Originally Posted by dbd33

Most people bet on house prices. It's the most common way to establish a store of significant wealth. I, for example, managed almost a ten fold gain in the value of one house near Toronto. Why was it near Toronto? Because that was where I was working. If it was near Montreal it might have doubled in value over the same period, near Vancouver, maybe gone up twenty fold. Had it been near London then serious money would have been derived from its sale. Luck.

Granted paying off the mortgage quickly was a deliberate strategy but the influence on my net worth of any planning strategy has been, and I think always will be, minor compared with the influence of luck. Similarly, not playing Russian roulette has been a factor in my continued reasonable health but that's not an influence as great as not being hit by bus and not catching AIDS, things that haven't happened only because I've been lucky.

In my view it's an unwillingness to concede that inherited wealth and luck are the primary determinants of affluence that leads to the lunacy of working people voting for the likes of Romney and Harper. Their policies do not create opportunites for affluence for anyone other than Romney and Harper.

Note that this isn't an argument against working hard, I accept that to a limited degree one can influence one's fortunes by hard work but it's not enough of a factor to warrant anyone patting their own back for doing some.

Originally Posted by gryphea

You can send me gifts if you like. Think of it as a charity as we don't wlays pay our credit card balance off.

Originally Posted by FlyingDutchman6666

dbd33, you're the only baby-boomer I know with the acumen to realise that the obscene wealth-gain of the last 10-20 years is down to, mostly, luck.

Originally Posted by Novocastrian

Overpaid is a bit vague, don't you think? Surely the relevant issue is house price compared to earnings? You overpay (if you have any sense), as much as you can afford.

Originally Posted by iaink

Im not saying all debt is bad, but the system is set up to get poor people, or people whose circumstances change into the trap of paying interest, and nothing is going to convince me that paying credit card, or worse still, payday loan interest rates is anything but a mugs game.

Originally Posted by FlyingDutchman6666

dbd33, you're the only baby-boomer I know with the acumen to realise that the obscene wealth-gain of the last 10-20 years is down to, mostly, luck. Consider that a huge compliment.

Alas, most put it down to their personal skill and hard work. Faced with the puzzling fact that living standards for the younger generation have plummeted, boomers tend to explain this away by 'love of mobile phones and iphones and ...

Originally Posted by Deficient

No authority whatsoever in a Canadian context, and only based on personal experience in a UK context. So not very much authority at all, I grant you.

I'll try to explain my thought process and if the reality differs then please correct me, because 1. I don't want to spread misinformation, and 2. it will help me as well to have a correct understanding of things.

My thinking was that the payment protection insurance premium is only applied to a credit card when one has a balance at the statement date. That has been my experience in the UK. In other words, when I have a balance at the statement date, the PPI premium is applied. If I have no balance at the statement date, then no PPI premium is applied. That has been the case even if I had spending in a given month that I repaid before the statement date.

My hunch is that if one pays off their credit card spending before the statement date each month (i.e. leaving no balance at the statement date), then they never incur the PPI premium. I also felt that there would surely be no value in having PPI because there would be no balance each month at the statement date to insure... but I'll correct myself on that shortly in a couple of ways.

I only have close-to-hand experience of the actual claim process in the UK too, which I realise doesn't account for much here in Canada, but my father was diagnosed with cancer while carrying a pretty substantial balance on his credit card and was signed off from work. While he was allowed to carry on using the card, on the condition that minimum payments from him would continue in addition to the coverage resulting from the insurance claim, the balance on the card as at the date of the insurance claim was the balance that was covered and therefore that was repaid incrementally over the following months (iirc this was 10% of that balance, per month). Any further spending was not covered, and would be repaid by him in the normal way.

Thus, if one repaid their credit card spending prior to the statement date, there'd be no balance showing on the statement, no balance being protected and the insurer would presumably have nothing to cover. And as I mentioned from my UK-based experience, no premium to pay. Something that occurs to me, a possible flaw in my thinking (in addition to any others that you might have picked up on?) is that the balance on a credit card as at the date of the insurance claim might not necessarily be the same as the balance (nil in this case) at the statement date, so it might be that you could have an insured balance at the claim date even if you generally repay your credit card prior to the statement date each month and technically never paid a premium. So I am likely wrong about that, first of all.

If you pay the balance after the statement date but before the due date, you pay the premium but from my point of view, paying out an insurance premium on a balance that I have the ability and willingness to cover seems like a waste of money but that's purely a matter of opinion and scale, so I hold my hands up and say I was wrong about that. And I guess that's the main reason you're taking issue with my post. I can only defend myself by saying that I am not a frequent or big-spending credit card user so my mindset will differ. But I gather from this thread that others do run their every expense through their credit card, which no doubt amounts to thousands on a monthly basis, and then pay it off each month, so having the insurance cover that in a bad situation would of course be a relief, allowing you to use the funds that you intended for that purpose to instead support yourself. Whether the cost/benefit in the long term balances out for each person is not for me to say, so I do admit I am wrong. Certainly the cost/benefit wasn't going to work out for me as a fairly minor spender and that was where I was coming from. Shot my mouth a bit there without thinking it through fully.

Hopefully that explains my post but, as I say, please put me right on things further if necessary.

I notice you also quoted the section of my post about credit bureau reporting but I'm hoping it was clear that I was just thinking aloud and not really stating cold hard facts about that. Can you shed any light on it? It's not clear if you were taking issue with any of that part.

Originally Posted by Shard

Well, partially down to luck. Those who bought in expensive urban centres generally made an economic choice to focus on wealth generation rather than say take it easy in a small town.

Originally Posted by FlyingDutchman6666

dbd33, you're the only baby-boomer I know with the acumen to realise that the obscene wealth-gain of the last 10-20 years is down to, mostly, luck. Consider that a huge compliment.

Alas, most put it down to their personal skill and hard work. Faced with the puzzling fact that living standards for the younger generation have plummeted, boomers tend to explain this away by 'love of mobile phones and iphones and ipads and whatnot' and 'lack of hard work'. As if a $300 iPad and $40/month cell phone plan somehow compares to the tripling of housing costs against real income.

And the value of 'hard work' is an interesting one. Back when the boomers were young, they had low house prices and high interest rates. Now, young people are faced with high house prices and low interest rates. Consider what happens if you 'work hard' and overpay your mortgage each month? The boomer saves tons of interest, and pays his mortgage off very quickly. Yet for today's unfortunate youngster, it makes very little difference. Grab a mortgage calculator and see...

Originally Posted by Shard

But I do agree that youngsters are in a much different boat and should not be disparaged by an older generation who did have it a bit easier. Career stability was more of a given, and, crucially entry-level jobs were far less scarce.

Originally Posted by ultrarunner

Did they though, like having the internet and social media to find jobs from the comforts of your home? If you are saying things were cheaper back then and they are not now, then you ought to take the wages into consideration and the standards of living

Originally Posted by Shard

Cost of living, on the whole, was probably the same.

Originally Posted by Shard

Well actually I was saying that there was greater career stability in the 60's-80's. Less downsizing and, less mobility, so the lack of Internet and social media was not really an issue. Cost of living, on the whole, was probably the same.

Originally Posted by mandymoochops

Jings - order your pressies from the Aeroplan miles catalogue and you can have them shipped here - i'll forward them to you when you're in AB