A family of four in Ventura County that includes two young children and two working adults needs an income of $82,231 just “to achieve a modest standard of living without assistance from public programs,” a report released Thursday concludes.
That amount exceeds the countywide median household income of $76,190, which means more than half of county families make less than that.
The study, called “Making Ends Meet,” was prepared by the nonpartisan California Budget Project, a group that advocates for government policies that assist low- and middle-income workers.
The minimum amount needed for a single adult in the county to live modestly was pegged at $34,764, which translates to an hourly wage of $16.71 for a full-time worker...
“It’s a reality check on what it costs to support a family in California, allowing only for the basics,” said researcher Alissa Anderson. “They need well into the range of what’s considered middle-income to make ends meet.”
The amounts, broken down for each county in California, were calculated using government and private industry data that detail median rents, child-care rates, health insurance premiums, taxes and costs for food and transportation.
After all those expenses are met, the hypothetical family of four with an $82,231 income would have $479 per month left over for “miscellaneous” items, including saving for retirement or college expenses.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Ventura County Income Requirements...
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Huff & Puff & Blow the Housing Market Down...
More than a third of the 1.24 million borrowers who have enrolled in the $75 billion mortgage modification program have dropped out...A major reason so many have fallen out of the program is the Obama administration initially pressured banks to sign up borrowers without insisting first on proof of their income. When banks later moved to collect the information, many troubled homeowners were disqualified or dropped out.
Sales of previously occupied homes dipped 2.2 percent in May, signaling that a boost from home-buying tax credits is fading sooner than expected...The tax credits were expected to lift sales in May and June...The report is "a worrisome sign for what will occur in July and thereafter when the effect of the tax credit is behind us," said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at MFR Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York...The report "suggests that even government stimulus in the form of a tax credit isn't enough," to support the U.S. housing market, wrote Guy LeBas, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott.
Sales of new homes collapsed in May, sinking 33 percent to the lowest level on record as potential buyers stopped shopping for homes once they could no longer receive government tax credits... The bleak report from the Commerce Department on Wednesday is the latest sign of a precarious housing market that is struggling to recover and could weaken the broader economic recovery. It follows a disappointing report issued earlier in the week showing sales of previously occupied homes had dipped in May.
Mortgage company Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average rate for 30-year fixed loans sank to 4.69 percent, from 4.75 percent last week.
That's the lowest since Freddie Mac began tracking rates in 1971. The previous record of 4.71 percent was set in December. Rates for 15-year and five-year mortgages also hit lows.
Mortgage rates have fallen over the past two months. Investors wary of the European debt crisis and the turbulent stock market have shifted money into the safety of Treasury bonds, driving down yields. Mortgage rates tend to track the yields on long-term Treasury debt.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
More on the Tea Party...
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
On the Border...
Tea Party Redux?
Years from now, historians will look back at the Tea Party Movement and divide it into two primary eras. Tea Party 1.0 was about the birth of the first massive, spontaneous grassroots movement in a generation. It was about rallying the troops and waking up America to realize that the inmates are running the asylum; that the first Manchurian Candidate became the first Manchurian President; that government programs and government spending were poised to destroy our children’s future. Tea Party 1.0 was the start of what I believe will prove to be the 4th Great Awakening in America...Tea Party 2.0, is characterized by the swift march of Tea Party Patriots into political activism on a permanent basis. Tea Party 2.0 is an unstoppable freight train. Patriots will be just as active on November 3rd as they were on November 2nd. Because, win or lose, we’re fighting to WIN…permanently. Sure, this will take a number of years. But the election of Barack Obama and the hegemony of socialists in our government were not suddenly achieved overnight...BUT THIS IS THE KEY: Whereas in the past we were content to win a given election (a mere battle), now we’re focused on winning the war. The war doesn’t end on November 2nd, and neither will our volunteerism...The mistake of the ’94 revolution was thinking that after we had taken the “beaches” of Congress we had won the war. But Eisenhower didn’t stop at Normandy, nor shall we at Scott Brown, Chris Christy, or Rand Paul.
More Housing Woes...
Housing starts fell to a five-month low in May but industrial output rose, evidence of an uneven recovery that has kept inflation at a minimum.
As the government's tax incentives for homebuyers expired, new home building dropped 10 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 593,000 units, the lowest level since December, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday.
Home construction plunged last month and building permits also fell, the latest signs that the construction industry won't fuel the economic recovery.
Builders are scaling back now that government incentives have expired. The biggest evidence of that trend: single-family homes tumbled 17 percent, the largest monthly drop since January 1991. The struggle in the housing industry is a concern for the broader economy because fewer homes mean fewer jobs across various sectors.
Overall new homes and apartments fell 10 percent in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 593,000, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. April's figure was revised downward to 659,000. Applications for new building permits — a sign of future activity — sank 5.9 percent to an annual rate of 574,000. That was the lowest level in a year.
A Well-Oiled Machin-- umm, Administration!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Santelli Moment...
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Housing Mess Continues Downslide...
... May, traditionally the height of the spring housing season...
Mortgage applications to purchase a home began to sink... are down nearly 40 percent from a month ago to their lowest level since April of 1997. Yes, you can argue that a larger-than normal share of buyers today are all cash, but those are largely investors that means real organic buyers are exiting in droves.
... 31 percent of foreclosures in March were deemed to be "strategic default" by researchers at University of Chicago and Northwestern University.That's up from 22 percent in March of 2009.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
News on the Personal Front...
Housing, Unemployment & Fraud... OH MY!!!
... More than 650,000 households had not paid in 18 months, LPS calculated earlier this year. With 19 percent of those homes, the lender had not even begun to take action to repossess the property — double the rate of a year earlier...
Unemployment claims in California hit 768,709 in April, a modern-day record and the highest during this recession, state Employment Development Department officials report...Just two years ago in April — a year into California’s recession — the unemployed filed 254,123 claims for benefits, EDD stats show. This April, that number more than tripled as the state remained at a record 12.6% unemployment rate, third highest in the country.
On April 27, 2010, I got a job with the United States Census Bureau in New Jersey. With a hidden camera, I caught four Census supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify information on their time sheets. Over the course of two days of training, I was paid for four hours of work I never did. I was told to take a 70 minute lunch break, was given an hour of travel time to drive 10 minutes, and was told to leave work at 3:30pm. I resigned prior to doing any data collection but confronted Census supervisors who assured me, “no one is going to be auditing that that level,” and “nobody is going to be questioning it except for you.” Another Census supervisor only said he’d adjust my pay after I gave him a letter recanting my hours.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
And it stoned me...
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
UPDATED: More on the Housing Yo-Yo...
Housing starts touched a 1-1/2-year high in April, but a drop in building permits to a six-month low suggested the housing market recovery may struggle to gain momentum without more government aid.
"... one factor that has experts really scared: homes that are ready to be sold but haven't been put on the market. Right now, there could be more than 4.5 million homes in "shadow inventory," according to a recent report by Barclays Capital.
This so-called shadow inventory is a recent phenomenon. In the past, inventory was either tight or it wasn't. But now, with home prices so low and so many foreclosures on the market, both homeowners and banks have been waiting to put properties on the market.
"These sidelined sellers closely watch the market for signs of a possible turnaround and rush in if there's a hint of good news," said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the California Association of Realtors.
But as more sellers put their homes up for sale, supplies increase, which will depress prices again. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
That vicious cycle could cause prices to bounce up and down for years. "I see a saw tooth bottom," Humphries said. "Prices go up; inventory rises, which sends prices down again. That plays out for three to five years of no appreciation. ... Without price appreciation, it leaves more homeowners in negative equity. That's toxic. Any setback, like a job loss, they go into foreclosure."
The number of homeowners who missed at least one mortgage payment surged to a record in the first quarter of the year, a sign that the foreclosure crisis is far from over.
More than 10 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment in the January-March period, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday. That number was up from 9.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and 9.1 percent a year earlier...
More than 4.6 percent of homeowners were in foreclosure, also a record... up... slightly from the end of last year...
The number of American homeowners who have missed at least three months of payments or are in foreclosure has surged to around 4.3 million...
Federal Reserve officials were divided over when the Fed should start shedding some of its vast portfolio of mortgage securities. The tricky endeavor would move the central bank closer to tightening credit for millions of Americans.
Minutes of the Fed's closed-door meeting April 27-28, released Wednesday, showed Fed officials expressed wide-ranging views about when and how the Fed should go about selling some of the $1.25 trillion of mortgage securities bought during the financial and economic crises. The assets were purchased to drive down mortgage rates and aid the housing market.
Its challenge is to sell those assets in a way that doesn't weaken home prices and jack up mortgage rates...
Most Fed officials favored "deferring asset sales for some time." A majority preferred beginning sales some time after the Fed's first increase in its key short-term bank lending rate. Such an approach would postpone any asset sales until the economic recovery was firmly entrenched.
The federal government sill sitting on a crap-load of mortgage securities.
Tuesday Hodge Podge...
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Housing Market Still Has A Long Way To Go...
Monday, May 10, 2010
Times Square Scare Follow-up...
ONE of the most troubling tics of Team Obama is the frantic rush to declare that every terror attack on American soil is carried out by an isolated individual with no connection to al Qaeda or other groups. It was the gist of their rapid response to the failed airline bombing on Christmas Day, to the Fort Hood shooter and, most recently, to the plot by Faisal Shahzad to set off a car bomb in Times Square.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
RE-POST: Bombs Away... (Weekend @ Times Square)
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
A different kind of "surge"...
Monday, May 03, 2010
Bombs Away... (Weekend @ Times Square)
Friday, April 30, 2010
GDP drops, and The One sat on Health Care info...
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Greece, Portugal, Spain... the U.S.?
Friday, April 23, 2010
Uh oh!!!... (hehehe)
The blacked-out portions of a subpoena request filed by lawyers for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich -- which were revealed through a simple computer trick -- suggest President Obama may have played a role in finding his own Senate replacement.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Tax Day Revolt 2.0 - Tea Party Time!!!
FORE!!!.......
In March alone, there were 1,919 foreclosure filings in the county, a 71 percent spike from February and an almost 14 percent increase from a year earlier, according to RealtyTrac. Last month’s filings included 769 default notices, 871 auction sale notices and 279 bank repossessions.
Foreclosures are going to be a problem the rest of the year, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
“We’re climbing out of a basement of a very, very significant downturn,” Kyser said. “We are still losing jobs.”
Experts are mixed on whether the foreclosure fiasco is coming to an end. Some predict another big wave during the summer, when a slew of adjustable rate mortgages are due to reset."
It continues:
The state [of California] accounted for 23 percent of the nation’s total foreclosure activity in the first quarter — more than 216,000 homeowners received foreclosure notices.
Areas hardest hit by foreclosures include Riverside, San Bernardino, San Joaquin and Kern counties.
Among states, Nevada continued to post the nation’s highest foreclosure rate, followed by Arizona and Florida.
UPDATE #2: Okay, maybe not so much good news for potential first-time homebuyers:
A quaint Camarillo three-bedroom house priced at $310,000 sold recently after fetching 11 offers. The winning bid came from an investor who offered $10,000 below asking price. The bank selling the home rejected several solid offers, including one that was $45,000 more than the asking price, with 20 percent down.
The catch? The investor had cash, and the bank wanted a quick close.
Traditional homebuyers are finding it hard to compete as banks try to minimize challenges by going for cash offers, said Kay Wilson-Bolton, a broker for Century 21 Buena Vista.
UPDATE #3: More bad news for the "sand states" here:
Cities in the "Sand States" of Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada, where overbuilding was rampant, are also in trouble, claiming nine of the top 10 spots in our list of cities in free fall. In Las Vegas, Riverside, Calif., and Phoenix, median home prices have fallen 50%, 44% and 37% from their respective peaks. Jobs are vanishing. Though country-wide, employers added 162,00 jobs last month, Riverside gained 13% fewer jobs in February 2010 (the latest numbers available by metro) than it did the same month three years earlier. Tampa, Fla., saw a 10% drop, and Los Angeles added 9% fewer jobs over the same time period.
These cities are also slow to absorb their glut of unsold foreclosed homes, keeping recovery at bay.
"These were highly speculative housing markets," says Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a Manhattan-based real estate appraisal firm. "In the markets that have unloaded a lot of foreclosed housing stock there's still a lot more coming."...
... "In California, so many jobs were concentrated in construction," says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of research at the Mortgage Bankers Association, the professional association for real estate financiers. "Jobs building single family homes wound up not being sustainable, and there were a lot of job losses."
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
URGENT PRAYERS AGAIN, PLEASE!!!
Oops!... HAHAHAHA!!!
Thursday, April 08, 2010
One Day, Two Day, Red Face, Blue Face...
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Monday, April 05, 2010
Obama Edits Jesus Christ Out of Easter Message...
President Obama literally edited Christ out of his "holiday greeting" today when he excerpted a sermon given by a military chaplain on Iwo Jima on Easter Sunday 1945.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Urgent prayers needed...
Monday, March 22, 2010
Welcome Socialized Medicine, Double-Dip Recession, and Tax-Payer Funded Abortions...
March Madness Run Amok...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Thursday, March 04, 2010
A Spending Limit Amendment?...
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Reid & Pelosi sitting in a tree... and the branch is cracking...
"...Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.
That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.
Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job..."
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Iraq... what needed to be said...
"I am not naive. I understand that there are individuals who opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning and I believe their passion, although misguided at times, is rooted in a deep desire for peace. What always baffled me was the reaction they had to pro-victory veterans when we came home. As if we were some robotic arm of the Bush White House. It was foreign for them to understand why winning in Iraq was so important.
Our friends died in this cause. There is no honor in their death unless we complete the mission they died fighting.
Everyone is exposed to the death of someone close to them at least one time in their lives. Cancer, accidents, sometimes it is sudden or violent. Rarely do we see it. But when we do our lives are affected forever because of it. We live in a culture where there must be a reason for everything that goes wrong. Obama is responsible for job loss. Bush ruined the housing market. The tires that blew out on my car that I was driving was a manufacturing error and not due to the fact that I was driving on the sidewalk.
Someone is responsible for everything that goes wrong in America. It makes us feel better to know it wasn’t our fault.
The war in Iraq was no different. While many scurried to blame Donald Rumsfeld, General Franks or President Bush for losing the war in Iraq, they bet against the American fighting men and women to turn the tide of the war. “The mission” in Iraq was evil...
I don’t begrudge these people. They simply will never get it. They are the type of people you need to protect in a society. They are innocent and naive.
It is the job of the warrior to hide them under the bed and tell them it will be okay, before we run off to combat the threat.
The ones that hold my contempt are those who, even today, know of the sacrifice made, the incredible progress gained and still will not acknowledge what was won on the ground in Iraq. They cheapen the sacrifice of how it was earned..."
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Sacre Bleu!!! (or maybe that should be "Sacre Rouge"?)
"French wine-makers and dealers were convicted Wednesday of selling millions of bottles of fake Pinot Noir to the US firm E&J Gallo in one of the biggest scams ever to rattle the world of wine.
A court handed out suspended jail terms and hefty fines to 12 people for selling 18 million bottles (135,334 hectolitres) of wine they said was Pinot Noir but which was in fact made from far cheaper grape varieties.
The convicted included executives from wine estates, cooperatives, a broker, wine merchant Ducasse and the conglomerate Sieur d'Arques."
Thursday, February 11, 2010
2/11/10
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
SnowJobbed (aka, "Why I no longer live in Philly")...
Monday, February 08, 2010
Post #800... What Might Happen on Feb 11, 2010?
Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday that Iran is set to deliver a "punch" that will stun world powers during this week's 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution, AFP reported.
"The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance (Western powers) on the 22nd of Bahman, February 11, in a way that will leave them stunned," Khamenei, who is also Iran's commander-in-chief, told a gathering of air force personnel according to AFP.
The country's top cleric was marking the occasion when Iran's air force gave its support to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a key event which led to the toppling of the U.S.-backed shah on February 11, 1979.