h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Brave New Foundation wants our help in naming names. They say,

"We have just two criteria: they have to be in the wealthiest 1%, meaning a net worth of over $9 million, and they have to be using their wealth and power to keep down the other 99%."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKvka1Mhzzw

So who is it going to be? The Koch brothers, the Walton family? You can name the mega-wealthy miscreant here:

http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/whoarethe1percent/

Incidentally today was Move Our Money day. If you haven't moved your money from an abusive Wall Street bank to a local bank or credit union, please do so at your earliest opportunity. For more information, please read:

http://moveyourmoneyproject.org/

I'm very pleased to say that since living in Austin my meagre savings have always been in a local credit union

Sadly, there's no credit union in our area for which we qualify (most are associated with labor unions), but I'll keep looking for one.

Meanwhile, when I went to the Move Your Money site, although the Occupy MN protestors have been around their corporate office, our bank is actually on the list of banks they suggested moving funds *into*, so I didn't go to move anything out. (We do need to close and re-open our accounts for an unrelated reason I think you already know about, HN) I know they didn't take any TARP funds and my research on predatory lending practices didn't bring up anything on them... so maybe it's "good enough" for the time being.

But what I wouldn't do to join a credit union and maybe see better than 1% interest on a not-insignificant balance...

I'm wondering what to do about our rather small 401Ks. You get a choice of various funds but when you trace them back, they all tend to be associated somehow with the same bad Wall Street players.

Sadly, I don't have to worry about mine... when I got laid off back in 2002 I had to cash mine in to pay the rent. I haven't had an employer which offered a decent one since so I've just left my money in savings till something worthwhile comes along.

I recently shuffled some of my old 401Ks to save them from disappearing altogether. One was bleeding out. I had lost probably somewhere around $50k. It had recovered just a bit from the '08 crash, but from January to June it had lost $10k and wasn't looking good. It was losing money when the market was going up. Between the two 401Ks I put $160 into something called a secured annuity (iirc). Anyway, its a fund that locks in its value once per year. If it's worth more on its anniversary date, it locks in that amount. If it's worth less, it has insurance that will make up the difference. I can't take it out for 7 years, but I had no plans to. It's not a high earner, but even if the market goes all pear shaped again, I won't lose what I put in it. Of course there are fees involved and that means that if the funds don't earn much. I may be behind the rate of inflation; but after seeing the huge losses I was taking and I expect that if I hadn't taken my money out when I did I would end up losing it all, at least I stopped the bleeding.

Oh, and I did this at my Credit Union. I feel that the financial adviser there has my interests in mind more than one I'd find elsewhere.

My credit union offers IRAs and we've got some pitifully small amout of money invested that way. A lot of my savings over the years are in 401Ks.

When I've waded all the literature, what I can't help noticing is that the 401K funds are invested in other funds. And *those* funds are invested in commodities. In other words, food.

Investing in food seems like a good thing, we all eat after all. More investment should translate to better infrastructure to bring crops to market, better methods of agriculture. But that's not the way Wall Street players are investing. They're building a bubble in the commodities market.

Thanks for the tip, Baron Grim. I'll check that out.