New thing in mortgages: walking away

Should You Walk Away? - Educate Yourself On Your Rights If You Face Foreclosure. Our Website Can Help You. via kwout

There’s a web site called youwalkaway.com that tells people how they might benefit from mortgage foreclosure. Strange what one can stumble upon on the web, isn’t it? My own take is that people who were trying to get something for nothing by flipping houses and are now in financial difficulty earned what they’ve received. And for lenders who loaned money to those they should have known could not pay it back, well, these lenders are not going to be paid back.

I hope that these losses are not socialized to those of us who were honest and responsible. But I suspect some kind of federal bailout is coming our way, at our expense of course. This is even more likely if we wind up with a Democratic president and a Democratic congress. I’m glad I own gold

Business ideas for 2008

How to Save the World via kwout

Dave Pollard comments on Harvard Business Review’s list of breakthough business ideas. As usual, I find Dave’s ideas deeply interesting.

Fed panics, cuts interest rate to avoid stock market bloodbath

Fed slashes rates - Yahoo! News via kwout

Now, imagine if we had no central bank, no modern central planning government agency. What would we call it? Maybe freedom?

Have you used online tax preparation?

I’m trying something new today, “blogging in reverse”. Instead of me expressing an opinion on whatever, I’m asking for yours.

Have you ever used a web site to prepare your income taxes online? Would you use that service again?

I have used Intuit’s TurboTax for many years. I am not real happy with them as a company after trying unsuccessfully to move Quicken from windows xp to mac osx.  So I’m looking at options for this year’s unpleasant IRS chore. I did see TurboTax with a state return for $32 at CostCo.