haha thats funny, cause this afternoon im heading out to corporate office to sign papers for our deal. but thats not the issue at stake i could care less if its plausible to you or not.

Thanks for the helpful tips Ks320 and jwa4378. Just the information i was looking for.

 

[QUOTE=2005GPW,Jul 26 2005, 05:03 AM] Entry level Manager paying $100K???

 

Best of luck to you. Sounds highly doubtful though to those of us who have been there, done that.

 

if you'll be driving a lot, i'd look into leasing a BMW M5, M6, or Porsche 997 4S. MB E55 AMG is nice too. goodluck

 

Signing papers??? LOL... So is that how it works now... Guess you;ve never received an offer letter before....

BTW: Anyone can easily say that they're getting a job as a car salesman, and claim a $100K salary. Yes, it is obtainable if you are a top notch salesman. However, you being really young and all, you don't seem to realize that there is work involved...

$100K in retail??? You might wanna try your odds at Lotto...

Good luck on signing those papers!

 

deal?

so is this a job or a sale?

The $100K part in retail for someone with no degree and no experience sounds suspect. Entry level retail management is usually in the $20K area.

what special skills do you offer? (besides good retail management, which is a dime a dozen skill honestly. The bilingual is no big deal in FL either.)

 

What's more important is what do you see yourself making 5 or 10yrs from now (realistically and not being too optimistic)?

Because if you feel you will continue to make no more than what you earn now (after factoring in inflation), then you might want to consider doing something else with your money other than a S2000, since every penny matters now.

But if you feel that your career will let you excel and make, say, more than 200K per year or so when you hit 25 or 26, then the whole world's different. The few 10Ks that you spend now is pennies in comparison (well, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point).

Again, this is based on realistic assumptions rather thinking that "ya, I'll be able to find a good stock next year and it'll go up 1000 times in 2 years and I'll become a millionaire." More like what people with your skillset and experience are able to achieve (the key here is your skillset as opposed to age group, since some people enter the work force earlier and some later).

 

Oh, wait...i know how this guy can get a high paying job with little skills!

Nepotism.

 

bro.. everyone still needs a place to live. House prices aren't going to drop radically, at worst they will plateau. I am a broker btw.

 

Sure, everyone needs a home to live in, but that doesn't mean what we see now is the bottom line level that it can drop to.

Real estate markets in Asia as well as some areas in Canada (which is where I used to live in) have proven that housing real estate prices can seroiusly drop like a rock. Take Hong Kong for example, an apartment running in the range of 10MM HK dollars (~1.3MM USD) dropped to 4MM HKD range during Asian crisis in 98, and it is still in the verge of recovery with these apartments seeing around 7MM as the market value, meaning it has taken a 30% loss in 7 years (or 60% loss immediately after the crisis, and if your business isn't working well? You would have capitalized that loss to pay off your other debt). And given that you are a real estate broker, you would have see what happens when crap hits the fan.

During economic downturn, foreign investors leave and other people downsize or need to liquidate. Perhaps the drop may not be as dramatic as what happened in Asia. But simply think about how much houses has gone up in the entire country, and look at the growth of the economy, just take GDP for example. Housing prices have gone up in the range of 18 to 30% across the country in the past 12 months, whereas GDP was up no more than 3.5%, which is around the average historically (well, lets wait for the new number coming out this Friday). Housing prices have gone up by 50% in the past 5yrs:

http://www.ofheo.gov/media/pdf/1q05hpi.pdf

If that's the case, for people to be able to catch up to that, even if housing prices are completely stale, it would take a good number of years to even catch up to the housing growth from the past 12 months, and even more (~12years) to catch up to what happened in the past 5years, and this is assuming zero inflation. And on top of that, a lot of the housing price increases were fueled by the ridiculously low mortgage rates. Can mortgage rates remain THAT low? We may not see the impact immediately, but the higher interest rate environment (note that I'm saying higher, but not high like 8% for long term yields that we saw before) will certainly eat into people's appetite and more importantly, ability, to continue purchasing homes.

Anyway, my point is, sure, we all need a shelter, that just means the floor price of an apartment in say, Manhattan, is 400K. But it has no indication that the current median price of 700K or mean of 1.4MM is the bottom line or even sustain in the long run. When companies hire fewer people or stop giving ridiculous bonuses? Young people don't move off to live by themselves and families don't look to constantly move to bigger homes and may even need to sell their second/third/vacation homes as they can no longer generate large returns from stocks and other investments to pay them off - housing prices WILL come down.

Not directly comparable, but take tech stocks for example. When NASDAQ Composite was close to 5000, the entire world felt that we have entered a new era and internet will revolutionize our lives and there is no way NASDAQ can fall below 4000, or even 4500. The world has concluded that it has set a new standard. Then guess what? It plunged down to low 1000s for a long period of time and not much higher than 2000 lately - so yes, there is no "floor" to investments. It can go up, and it can certainly go down as well ...

Of course, everyone would love to see their portfolios (with real estate being part of the equations) going up, or see their current net asset value to be the bottom line, except that reality doesn't work like that.

Anyway, so back to the very original question, somewhat related to my above statement. Do you feel your car will no longer be a financial burden 2 or 3 years from now? That's what you need to think about. There is a Chinese saying (something along these lines) "Don't wear such a big hat if you don't have such a big head" The car should be something to award yourself, not something for you to have nightmares of ...