Is the Tacoma union made?

I think people got duped into thinking that their home was the only investment strategy they needed, because for a brief time before the housing bubble burst, that was actually true.

I saw these corporate boards slashing jobs/wages to improve their stock's performance, and I figured I could complain about it or profit from it. So we make sure we invest at least 30% of our income every year through various avenues (401k, Roth IRA, 529 plans, taxable brokerage acct, etc), and now I feel like the corporate fat cats are working for me. "But Phew, sometimes the stock market goes down!"; indeed, but there hasn't been a 15 year period during my lifetime when the S&P 500 has failed to return 6%/yr. 1993-2008 was pretty much a worst-case scenario (it included the tech bubble pop, housing bubble pop, financial crisis, 9/11, etc), yet $10k invested in 1993 was worth $25k in 2008.

Banking on your wages or home value growing 6%+ per year seems like a much riskier proposition. Pay yourself first (i.e. invest in the stock market), then choose housing you can afford with the remainder. Don't dump all your money into a residence and cross your fingers.

 

You do realize the cost of living since 1967 has sky rocketed.

Did you take into account inflation?

 

Yup, I was there during the Wolff/ESOP award/Goodwin/ESOP loss years. The IAM (really all employee groups) vs Company was poison on both sides & of course reping the company during grievance put me in a unique place. I choose to leave UAL prior to 9/11/01 and became self employed (already had been part time at my own place since mid 80s) for years prior to working where I do now. Of course I lost all my ESOP shares (stock 4 salary). It could have been & was, at one point I think, a great company to work for, IMO. But, the recent crop of clowns in combination with some other events have ruined it.

 

regardless... Don't be fooled into thinking Toyota is more reliable than Ford or GM because of union or non union workforce. It has more to do with their parts and QC. Also, I've read Toyota pays their US employees better than some union contracts for the purpose of keeping the unions out. So thank unions for your high wage.

 

Yes, as I already stated the dollars are adjusted for inflation. Look at the source documents I cited for more details.

 

All wise words.
I didn't feel expert enough to invest wisely when I was younger and didn't really have enough to invest anyway. Sure I was a little foolish with my money in my twenties, but not too much. Boston is expensive to live in and that's where I was for 20 years. I could have saved more and wish I saved more, but didn't and I can't change it now.

What I did save was cashed out when my wages dropped by almost 50% during the recession and I needed to update my place to hopefully make it more attractive to buyers. Didn't work.
We're still at least 100K underwater with both mortgages.

...and these aren't million dollar homes. We didn't buy as much house as we could afford and then "cross our fingers". We just bought what we could afford at the time.
My wife's house was purchased for $167,000 and it was in need of repair in 2007. Now it's worth $103,000 and we're spending money to repair it.
Our biggest goals are to sell the homes and not have too great a loss. Then we can try and rebuild.

That 30% sounds great, but we can't come anywhere near that anytime soon.

One funny thing that comes to mind. I remember clearly when Ford's stock dipped to about a dollar a share and they didn't take a bailout from the government. I was looking at my savings and thinking, there's no way Fords stock is worth one dollar. It's totally going to go up.
But it was the height of the recession. Was I really going to gamble my savings when I wasn't guaranteed to have a job?
I didn't gamble and kick myself frequently for that decision.

Sorry OP.

 

Glad someone acknowledges this.

The "you must go to a college for four years and accumulate $80k+ in debt to succeed" mentality is ridiculous. The reality that most people do this is part of the reason it's so expensive to begin with.

I couldn't even begin to count the amount of people who gave me disapproving comments when I refused to go that route. I'm 24 and still get them to this day. I have an associates that I wrote the checks to pay for. No student aid, scholarships, etc. I was working as many hours as I could get and paying my parents rent while I was talking 8-10 credits per semester. Took three years, but I did it.

I make pretty comparable money to my peers with bachelors' degrees, love my job (they can't all say that), have no student loan or credit card debt, and enough savings to get me through a minimum of 6 months very comfortably based on my normal spending. Working on building that up more now, because as it is I think six months is unacceptably low.

Some day I'd like to go after a B.S., but that will not happen until I have 18-24 months reserve cash and the living expense/income balance that allows me to write the checks again. Couple years out, more than likely.

 

Kudos and well done.

 

This is exactly my view on it. Build quality is probably about the same either way, it is the parts and design of the vehicle that make the difference.

 

Around here mcDonslds pays 10-14 per hour.
Crackle Barrel pays dishwashers 14.
I know waiters who work the sit down fast food restaurants, TGIF type places, and make 200 working the day shift. 300-400 at night.

 

So carpenters , plumbers and masons in your area work for $10-$14 / hour ?

 

Yes.
Most of them are Hispanic. The rest are young rednecks. A few rusty but talented old timers.
Oh...it's nothing but joy.

 

You pay peanuts you get monkeys

 

Carpenters here get $30-40 ( $23-30 USD ) , specialized guys get more

and I'm talking non union guys in my area

 

They should move

 

This is one of the big failures in our education system. The focus on sending everyone to college after high school has left us with an over-educated, under-skilled workforce with lots of debt but nice pieces of paper to hang on the wall. When I went to high school, we had all kinds of trade programs that would build skills early on, so those who choose to go right to work after they graduated could start a successful career. Now it seems every high school student is fed the BS that unless they go to college, they aren't successful or employable.

 

I agree.
The immigrants and illegals should move back to where they came from.
Allow demand for skilled workers to rise. And the compensation along with it.
There's a reason there was no immigration in the US from the 1920's to the 1960's.

 

It's not only the high school students who've bought in, so has business. Three years ago my non-degreed wife was looking for employment and almost every job posting required a college degree. She's worked in middle management for years, including her prior job of several years with a large software company that closed their local office. Corporate America demands a degree or you drop out of the automated HR application process.

 

I agree totally, but it goes further than that. About 3 years ago, I was in a trade program at a local college to get my aircraft mechanics license. Half of the kids coming into the program had literally never touched a screwdriver before. Most of those were probably raised by single mothers. Point being, we are raising a generation of people that have no clue on how to fix anything. The K-12 schools are little help in that regard, but 35 years ago I didn't bother with auto shop in high school because I already knew 90% of it from my dad. A lot of immigrants coming in know how to work with their hands. Where they come from, the still fix things themselves because they have to.

 

Some areas are getting back to that and acting like it's a new concept. We had wood shop, machine shop, auto shop where we could even work on our own cars. When they gutted funding for all that, it didn't help the economy in the long run.