less emotional version of the above check out, http://bit.ly/10GBoW.

Portfolios And Healthcare, The New “Your Money or Your Life.”

CaphwarmChume — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:38:01 +0000

As we watch our portfolios hopefully recover a bit (at least temporarily), we also can watch healthcare reform unravel. The insurance companies, and the congressmen they have in their pockets are relentlessly on the attack. “We must proceed carefully,” they say. “It’s unwise to move too fast.” Too fast! Are they nuts? We are decades behind the rest of the industrialized world in making good, responsible, affordable healthcare available to all.
But the critics are not nuts. They are calculating, and amoral and basically full of shit. Their goal is to do nothing. Doing nothing keeps the dough rolling in to their already stuffed coffers. Doing nothing won’t hurt them. Hell, find one critics of healthcare reform who doesn’t already have a great plan, themselves. Doing nothing weakens Obama and any further attempts he makes to fulfill the mandate he overwhelmingly was given in November.
I find it nauseating to listen to Jim Cramer and the rest of the financial hacks at CNBC (the other “fair and balanced” network) gleefully report that healthcare reform is dead, indicated by the strength of healthcare stocks. Same thing happened as a prelude to Clinton’s healthcare program going down, and they are counting on history repeating itself. 47 million people will remain uninsured yet they find reason to celebrate. After all, isn’t an increase in next quarter’s profits for the likes of United Health more important than an increase in infant mortality? And amazingly they are conning the American public. Once again, so many of us are being duped. I like to think we are smarter than that. Are we?
Paul Krugman spells it all out beautifully in a recent column, http://bit.ly/QufUi. Give it a read, just promise you won’t stick your head in the oven after you do.

Reducing recession anxiety slice by slice

CaphwarmChume — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:16:14 +0000

When I need to reduce my own recession worries my mind turns to food, most often, pizza. Speaking of which, there was a good article about new pizza places in New York City a couple of weeks ago in the NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/dining/08pizza.html?scp=6&sq=pizza&st=cse

Made me think, does a good slice of pizza taste better on days when the Dow is having an up day or a down day? Does it taste better when you have a ton of money in the bank or when you’re scraping bottom? Or does the enjoyment of a slice of pizza correlate with absolutely nothing other than that particular slice of pizza? Could it be that a slice of pizza turns out to be a major clue in our endless pursuit of happiness? (I love when I go on philosophical rants as if I knew what I was talking about.)