Meyer issued her forecast two days after the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes showed for April an 18.1 percent year-to-year decline, compared with 18.7 percent in March, in the rate of home price declines in 20 major U.S. metropolitan areas.

The indexes have tracked the prices of U.S. single-family homes since 1987.

Read more

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“Credit card debt is our biggest hindrance in being able to take care of our families and set ourselves up for prosperity,” said finance student Brad Chaffee, 34, of Charlottesville, Virginia.

“If your paycheck is going toward paying all these credit card companies off, you can’t get very far,” added Chaffee, who has a Web site called enemyofdebt.com. “You certainly can’t use your income as a wealth-building tool — which is what it becomes when you don’t have all these debt payments. I feel very strongly about that.”

So do thousands of others, many of whom are followers of charismatic financial expert Dave Ramsey, whose Web site, books, arena rallies and radio show on 400 stations hammer away at the “freedom from debt” theme.

“Debt is not a tool; it is a method to make banks wealthy, not you,” says Ramsey’s Web site, where users can find blunt advice on how to deal with creditors and develop sound money habits. “Debt is dumb.”

Read the full story at CNN

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Sure, we still have an unemployment rate over 8%, which we have not seen since the ’70s, but it’s like I have been saying that what is happening in this new economy is suppossed to occur.  I wrote a blog back in December or January about how we must all get used to living as we did back in the ’70s, minus the disco.

We might be experiencing that right now.

Wall Street experts are saying that the market might be stabilizing amid relatively decent consumer spending numbers.  The housing market seems to be stabilizing as well with better than expected sales numbers for February and March.  And the best news of all is that the stock market is also performing better than expected under these circumstances.

We cannot forget that there are Americans that do not have jobs and there are Americans losing their homes.  Unfortunately, business, capitalism and the economy do not pick their victims.  There will be losses and there will be gains in any economic environment, where these days, (thanks to the scary media) we only hear and feel the bad things.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.  We have to decide who we are going to be in this new economy.

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Getting better means that the global economy is actually stabilizing itself to where it should be.

Sure, the world is in a recession but note that this recession is really an adjustment to reality.

The reality is that we will live in a world without so much credit just as we did in the ‘70s.

As we close this first quarter of the worst global economic performance in history, we must take into account some of the brighter notes of news related to this scrambled economic environment.

Some news of note has been the best four-week performance by the Dow despite continued negative employment data.

This last week, the Dow closed above 8,000 while reports show US jobless rate at 25-year high of 8.5 percent.

The last time the Dow rose for four consecutive weeks was between September and October of 2007 — when the index reached its record above 14,000.

A couple of weeks ago President Barack Obama freed billions of dollars to help the nation’s small businesses, where we will now have a little breathing room in managing our businesses.

Over the last couple of weeks bank accounting rules have been eased as well as there being a commitment from the world’s finance leaders to keep propping up the global economy.

This last Friday’s March unemployment report was the last big hurdle in determining how well things might seem to be.

Is the worst over?  No one is sure just yet, but so far so good.

Does this mean that those of us who have lost our jobs will get back to work soon?

Not really.

We must recognize that the industries that caused this economic meltdown are the industries that are pushing unemployment numbers up.

We must also recognize that those industries that are tied to consumer disposable spending are also as affected, where there is little chance for displaced workers gaining employment in those specific areas.

When we look at our businesses, we must take into account how we are going to manage our business in this new economy, this new opportunity to better our business practices.

Reviewing operations, processes and business structure is of paramount importance now that we have been given a second chance.

Our approach via our proven Operational Accounting methodologies will secure business’ ability to manage the changing economy and secure operations into the future.

This economy has adjusted itself where we now have an opportunity to better our business.

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I am a big fan of the SBA and of course, small business success, but I recommend we tread cautiously with this renewed liberation of credit.

For those of you who know me or have been following my comments over the years, I advocate that business not use loans to fund working capital.

It’s great that we now have the opportunity to fund growth in our businesses, but the working capital we think is in an SBA loan is actually in our business.

I have made a career of developing operational accounting methodologies that allow business to re-engineer itself, thus generating necessary working capital, where I imagine the SBA not liking my advocating no loans, but it is for the best.

Be very careful with business loans.

Read more at: Yahoo.com

Who knows?

Last week, Wall Street reported its best week gains since November ’08 and Monday, President Obama will release financial support to small businesses via the SBA.

There are other not so bad signs such as the surprising rise in consumer spending in the month of March.

What does this all mean?

It means nothing at this point as we all wait to see what happens, but I am confident that good times are ahead.

Note that we are in a recession, there is no doubt about that and people are losing their jobs.  But we must take into account what this recession is all about.

It is all about the global economy adjusting itself to where it should be.  In other words, we should not have expanded our business on credit, we should not have purchased our first house on an 80/20 mortgage loan knowing we could not pay for it, and we should have not put ourselves into so much debt.

According to CreditCards.com, Americans have spent billions of dollars in credit cards in 2008, where there currently seems to be a downward trend since this recession finally caught our attention.

As I have blogged many times before, we are heading back to where we were in the ‘70s

Before we get back to the ‘70s, we must adjust our lifestyles to reality, hence this recession.

I think it’s great that the SBA will gain new funding for small business, but we must make sure we use working capital (loans or cash flow) appropriately, or we will be right back in the same boat.

Good Luck everyone.

Sometimes, we want to belive that someone is going to do us good and help our businesses when in fact, they only serve to hurt us.

Check references, verify skill levels and do background checks. 

Sure, if an employee wants to steal from us, they will, but at least verifying who we are hiring lets employees know we are aware.

From CNN - The CFO of a California cabinet company was arrested Wednesday after a yearlong investigation, according to the San Diego County Sheriff’s on suspicion of embezzling $9.9 million from the company over seven years.

Because of the embezzlement, the San Marcos, California, company was forced to lay off employees and restructure, police said.

“She used these monies to gamble. She used them to remodel her home. She used them to buy expensive clothes, shoes, [including] a $4,000 pair of Italian shoes. She had more than 400 pairs of shoes in her closet,” Sgt. Mark Varnau of the Sheriff’s Department told CNN. “She had 160 high-end purses valued at $2,000 apiece.”

Read more at: CNN

“I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future,” he told the newspaper. “I don’t think that people should suddenly mistrust all of our financial institutions.”

Read more at: CNN

Stanford Kurland, formerly of Countrywide, has a new venture.

By ERIC LIPTON, New York Times

CALABASAS, Calif. — Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.

So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

Read more of Eric’s article at The New York Times