Dear Dave,
I’m a pastor. I make $24,000 a year, and my wife and I live rent-free in the church parsonage. We’ve also got two kids, about $19,000 in credit card debt and we owe $13,000 on a van loan. The book value of the van is $23,700, but we got a good deal with our trade-in. Do you think we should sell the van?
Matthew

Dear Matthew,

I’d sell that thing tomorrow! You can’t prosper when you’ve got a year’s income tied up in something that’s going down in value.

Cars are just about the biggest item you can buy that will go down in value like a rock. I mean, if I were to come to you and offer you an investment opportunity where you could turn $23,000 into $10,000 in just three or four years would you be chomping at the bit to get in on it? Of course not!

You can easily get a quality, dependable vehicle for less than $10,000 – with no payments. And that will also free up money and enable you guys to really attack that credit card debt!

- Dave

Dear Dave,

With all the crazy economic things happening lately, I was wondering if it’s possible for the government to go bankrupt.

Susan

Dear Susan,

Technically, it’s possible. But the chances of that happening are so close to impossible I wouldn’t worry about it. They’ll just continue being bureaucratic vampires and sucking the money out of us!

The real issue, I think, are some things that haven’t been pointed out about the situation with our national debt. When the government takes billions of dollars and uses it to help Fannie Mae or AIG, where do you think they get that money? They borrowed it. How do they borrow money? They issue government bonds that are bought by foreign investors, local investors, institutional investors and others.

But here’s the catch. If all these people are buying government bonds they’re not buying other kinds of bonds. So when the government borrows hundreds of millions of dollars by going into the bond market and issuing bonds, they’re basically sucking money out of the economy.

And when there’s not as much water running downstream the creek gets dry!

- Dave Continued...