If You Are Looking because Leeches, Skip the Pond,

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yright © 2007 Ed Bagley
Two seemingly unrelated stories caught my care yesterday. One was about corporations stockpiling cash and the other was about consumer savings rates.
Some American companies actually know how to sock it away.
ExxonMobil finished its 2006 first quarter with $36.5 billion (not million, but billion) cash in hand, according to America Today, giving the world's No. 1 fuel company more cash than anybody company in the USA.
Could you even assume having $36.5 billion in your savings or retirement account? That namely a lot of moolah, or serious money because folk in the understand.
Microsoft was near backward with $34.8 billion in money. Microsoft's savings were even more meaningful when you remember namely Microsoft paid a $32 billion one-time bonus in 2004 after starting an anniversary bonus program in 2003.
Johnson & Johnson was a far third with $17.2 billion, but even $17.2 billion is a staggering figure.
Industrial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 had mattered their corporate piggy banks with $642.7 billion at June of 2006. Imagine just the interest a company generates on its maintained earnings. ExxonMobil acquired $946 million in 2005.
The savings rates of consumers are equitable the opposite.
In 2005 private savings rates of consumers moved into negate territory for the first time according to the U. S. Commerce Department.
That manner consumers not only spent entire of their after-tax income but submerged into existing savings or borrowed money, constantly with credit cards (the scourge of modern American finance) to cover their spending.
This is a fact that I learned from QSR, which is a trade magazine that covers the canteen and quick food industry. QRS follows consumer spendable income.
By decree other monies evaporate from retirement savings accounts via coerced distributions. Your government loves apt reserve consumers spending so the economic grows, and it could care fewer if retirees really need apt withdraw their retirement funds early.
Your government cannot keep its proboscis out of your commerce, or its hand out of your pocket.
Credit card companies did very well during this period. CBS reported that in 2004 credit card companies collected $14 billion in penalty charges and additional fares, accounting for approximately half of the industry's $33 billion in profits.
You remember honor card companies. They are the leeches who lend you money when you do not deserve it and then bleed you dry until you cannot stand up straight alternatively pay your every month bill in due time.
Then comes the over limit fee,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the late fee and the interest on the remaining balance, all of which is thought to mail you to the poor house faster than a merchant tin swipe your credit card for a purchase.
I phone credit card companies leeches not to be clever but to be accurate.
A leech is really a worm, many of which are bloodsucking parasites, especially of vertebrates, which embody mammals,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which include humans. And if you muse credit card companies do not suck the lifeblood out of you financially, then you ambition be always enshrined for their fribring an end to ... need of being snookered.
You have no need to go looking for leeches at your local reservoir, maximum Americans are carrying eight credit cards around with them every daytime. The mean American family has 8 credit cards along to a 2004 report by FRONTLINE (a PBS-funded network site) and the New York Times weekly.
Here are a few facts you should know almost credit cards:
1) Nearly 144 million Americans have a Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover credit card.
2) 38% of those credit card consumers pay their bill in full monthly.
3) 24% pay only the minimum remittance monthly. Do you understand that only an credit card with an famous balance of $10,000 at 18% interest takes 40 years (yeah, 40 years) to pay off if you make