Well, 2 Billion in funds have been found for the Cash for Clunkers program. So it looks like things are safe for probably another two weeks for anyone wanting to trade in their old gas guzzlers for a fresh brand new automobile.
The U.S. House of Representatives Friday voted to transfer funds from other parts of the federal stimulus package to the auto-rebate program.
AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson said that a lot of cars have been moved, especially mid range models, more so than luxury brands. And that the stimulus bill has helped the company’s bottom line.
I took a look at my ING savings account yesterday and man, I need to pay better attention to my rates. I know that everyone is suffering from low interest rates on their savings and money market accounts, but there has got to better savings rates than what I am getting right now.
Lock it Up
That’s why I’m thinking of locking up my money in a bank CD for the long term. I don’t see the current interest rate crunch lightening up anytime soon and I already have a lot of my money in the stock market. So today I’ve been searching for the highest CD rates on bank CD’s at Bankrate.com.
I think I’ve got it narrowed down to two. The Discover three year CD at 2.75%. And the First Midwest 32 month CD at 2.76% with a guaranteed interest rate boost every 8 months.
Both of these are pretty good rates given the climate. I’m just not sure if I want to lock up my money for 3 years. My next step is going to be researching money market rates.
The Cash for Clunkers program in the USA is coming to an end. It looks like demand was just too much for the program to handle. However, The House wants to pour an additional $2 billion into the popular, albeit, financially strapped – “cash for clunkers” car purchase program.
Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said they would work with “the congressional sponsors and the administration to quickly review the results of the initiative.” If the program were to end today, that would be a problem as dealers estimate 200,000 vehicles have been sold in transactions that have not yet been completed through the cash for clunkers program. Doh!
Now whether this was a good idea or not, I blame poor management on how well this program was going to be. If you figure on even a small percentage of sub $2000 cars being driven out there getting turned in, you should know that billions upon billions would be needed. But hey, congrats to those who were able to use the program successfully.
Still have a clunker that you want to get rid of? Check out the video below for an example of how to use it:
According to Mint.com we are starting to spend more. After 18 months of straight drops in spending, Mint noticed that it’s million plus users have increased spending by a whole 3% over the 1st quarter of this year. But it is still less than 2% ,on average, versus Q2 2008.
The most dramatic increases versus Q1 were in shopping and Travel, both up 17% and entertainment up 6%. Spending on Gas and Fuel is down nearly 40% versus Q2 2008, thanks to a decline in lower gasoline prices.
So is this a sign that the economy is recovering and all is well again? I doubt it. The stock market has also gone up over this time period and I doubt that the worse is over for the stock market as well.
My wife and I officially sold our fairly new condo today, and we have bought a split level house, circa 1969, with some amazing updates for $20,000 less than what we bought the condo for three years ago. This I attribute to the housing market bubble popping.
Now the condo has been nice. It was a new construction when we bought it, nice and open design with all of the bells and whistles. But what happened was that a few months ago we realized that we were becoming house poor. The budget I planned for the condo kept getting blown out of the water from unexpected expenses. I didn’t properly plan on emergencies and raises that we didn’t get due to the economic downfall we have all experienced.
After a couple of years of being tight on cash we decided we were mainly paying for the area we were living in and could do with a less expensive house.
So, now we will be saving about $300 a month in mortgage and taxes and we were able to get our money back out of the sale of the condo. Unfortunately we didn’t make anything, but at least we didn’t lose our butts.
Hopefully the money being saved will be going into savings. Up next is my goal for a lower car payment.
