Tag: spending
Signs You Have A Spending Problem And Ways To Stop

Signs You Have A Spending Problem And Ways To Stop

By Cameron Huddleston, GOBankingRates.com (TNS)

One in five Americans spent more than what they earned in the last 12 months, according to a Federal Reserve Board survey released in May.

Regardless of the reason spending might exceed income, “overspending is harmful because it could be a sign you’re out of control with your finances,” said Leslie H. Tayne, an attorney who concentrates in debt resolution solutions and authored Life & Debt.

Here are a few warning signs that indicate you are spending too much, followed by suggestions for getting your spending under control:

You Max Out Your Credit Cards And Pay Only The Minimum

If you’re maxing out your credit cards and can’t pay off your balances every month, it’s a sign that you’re relying on credit to supplement your income, Tayne said. “This is a hard cycle to break, especially if you can only afford to make the minimum payments each month,” she said. Not only can this hurt your credit score, but it can also leave you in debt longer than necessary.

You Pay Bills Late

About one out of 20 people with a credit file are at least 30 days late on a credit card or a non-mortgage account payment, according to an Urban Institute report.

Paying bills late because you don’t have the cash to cover them is a sign that you’re overspending, Tayne said. And it sends a red flag to your credit issuers, which could hike your interest rates or lower your credit limit, according to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. You’ll also be hit with fees, which can add up quickly, and several late payments will hurt your credit score.

You Raid Your Retirement Account

You might think there’s no harm in borrowing from your retirement account because it’s your money. About 20 percent of 401(k) plan participants have taken a loan from their account, according to the Pencil Research Council Working Paper. You can borrow up to half of your 401(k) balance, up to a maximum of $50,000, but Tayne said rarely is this a good idea. “Borrowing from your future is a risky move,” she said.

If you borrow from your retirement account, you will have to pay yourself back with interest, which can be lower than the rate of return you would’ve gotten if you had left the money in the account. So really, you’re just shortchanging your retirement savings.

If you’ve realized that you have an overspending problem, rest assured. There are different ways you can get your spending under control and create healthy spending habits.

Create A Budget

The first step to getting your spending under control is creating a budget, Tayne said. Take a close look at what you’re spending money on and look for ways to cut back.

Rely On Cash

By living on a cash- or debit-only budget, you can curb the impulse to overspend. Tayne suggested setting a budget for each shopping trip and only bringing that much cash with you to avoid making impulse purchases.

Get Help

If you’re buried in debt and can’t curb your spending, your best option might be to get professional help. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling member agencies provide free and affordable debt counseling and other money management services. You can find an agency in your area through NFCC.org.

Photo: frankieleon via Flickr

Senate Waste Watchers Soldier On

Senate Waste Watchers Soldier On

By Matthew Fleming, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — A dog-bite prevention website. Vermont puppet shows. Researching the bomb-sniffing capabilities of elephants.

Those are just some government spending projects labeled “wasteful” in this Congress by a crop of lawmakers who continue to take on the mantle of pork busters four years after Ohio Republican John A. Boehner banned earmarks after he took the speaker’s gavel in 2011.

Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) long the standard bearer of the waste-watching movement, told CQ Roll Call that despite the moratorium on traditional earmarks, billions are still spent on duplicative programs — what he considers the largest earmark.

“It’s great to bring it up and raise the issue, but if the issue is raised and nobody eliminates the problem that’s creating the waste, you haven’t done anything,” Coburn said. He’s now working to organize a convention of states to restrict the power of the federal government and is considering continuing his spending reports from outside the Capitol. “We’re talking about symptoms, but we’re not fixing the disease.”

There are four Republican waste watchers in the Senate carrying the torch and making Coburn “proud” these days: Arizona’s Jeff Flake and John McCain, Dan Coats of Indiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Waste-report season is now in full bloom. Coats last week spoke on suspicious spending by defense contractors, while Flake released a dinosaur-themed report featuring legacy earmarks he dubbed “Jurassic Pork.”

For effect, Flake swept through the Senate Press Galleries distributing pork sandwiches to reporters. (He graciously offered chicken to those with an aversion to pork.) In May, McCain, Flake and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania appeared with “Pigfoot,” the mascot of Citizens Against Government Waste, to highlight their annual “Pig Book.”

This week, Paul took the role of Senate sommelier by highlighting grants for the Washington state wine industry, asking the question: What wine pairing goes best with waste?

And for the piscivore palate left unsatisfied by a diet of only wine and waste, McCain served the main course last month when he fought in vain to end a catfish-inspection program as an amendment to a trade bill.

(c)2015 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Analysis: Why The GOP Will Likely Attack The Fake White House

Analysis: Why The GOP Will Likely Attack The Fake White House

By David Hawkings, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — If budget resolutions are aspirational, sketching the big picture Congress envisions for government, then spending bills are the polar opposite: blueprints that lawmakers micromanage down to the smallest line item.

As arguments began over budgetary targets measured in multiples of billions, another annual ritual climaxed elsewhere on the Hill last week: Appropriations subcommittees were picking nits measured in the low-end millions (sometimes less) at 30 different hearings. A dozen more are planned before spring recess starts at the end of this week.

The sessions are supposed to be pure fact-finding, but in reality they’re about something else this spring. That’s a predicate for the now all-Republican Congress to go further than at any time in the previous six years to make detailed decisions contradicting the spending President Barack Obama wants.

Which brings us to this guidance: Keep your eye on the fate of the fake White House.

The Secret Service wants $8 million to create an ersatz executive mansion, the better to train its agents and officers in presidential protection. If Congress provides the money, it will be a signal of bipartisan belief the agency is getting its act together — and also a sign the GOP is avoiding the temptation of making granular spending cuts based entirely on their headline-grabbing appeal.

In other words, the project doesn’t stand a great chance of surviving. That’s only partly because dissatisfaction with the Secret Service is among the precious few things about which there’s bipartisan agreement these days. Mainly, it’s because Republicans are itching to poke at Obama almost every chance they get — and trying to make a mockery of the White House mockup may prove impossible for them to resist.

Every year, lawmakers hone in on a handful of relatively small-beer items that pack a decent symbolic punch, hoping to convince constituents of their fiscal prudence by excising a couple of million dollars in easy-to-understand spending from a budget that’s a tough-to-comprehend six orders of magnitude bigger. When such a program or project gets targeted, its merits quickly become beside the point.

So this point in the process — well before the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee releases its draft of legislation to fund that sprawling department in fiscal 2016 — may be the best time to appreciate the arguments in favor of constructing a phony White House complex just 20 miles from the real thing. Since an agency as beleaguered as the Secret Service is pursuing the money with a straight face before a chorus of already raised eyebrows on the Hill, it’s a rebuttable presumption there’s some merit to the idea.

The reasoning is not quite as many cynics describe: Having so clearly revealed recently that it’s not up to protecting the real thing, the Secret Service is hoping to do better with a forgery.

The actual rationale is a more sober take on the same concept. Training, then training some more, is the best way for law enforcement agents to get ready for the incredible tensions and minimally predictable situations they must confront. The more realistic the simulations, the better. And, since it would be pretty unsettling for agents and their dogs to stage exercises at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (the public, staff and first family might all get freaked out), a mockup is the next best thing.

“Right now, we train on a parking lot, basically,” Joseph P. Clancy, the new Secret Service director, said in explaining the proposal to House Appropriations last week. “We put up a makeshift fence and walk off the distance between the fence at the White House and the actual house itself. We don’t have the bushes. We don’t have the fountains. We don’t get a realistic look at the White House.”

That would be rectified at the Secret Service training center by erecting a full-scale model of the residence, the East and West Wings and the surrounding 18 acres. It’s not clear just how detailed the grounds would be replicated or whether the interiors would be copied, because the design hasn’t been made public. (Two months ago a drone crashed, undetected, on the south lawn. Six months ago, an intruder got over the wrought-iron fence, ran across the North Lawn and sprinted through the front door and into the East Room before officers tackled him.)

The 500-acre campus, a wooded compound abutting the Baltimore-Washington Parkway just outside the Beltway in Beltsville, Md., already features a Potemkin Village where agents practice protecting the president in many types of places. Aerial photographs show a pretend strip mall, an urban street-scape that might belong at Universal Studios, a tarmac with mockups of Marine One and the front end of Air Force One, a highway overpass and a tunnel to nowhere — all connected by an elaborate six-mile road network for the practice of defensive driving.

Congress has paid for all that fakery in the past, but the end of the Obama years may well be different. The “new” White House may survive subcommittee, where genuine needs generally triumph over political point-making. But that won’t stop efforts to block it in the full committee, on the House floor and then in the Senate.

To be fair, Democrats have pursued the same sorts of petty punishments for past Republican administrations. One of the classics was in 2001 when Jay Inslee, now the governor of Washington state, demanded a House vote on cutting off federal funds to pay the utility bills at the vice president’s official residence. His amendment, which would have saved all of $134,000, received only 141 votes, but it got enormous coverage as a window into the surging partisan antipathy toward Dick Cheney.

It’s also true that Republican lawmakers are eager to deny themselves anything that might sound frivolous. (Last year, they voted as a bloc to pare back the Capitol Visitor Center’s budget by $243,000.) So don’t expect to hear any talk of constructing a Hill replica for Capitol Police training, either.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Right’s Word-Deed Problem

The Right’s Word-Deed Problem

WASHINGTON — Briefly, there seemed a chance we might have a cross-party discussion of the biggest economic problem the country faces: the vexing intersection of wage stagnation, declining social mobility and rising inequality.

Even the most conservative Republicans were starting to talk about this challenge in rather urgent terms. In a moment whose irony he noted, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told a bunch of rich Republicans gathered by the Brothers Koch earlier this year that those doing well in America were “the top 1 percent, the millionaires and billionaires the president loves to demagogue, one or two of whom are here with us tonight” while the “people who have been hammered for the last six years are working men and women.”

And on it went through the country’s top Republicans. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) stressed “opportunity inequality” and Mitt Romney, in another ironic turn, charged that “under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer.”

It would be wonderful if conservatives really wanted to deal constructively with the predicament they so passionately describe. But thanks to the House and Senate GOP budgets, we now know that conservatives and Republicans (1) aren’t serious about the plight of working class and lower-income Americans, and (2) would actually make their situations much worse.

Their spending plans fail even on conservative terms: They are not fiscally responsible. Instead, they rely on all sorts of magic tricks that shove choices and problems down the road.

One heartening sign is that at least some conservatives find these budgets ridiculous. For example, James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute headlined his commentary for The Week: “The disappointing unseriousness of the House GOP’s budget.”

Pethokoukis wrote: “House Republicans say they want to balance the federal budget and eventually eliminate the federal debt. They do not have a plan to do so. Oh, to be sure, they have a plan! Just not a realistic one that will actually accomplish their goals.”

He noted that of the $5.5 trillion in cuts from planned spending, $2 trillion would come from “repealing the Obamacare insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion and replacing them with … well, nothing right now.”

The wholesale assault on efforts to provide lower-income Americans with health insurance is the clearest sign that Republicans don’t want to deal with inequality. The inability to get health insurance is one of the biggest burdens on low-income families, particularly those working for low wages and few or no benefits.

Obamacare has helped 16.4 million Americans get health insurance. Where would they turn? And Republicans would compound the damage: The Senate proposes cutting an additional $400 billion from Medicaid over a decade, the House more than double that. Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that on other low-income programs, the Senate budget cuts even more than the House. The vagueness of these plans makes it hard to tally how much damage would be done to food stamps, Pell Grants for low-income college students and the like, but Greenstein estimates that about two-thirds of the cuts in both plans come “from programs for the less fortunate, thereby exacerbating poverty and inequality.”

Greenstein concludes that under such proposals — here’s hoping President Obama is relentless in blocking them — “ours would be a coarser and less humane nation with higher levels of poverty and inequality, less opportunity,” and an “inadequately prepared” workforce.

Another bit of hypocrisy: These budget writers care so much about national security that they’re not willing to raise a dime in taxes to cover their sharp increases in defense spending. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, called out his conservative colleagues for how differently they treat defense and social spending.

“You’re always telling us the deficit is so bad we’ve got to cut programs for the elderly, for the sick and for the poor,” Sanders said, “and suddenly, all of that rhetoric disappears.”

Budgets are, by their nature, boring. That’s why those who assemble these long columns of numbers figure they can assail the well-being of the least privileged people in our society even as they profess to care about them so much.

I’d respect these folks a lot more if they said what they clearly believe: They think more inequality would be good for us. It almost makes you nostalgic for the candor of the Romney who spoke about the “47 percent” and the Paul Ryan who once divided us between “makers” and “takers.” Honesty beats saccharine words about the struggles of working people any day.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on July 17, 2014. (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)