What is Your Net Worth? From The Simple Dollar

The Simple Dollar (one of the resources in the blog roll) has re-printed links to some of its older articles including one from last year, My Real Net Worth, written by Trent Hamm. Here is an excerpt:

...I’ve always found “net worth” to be a strange way of expressing the idea. To me, the mere sum of one’s assets minus one’s debts is a good financial indicator, but it’s far from what I would call “net worth.”

As I take a look down my list of assets, I see things like our home, our savings and checking account balances, our retirement accounts, and so on.

But are those really all of our assets?

I view our close family and friends as major assets. These people help lift us up through thick and thin. They provide great friendship and social situations when times are good, and are there for encouragement (and more tangible help) when times are bad. Certainly, they’re an asset in our lives.

I look at our health as an asset. We’re all in good health. My wife and I are able to earn money because of our good health....

To put it simply, my real net worth is more than just a sum of financial assets and debts. Compared to the wholeness and beauty of life, one’s financial net worth is just the beginning.

Read the full article on The Simple Dollar.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/articnomad/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Schadenfreude Watch: Financial News

In the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of working at a Whimpy fast food chain (named for the hamburger eating Popeye character)in Edinburgh, Scotland. Among the pleasures of this job were bright red overalls that were a cross between a uniform and a clown suit, and dealing with American customers.

Note that I am an American, born and bred in the Detriot area. But let's just say the ex-pat fast food context did not bring out our collective national best side. In my position on the front lines of the hospitality industry, I was tasked with explaining to my fellow Americans that ketchup packets, thrown liberally on McDonald's trays across the purple mountains magesties and frutied plains of the USA, cost 10p each in the UK.

This was invariably taken as a major affront, and elicited outraged shouting.

"What do you MEAN I have to pay for ketchup?? Do you want me to pay for the air too, or does that come free?"

Had I been a bit more confident in those days (the red overalls didn't help in that regard) I might have replied, "Sorry, Toto, you're not in Kansas any more." Presumably they left their native land with the hopes that things would be just a little different than home.

So you can see why some Europeans have come to believe that Americans have high expectations of what they can get with their all mighty dollars, and why seeing the U.S. economy in a recession as the Euro climbs might give them a little chuckle.

This is my long winded introduction to my latest Schadenfreude spotting from the Atlantic Review blog, reporting on a Financial Times article.

German Bundesbankers...are not concerned about any direct fallout from the US mortgage crisis, writes Ralph Atkins in the Financial Times.

The article's headline is "Schadenfreude stirs in resilient Germany," And why not? They invented it. But, the blog notes, Atkins only claims once that "across Germany, a sense of schadenfreude has even started to emerge."

I guess the writer of the headline felt more Schadenfreude than the author of the article itself.

Mortgage Bankers Association Can't Pay Mortgage

Foreclosure filings of all kinds - delinquency notices, auctions sale notices and bank repossessions - were up 112% during the first three months of 2008 compared with the same period a year ago. Community advocates and policy makers are worried that the problem will worsen as the interest rates on as many as 1.8 million mortgages reset this year. (Source: CNN Money) Is there any good news for the family facing foreclosure? Maybe this will help:

The Mortgage Bankers Association-- the folks that came up with the great idea of giving adjustable rate mortgages to people who couldn't afford them-- are having trouble paying their mortgage, The Washington Post Reports.

"A year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association was thrilled to sign a contract to buy a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Washington. Interest rates were low, the group's revenues were steady and the prospects for quickly renting out part of the structure were strong. But since then, the association has fallen on tough times as many of the subprime mortgages dispensed by some of its members proved dicey. Borrowers discovered the loans were more costly than they had anticipated. Foreclosures soared, and cheap, inexpensive credit dried up, slowing the economy. The result: The trade group is about to find it harder than it imagined to pay its own mortgage."

There don't seem to be many tears shed for the professional organization.

"They are certainly getting what they deserve," Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group, was quoted as saying.