Engaged!

Wow so a month with no posts and this will probably one of our biggest news items ever to make up for it!

So we are now engaged and officially on our way to becoming Chianna for realz!

Holiday Letters and Cards

So we have been noticing that everyone has been sending out these holiday cards and update letters....So we figured we would try to do the same, but we would save the trees so we will just do ours online. Enjoy!

The year started with us going to Tahoe so one of us could snowboard while the other one sat by the outside bar with a fire pit to read a good book, I will let you figure out which one did the sport while the other read the book.

In April we decided that we really hadn't done anything in four months so we decided to take a day trip up to San Francisco and did some touristy stuff. Such as the Japanese Tea Garden and the rest of Golden Gate Park. After which, we decided to not be cheap and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Vista point. It was probably the best weather for us to have done this little outing! Just proves that if we don't do much then when we do something everything will work out!

In May I got ditched by Anna while she went to Stockholm. She left for two weeks for work while I sat at home and did productive things such as playing video games!

In June I got ditched again while Anna went to some bachelorette party. Once again I sat at home and did some productive things such as video games. After Anna returned we took a little trip to Maui, which was Anna's best flight of the year since it was with me! ( I am glad that I am writing this so that she will only read this after everyone else probably has )

In July we went to Anna's best friend's wedding. It was fun to see and meet everyone. It was a great day to have a wedding and couldn't have been any nicer. It was so nice that I don't think I need to think about a wedding for a long time to come.

We also went to Yosemite in July. It was the closest I will get to camping ever! The only thing that could have been better was the weather. Sadly with all the record amount of fires we had this year in California the viability was nil. But it still was beautiful and we realized how close it really was to us, so there will be a follow up trip in 09 for sure.

Then it was another long break from travel for us until December. Where we did three trips in a row to Atascadero the day after Thanksgiving to see some of Anna's family that I had never met. Then we were off to Chico to see our friends graduation from police academy, which actually was closer to the movie than I could ever imagine. After Chico we had a few days off until we went to Vegas for a "business" trip. We enjoyed a nice meal at the Wynn and then took in a show at MGM. It was a great trip!

Well that wraps up the year until now. As for the rest of the year we will be doing a Christmas trip down to Atascadero. After which we will be sitting at home and hopefully staying up to meet the New Year...and if not that is why we have Tivo!

We hope you all have had a great year!

Chianna

Stimulus Package

Hopefully the Obama team will spend the money wisely. Especially since the 100 biggest metropolitan areas account for 65% of America's population and 75% of its output. Hopefully they won't build bridges to no where and they repair the bridges we already have.

Top 100 Cities:

1. New York, New York (pop 8,213,839)
2. Los Angeles, California (pop 3,827,953)
3. Chicago, Illinois (pop 2,839,944)
4. Houston, Texas (pop 2,076,189)
5. Phoenix, Arizona (pop 1,473,223)
6. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (pop 1,460,301)
7. San Antonio, Texas (pop 1,262,858)
8. San Diego, California (pop 1,258,961)
9. Dallas, Texas (pop 1,213,608)
10. Detroit, Michigan (pop 920,645)
11. San Jose, California (pop 912,736)
12. Indianapolis, Indiana (pop 789,181)
13. Jacksonville, Florida (pop 787,735)
14. San Francisco, California (pop 751,461)
15. Hempstead, New York (pop 744,344)
16. Columbus, Ohio (pop 738,665)
17. Austin, Texas (pop 703,592)
18. Memphis, Tennessee (pop 676,738)
19. Baltimore, Maryland (pop 640,064)
20. Charlotte, North Carolina (pop 633,259)
21. Fort Worth, Texas (pop 622,811)
22. Milwaukee, Wisconsin (pop 600,787)
23. Boston, Massachusetts (pop 596,638)
24. El Paso, Texas (pop 591,168)
25. Washington, District of Columbia (pop 582,049)
26. Nashville-Davidson, Tennessee (pop 579,738)
27. Seattle, Washington (pop 577,727)
28. Denver, Colorado (pop 566,359)
29. Las Vegas, Nevada (pop 544,887)
30. Portland, Oregon (pop 536,871)
31. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (pop 532,861)
32. Tucson, Arizona (pop 516,791)
33. Albuquerque, New Mexico (pop 498,716)
34. Atlanta, Georgia (pop 483,108)
35. Long Beach, California (pop 471,957)
36. Brookhaven, New York (pop 468,034)
37. Fresno, California (pop 459,540)
38. New Orleans, Louisiana (pop 453,726)
39. Sacramento, California (pop 451,261)
40. Cleveland, Ohio (pop 450,046)
41. Mesa, Arizona (pop 443,710)
42. Kansas City, Missouri (pop 443,702)
43. Virginia Beach, Virginia (pop 438,191)
44. Omaha, Nebraska (pop 414,798)
45. Oakland, California (pop 394,715)
46. Miami, Florida (pop 383,048)
47. Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop 381,370)
48. Honolulu, Hawaii (pop 375,825)
49. Minneapolis, Minnesota (pop 374,682)
50. Colorado Springs, Colorado (pop 371,287)
51. Arlington, Texas (pop 362,385)
52. Wichita, Kansas (pop 355,015)
53. St. Louis, Missouri (pop 352,572)
54. Raleigh, North Carolina (pop 345,584)
55. Santa Ana, California (pop 339,685)
56. Anaheim, California (pop 331,885)
57. Cincinnati, Ohio (pop 331,310)
58. Tampa, Florida (pop 326,887)
59. Islip, New York (pop 326,631)
60. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (pop 316,615)
61. Toledo, Ohio (pop 301,493)
62. Aurora, Colorado (pop 297,081)
63. Oyster Bay, New York (pop 294,520)
64. Bakersfield, California (pop 293,456)
65. Riverside, California (pop 287,739)
66. Stockton, California (pop 283,657)
67. Corpus Christi, Texas (pop 282,022)
68. Buffalo, New York (pop 278,398)
69. Newark, New Jersey (pop 277,903)
70. St. Paul, Minnesota (pop 277,015)
71. Anchorage, Alaska (pop 276,613)
72. Lexington-Fayette, Kentucky (pop 272,219)
73. Plano, Texas (pop 250,067)
74. St. Petersburg, Florida (pop 248,191)
75. Fort Wayne, Indiana (pop 247,849)
76. Glendale, Arizona (pop 244,672)
77. Lincoln, Nebraska (pop 242,676)
78. Jersey City, New Jersey (pop 239,198)
79. Greensboro, North Carolina (pop 237,428)
80. Norfolk, Virginia (pop 237,349)
81. Chandler, Arizona (pop 232,312)
82. Henderson, Nevada (pop 231,880)
83. Birmingham, Alabama (pop 231,877)
84. Scottsdale, Arizona (pop 228,119)
85. Madison, Wisconsin (pop 223,719)
86. Baton Rouge, Louisiana (pop 222,669)
87. North Hempstead, New York (pop 220,975)
88. Hialeah, Florida (pop 218,529)
89. Chesapeake, Virginia (pop 216,644)
90. Garland, Texas (pop 216,012)
91. Orlando, Florida (pop 215,190)
92. Babylon, New York (pop 214,275)
93. Lubbock, Texas (pop 212,341)
94. Chula Vista, California (pop 211,609)
95. Akron, Ohio (pop 210,526)
96. Rochester, New York (pop 209,317)
97. Winston-Salem, North Carolina (pop 208,393)
98. Durham, North Carolina (pop 206,614)
99. Reno, Nevada (pop 206,375)
100. Laredo, Texas (pop 206,285)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

We are having Thanksgiving with the Chiangs then heading down South to the Kinney's to spend time with both families for the holiday.

We wish all our friends and families a safe and joyful holiday season!

We will be out of town every weekend until the New Year so most likely the next post will be in the New Year.

LOL robbing Peter to pay Paul....

This should serve as a good warning to the US government to think before bailing out the auto makers. When you provide a bridge loan to a company you want to make sure that once they cross that bridge they will know where to go......

A.I.G. Borrows Another $20.9 Billion From the Fed

October 30, 2008, 5:22 pm

• Link to This
• E-mail this

• Topics
  • Legal
• Industries
  • Financial Services

American International Group has found another place to borrow billions of dollars from the government: the Federal Reserve’s commercial paper program.

The distressed insurance company disclosed Thursday afternoon that it was borrowing up to $20.9 billion from the Fed’s program, under which the central bank is buying companies’ short-term debt in an effort to unfreeze the market for commercial paper.

A.I.G. already has access to two government credit lines totaling $122.8 billion in order to avoid collapse, and the company’s borrowing from the commercial paper program enabled it to reduce its debt under those lines.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, A.I.G. said four of its affiliates had exchanged commercial paper for cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It said in the filing that it would use the proceeds to refinance its outstanding commercial paper, as well as pay down its initial credit line of $85 billion.

The Fed said A.I.G. reduced its debt under the two existing credit lines to $83.5 billion, from $90.3 billion a week ago, by using cash from the commercial paper program, Bloomberg News reports.

With the latest loans of up to $20.9 billion from the Fed, the insurer’s borrowing now totals as much as $104.4 billion.

An A.I.G. spokesman, Nicholas Ashooh, told Bloomberg that the terms of the commercial paper program were better than those for the original $85 billion credit line, which has a higher interest rate.

“They’re paying off a Fed loan with another kind of government subsidy — it’s like using one credit card to pay off another credit card,” Robert Haines, an analyst at the research firm CreditSights, told Bloomberg. “If they make progress paying off debts over time, I don’t think it’ll be viewed as necessarily a bad thing.”

A.I.G. is rapidly running through the $122.8 billion made available by the Fed. Last week, A.I.G.’s chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, said the company might need to borrow even more money.

This enormous need for cash has raised questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say that at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

How quickly we forget!

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c0de7db153ef933a0575ac0a96f958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

Amazing that they could understand the consequences even before the tech bubble blew up...

September 30, 1999

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

By STEVEN A. HOLMES

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black borrowers, compared to 5 per cent of loans in the conventional loan market.

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.

''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,'' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ''If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.''

Under Fannie Mae's pilot program, consumers who qualify can secure a mortgage with an interest rate one percentage point above that of a conventional, 30-year fixed rate mortgage of less than $240,000 -- a rate that currently averages about 7.76 per cent. If the borrower makes his or her monthly payments on time for two years, the one percentage point premium is dropped.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.

Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites.

Home ownership has, in fact, exploded among minorities during the economic boom of the 1990's. The number of mortgages extended to Hispanic applicants jumped by 87.2 per cent from 1993 to 1998, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. During that same period the number of African Americans who got mortgages to buy a home increased by 71.9 per cent and the number of Asian Americans by 46.3 per cent.

In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites who received loans for homes increased by 31.2 per cent.

Despite these gains, home ownership rates for minorities continue to lag behind non-Hispanic whites, in part because blacks and Hispanics in particular tend to have on average worse credit ratings.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

The change in policy also comes at the same time that HUD is investigating allegations of racial discrimination in the automated underwriting systems used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to determine the credit-worthiness of credit applicants.

Will Batman save us?