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  Features

  InsideCostaRica

Sunday, November 17, 2002 · Index

Finances

What does that word mean to us? Lately it seems that every conversation around the town is about a financial impasse or at the very least a temporary upset in our lifestyle brought about by someone’s mishandling of funds. It seems that almost everyone I meet has seen the end product of it in some way. It doesn’t seem to matter, the problem still exists if we are working for a company or own the company.

Our investments, savings, and assets used to be a growing dimension, a measurement of our uphill struggle to succeed and prosper. The financial side of our lives used to be easier to lay out. Our advisors helped us plan for retirement by providing insurance policies that paid a retirement benefit. They helped us with tax saving ideas and showed us how to defer taxes. It was and is not good enough to just accept the retirement benefits where you work, and now the where is the 401K plan after investing all the time and money in it, and your Social Security is not viable until you are at least 62.

Some of us “smart asses” bought high volume stocks (WorldCom and some other ones) and lost a fortune this last year. I know I sure did myself a lot of harm there.

Some others of us purchased stocks and bonds and were astute enough to make a fortune at it, and others of us made money in a business venture or two. Maybe we sold the business and had to sue the new owner later to get the payments that were supposed to be made.

It was not so hard years ago to get a judgment and collect on it, now it is nearly impossible to do because of some changes in the legal world. It seems that everyone is nearly judgment proof. This was not meant to be an advertisement but if you need help, my good friends on Florida’s west coast conduct a business http://www.amjr.com that does a good job of collecting funds on judgments that seem lost forever.

Where will all this go, will it continue to fester, aggravate us, or are we going to do something about the laws that promote the problem? Why are companies allowed to just take our money and run? For that matter, why is the government allowed to just confiscate our money at will? I have many friends that had legitimate funds “loaned” to the Brothers and also people that invested in the Genesis deal. In both cases the funds were made unavailable by some agency or other and we have to prove it was our money in order to “possibly” get some part of it back if any at all! Excuse me but this sounds like a huge government scheme to procure funds from the unsuspecting individual who does not stand a chance of refuting the charges drummed up against them.

In the case of the Brothers, the monies have been seized from everyone but there were only a very few people connected with the original drug money and they are known to the powers that be.

Fair is fair, why is your money locked away where you cannot use it and may never be able to recover it? Because some faction wants your money and they usually get what they want. Fighting “city hall” is fruitless. The government locks up scammers occasionally, who locks up the scammers in government? They just get “overlooked” and someone else gets the blame?

Have a nice day

Bari

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