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Briefs By Tom Noble Friday, July 02, 2007 We're no longer there! The Law Offices of Thomas Noble, P.C. is now located at 6116 N. Central Expressway, Suite 922, LB 72, Dallas, Texas 75206. Phone, fax, and web site remain the same. ∞ A divorce lawyer's moist dream: venerable polygamist converts to monogamy. ∞ As baby boomers approach "retirement", it will be interesting to watch how we re-define the concept. The Number by Lee Eisenberg[1] takes on the challenge without being another exercise in pie charts and bar graphs. Eisenberg is the former editor-in-chief of Esquire. His prose smoothes the digestion of a meaty subject like a glass of Pouilly Fusse' without sacrificing content for form. It's a complicated subject: a mix of emotional and financial issues, a combination of concerns about the death of the traditional pension plan and a shrinking middle class, most of which is mired in unprecedented debt, and skepticism about Social Security. Excerpts: If you and yours are bringing in $40,000 a year, you're doing better than half of the households in America. Or, as a Washington think tank recently pointed out: if you're a teacher married to a policeman, your combined household income puts you in the top 25 percent of all households in the nation. We live in a country that once celebrated itself as egalitarian, yet 1 percent of the population - nearly three million people - currently has as much money as the hundred million people at the bottom of the ramp. One of the more blatant paradoxes of the past twenty years is how the average size of a new house has increased 25 percent while the size of the nuclear family has diminished (we're not talking weight here). To assign a real live broker (oops, financial consultant) to a client who keeps too low a Number is tantamount to Safeway assigning a personal shopper to anyone who comes in to buy a quart of milk. A million dollars conservatively invested yields $50,000 a year in income, which is hardly what it takes to feel like a million bucks. Debt Warp holds that our whip-it-out credit card culture makes it so easy to buy stuff that people delude themselves into thinking they're more affluent, better set for the future, than they are. Starting in 2000, two of Debt Warp's principle components, automobile loans and credit card debt, rose a full 33 percent. Also in this time, U.S. consumers showered themselves (hosed themselves is more like it, using German-made, multiple head, full-body shower sprays) with 2.3 trillion dollars of new mortgage debt, an increase of 50 percent. Accordingly, there are well over a billion credit cards currently in circulation on the North American Plastisphere. According to the Wall Street Journal, households with at least one credit card carry a debt load of over $9,000, up 23% over a five-year period, adjusted for inflation. That's quite a nosebleed. An American declares bankruptcy every fifteen seconds, says the New York Times. ∞ It's not the what; it's the how! ∞ I leave you with the wisdom of James Taylor: The secret to life is enjoying the passing of time. [1] Free Press: 2006. 
Contact Me: tnoble28@hotmail.com Copyright © 2010 by Law Offices of Thomas Noble, P.C. All rights reserved. You may reproduce materials available at this site for your own personal use and for non-commercial distribution. All copies must include this copyright statement. |
