Building wealth

There is a common sense truth about this due to compound interest and rising leverage as your principal increases. But there's also the aspect that if you make a million you pick up knowledge, a certain mindset and meet helpful people along the way that combined make your next million much much easier.

The system is indeed rigged. The rich tend to get richer, the poor tend to stay poor. Welcome to capitalism. Especially egregious when we're talking about inherited wealth.

Also, even as fast moving as today's world feels, that's nothing that will change in 3 or 10 or 50 years. It's basic common sense that's going to last you: Staying on top is easier than working yourself up.

If anything, earning the first nominal million is guaranteed to become easier and easier as inflation tanks its real value.

>making your first million dollars is the hardest thing ever
>the hardest thing ever
>Like, for real though, oh my god, like, the hardest thing EVER
This is stupid and makes it seem way more grandiose than it is.

>he thinks it's capitalism

That's the same insane logic that claims communism is awesome because it has never been tried irl. Like the idealistic principles on paper hold some inherent worth.

I'm not theoretizing about which system would work best under idea conditions. I'm describing the effects of the real world implementation, because that's all we have. I find comparisons of systems under ideal conditions entirely unconvincing.

Next you'll tell me that people are perfectly rational beings just because the model (homo oeconomicus) claims they are...

The phrase "The rich tend to get richer, the poor tend to stay poor" needs to die now.

Being poor in 2016 means having a cellphone, internet, air conditioning, a car, a refrigerator, television, cable, a washing machine and drier, a microwave, and innumerable other amenities that didn't even exist before recent history.

If you were to compare the poor of 2016 with the poor of 1916, who would you say is richer? Your phrase would be more correctly stated as "The poor are getting richer, and the rich are getting richer even faster. Welcome to capitalism."

>The system is indeed rigged. The rich tend to get richer, the poor tend to stay poor.

Not really, high IQ tend to be rich and low IQ tend to be poor. If you are a retard born to rich parents, you have a high likelihood of being poor. If you are a genius born to poor parents, you have a high likelihood of success. There is tons of empirical data form studies on this.

The poor tend to be poor because they make retarded financial decisions (payday loans, buying consumables on credit, leasing new cars, buying fancy cloths/jewlry, etc), dumb people doing dumb things. The rich tend to be rich because they make smart financial decisions (being competent in a desirable career, investing large amounts of pre and post tax income, not having children young, etc). Smart people doing smart things.

Earning a million dollars is easy, it just requires a plan, dedication and the ability to keep your focus on a reward many years in the future (again, a strong trait for people with high IQ, and weak for low IQ).

taxes are not a clear cut part of this equation lot's of options to postpone or avoid them.

>If you were to compare the poor of 2016 with the poor of 1916, who would you say is richer? Your phrase would be more correctly stated as >"The poor are getting richer, and the rich are getting richer even faster. Welcome to capitalism."

Someone with a brain, too bad itl be drowned out by meme goymunists.

yeah for me it's $100k

things change, nobody could afford the supercomputers in everyone's pocket this year in 1916. but i guarantee you lot's of thing were much affordable to the poor back then.

Even if there are (I can't think of any), if you look at things in the aggregate, the standard of living is a million orders of magnitude higher for the poor of 2016.

my first guess would be housing and land a lot cheaper back then. or at some point in between the dates.

standards of living is mostly higher because of two factors: medical technology and healthcare, other technological conveniences and basic food prices.

Oh don't play daft. Rich and poor are obviously used as relative terms in this context. That quote is equivalent to "the gap between the rich and the poor is widening" and that's a fucking fact. Don't put words into my mouth.
Plus, you're assuming I'm somehow anti-capitalist. Why would I be against a system that's massively benefitting me? But I can still point out that it's fundamentally unfair.

>amenities
Dude, have you ever gone out of your comfy bubble? Some of my rental properties are in the bad part of town - let me tell you, this is not how the poor are living. My poor tenants don't have a car (unless they're delivery drivers or something like that), have never in their life had air conditioning, wouldn't even be able to fit a washing machine or dryer into their shithole appartment and can't even call me to make excuses for missing out on the next rent because their phone credits have already run out half of the time. The best of my ghetto tenants has $300 to her name. And she saved up for that for a year. Something breaking down, even the loss of $100 is terrifying to them. Fuck that shit!

>Not really, high IQ tend to be rich and low IQ tend to be poor. [...] tons of empirical data
I'd like to see some of that. Because all the studies show that both the genetic component and the educational component of intelligence are generally inherited from your parents. Rich people are much more likely to have intelligent kids.

>The poor tend to be poor because they make retarded financial decisions.
No contest on that, that's definitely a fact. But I'm not saying it's impossible, just that the system is stacked against the poor. It's a vicious cycle. Them having less money means they have to pay more money. It's obscene what they spend on housing, banking, interest, etc just because they have shit credit and nobody trusts them. I mean, I'm glad they're around because their consumerism fuels the economy, but it's still harsh for them.

It is true if you think about it in simple terms

Going from 0 to 1 million is a 1,000,000% increase in your wealth, but going from 1 million to 2 million is just 100% increase in your wealth

+1 goy for listing only depreciable assets as an example of wealth.

at least the 1916 man had real silver coin and the homestead act was a thing.

>Going from 0 to 1 million is a 1,000,000% increase in your wealth
you flunked math didn't you?

Housing cost growth has wildly outpaced household income growth. Price of land has increased because it is more scarce, but housing costs have more than tripled, adjusted for inflation.

I would also argue people today have more incremental expenses than they did in 1916. Modern life is basically impossible without a cell phone, internet, car (and insurance), various utilities, student loans and more chances you will have to pay for repairs.

Quality of life has increased due to medical technology as said but that is about to hit the shitter as automation prices more and more people out of healthcare. Food is kept artificially low by cheap illegal labor. Once that is threatened shit will really hit the fan.

More abstractly I would argue that people probably had more fulfilling lives back then (and thus a higher quality of life): more satisfying, if laborious, jobs, more social cohesion, fewer things to worry about outside of health and food.

As far as wealth inequality goes I think it is untenable. We are in the bread and circuses phase but soon we'll reach the riots phase.

>0 to 1 million is a 1,000,000% increase in your wealth

So close and yet so far...

I'm not assuming youre anti-capitalist. It's just hard for you to make the argument to me that anyone has been wronged because their wealth is not accelerating as quickly as someone elses.

I understand that your rental properties might offer anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but in the aggregate, the lives of the poor have improved tremendously. In 1916, *every* poor person probably lived the way you describe. Today, only *some* of them do.

Just because science, medicine & technology etc have advanced doesn't mean the poor are richer than 1916

Wealth is relative, somethings worth is only measured against everything else, if the poor 50% of the population have a lesser share of the wealth of the country now than they did in 1916 then they are poorer, no debate about it.

...

1 to 1000000 would be correct. You can't grow 0 without external factors.

I don't disagree about incremental expenses, but I need some kind of citation on your claim that housing prices have tripled in real terms.

I'm reading an article of US News that says average take home pay in 1916 was $687/year, and the median house was $3200. Today, average take home pay is $53,000 and the median home is $177,600.

So a house used to cost 4.65x annual take home pay in 1916 and now costs 3.35x annual take home pay in 2016. It seems to me that buying a home actually got easier, as a percentage of earnings.

not even that would be correct tho
1,000,000% of 1$ is $10k

*US News & World Report.

Just clarifying.

Disagree. Home costs are not that low in most areas that can supply that income, and most first-time buyers are not making $53,000.

Let's say you are 24 and it's time to buy a home so you can stop throwing money in the rentpit. $53,000 would put you in the 89th percentile for income, way above average. 50th percentile is $22,500, and good luck getting a mortgage at your age and with your loans. Meanwhile rent, auto, etc are just eating away what could have been your downpayment.

>It's just hard for you to make the argument to me that anyone has been wronged
What are you trying to argue here? Just because everyone's life has improved we automatically live in the optimal system? I don't think this is true at all and this isn't some sort of whacky model where we are only permitted to make Pareto improvements. We are allowed to think about redistributing wealth and lowering inequality has been empirically shown to benefit everyone. Even the rich are supposed to have a better quality of life and life expenctancy when the Gini coeffient goes down. So even if you personally don't see inequality as a wrong in itself (I do), the unfair distribution of wealth wrongs us all by way of dragging down our quality of life.

This is another thing that I was just discussing on another thread. Americans are peculiarly obsessed with owning their homes. Many would be a lot better off renting and investing their down payment than pouring money into a home that is not going to appreciate that much in value (real terms).

All the people who bought homes in Detroit when times were good are now stuck with underwater mortgages that prevent them from pursuing other career opportunities elsewhere. Being tied to an enormous long term asset with little liquidity and little opportunity for capital appreciation doesn't seem like a wise pick in comparison to renting a cheap apartment and picking stocks (even if it's just an index fund).

>Americans are peculiarly obsessed with owning their homes
americans are also on average extremely wealthy. Homeowners in particular.

I wonder if there's a connection?

Also according to census.gov the median home price as of December 2015 was $299,000 while median household income for 2015 was $55,775. This means the median house is 5.36x the median household income, as of last year.

census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/uspricemon.pdf

census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/acsbr15-02.pdf

Living in an apartment sucks, especially a cheap one. Is it really any wonder people want to own a home? If you're not spending the money to improve your life, why bother?

Furthermore you have to buy a house at some point unless you plan to blow a lifetime's worth of rent, and comparing buying a house at all to buying a house in Detroit is disingenuous.

i fucking hate this home thing i think you shouldn't buy a home you can't pay off from pocket or from a years wage.

and that's not happening for me i can tell you that. i would need to work about 30 years for a home and i'm in the top 2% earning wise. with gf together we probably could do it in 15 years.

and then we would be at zero. literally zero. we could start saving all over again from scratch (altho now with no rent to suck the marrow out of it).

If I offered you 1) an investment in a long term, highly illiquid physical asset that returns somewhere between 0%-1% in real terms over the long run, or 2) an investment in stocks that are extremely liquid and have appreciated 7%-8% historically in real terms, which one would you choose?

I'm not here to tell you what's right for you. If you value owning your own home more than you value an extra 7% return and less liquidity risk, then that's up to you.

Again, what is the point of stock appreciation if your life is shit?

That's why I'm pointing out that it's up to you to decide whether the extra 7% is worth whatever living conditions you might end up in.

I'm very satisfied with my apartment and value that 7% much more than moving into a home.

Brits are obsessed with home ownership

So much so that its practically destroyed their housing market with foreign investors and letting agents muscling in but no housing projects for low incomes to live in.

you're assuming free rent in your comparison.

that's not reality.

in reality with the one option your rent is lost.
with the other your rent is put into your investment.

you should be over 18 if you're going to post here.

>Rich people are much more likely to have intelligent kids

Yes, so the system isnt rigged, it merely reflects the capabilities of individuals. By the way, this is true in non-capitalist systems too for the most part, intelligence is a primary factor in social and economic standing.

Nobody is out to get poor people, it is just that dealing with unintelligent people tends to create a lot of financial risk, and risk is expensive.

Poverty is endemic in most societies because we continually subsidize it rather than try and get rid of it. Literally the most effective policy measure ever used to reduce generational poverty was the 1 child policy implemented by China. Instead, in the US, your typical ghetto single mother with 2 kids can expect yearly government services equivalent to $65,000 a year. The incentives produce exactly the result you would expect.

I'm not assuming free rent. I'm assuming not paying property taxes, having to fix shit, having to pay homeowner association dues, or the other nickels and dimes that occur when owning a home. That is very much reality.

>That is very much reality.
you don't own a house so you have no real idea.

but if you want to make your comparisons equal you'd have to TAKE ALL OF YOUR RENT EACH MONTH AND PUT IT INTO STOCKS.

then stocks will outperform ownership. Because when you own a home at least part of your payment goes back into your investment.

renting, that money's just gone.

>it merely reflects the capabilities of individuals.
Sure, but since the individual capability depends to a substantial degree on the socio-economic background, this is circular logic. The poor deserve to be poor because they can't afford a good upbringing. Sounds a bit rigged to me...

not really, assuming you can pay mortgage rates as low as rent it will be a long mortgage where you pay about twice as much as the flat price of a home. before your mortgage is up you will again pay for it as much again in maintenance. so basically you are a few % better off with ownership. unless you pay out of your pocket or rents are exorbitantly expensive compared to ownership.

this topic is amusing because i was just talking to a friend about this last night.

basically, you'd lose about 4% per year on a house with costs all in; related expenses and mortgage interest. so to match the 8% of the stock market, you'd need to make 12% lol. a 500k home compounded at 12% per year over 30 years is something like 9 million dollars. highly unlikely.

on top of that, that's purely capital appreciation so you can't realize your profit until you sell. so you sell and now you still need a place to live. so you're stuck with an illiquid asset that generates no cash flow. you either rent or buy another smaller place. selling and buying property also has fees which completely whack your ROI.

i'm lucky that i've rented a place for 5 years and the landlord never raised rents on me. i'm also a good tenant and help him around the house. i make shit money compared to the math PHDs and business owners on biz.

i save somewhere around 50% of my work income per month. a 25k investment with a 10k contribution per year at 8%/year yields 1.4 million over 30 years. capital gains are taxed at 1/2 of regular income and of course that figure did not include dividend DRIPS. this portfolio would be completely liquid and you have cash flow from dividends.

i live in canada and with a TFSA, all the capital gains are NOT TAXED AT ALL. neither would the dividends. so i really can't see why anyone thinks owning a home is a superior asset. big whoop my rent is gone. i have 1.4 million liquid. do i want to own a home at some point, sure. but i don't view them as investments.

>so to match the 8% of the stock market, you'd need to make 12% lol
again, assuming you pay no rent and instead invest your rent payments in the market, this is true.

in reality renters pay rent and that rent is lost.

owners pay into equity and that payment appreciates.

so while you're throwing away $1k per month owners are investing it. even if the return is lower they beat you because $100k invested is larger than $0.

>owners pay into equity and that payment appreciates.
no you pay for about 20 years the banks dues, then you start getting equity.

you start getting equity the first year, it's just not much.

not much is still more than a renter's nothing.

yeah well i don't know, like i said here: every decade you roughly have to spend half the flat price on the home for maintenance insurance whatnot again. that's a general rule for new homes, older homes are worse in this regard.

so you start getting equity sure but amortization is greater than that.

any profit off equity is greater than the $0 profit renters make off of $0 equity.

except i only pay 600/month. i have higher potential earnings because i can move on a whim. if you've been following the canadian RE market, you'd know shit is just about to implode. buy high sell low. or watch your "investment" give negative returns for 15 years or some shit. what's the cost calculated with that? unknown of course.

with stock at least you can buy in 10k chunks and average down. no such thing with a mortgage agreement. and of course you MUST make payments or the banks takes your house. i can always move to a shithole if i have to. but trying to sell a house when no one wants to buy, like in canada right now, is an unquantifably painful experience. lose your job? all the "equity" you bought into is gone.

>in reality renters pay rent and that rent is lost.
really? so when you're 60, you'll need to sell your house, pay associated fees and either rent or buy a small condo. what's the price of that condo? 1/4? 1/2 of current home? you just zapped your equity by -25% or -50% with that purchase. in order to realize gains on property you MUST sell. a stock portfolio at least provides cash flow. what good is equity if you can't use it. or you can remortgage and pay interest AGAIN.

value minus obligations = equity. equity for homes is tied to market value. you don't get equity with a dropping RE market. no good having a home worth 450k but mortgaged at 500k. just like the stocks; but stock will at least provide cashflow. RE is even more dependent on market timing that stocks. mfw hearing friends of friends losing 400k on houses since last year.

>in order to realize gains on property you MUST sell.
or take them out in other ways.
if your house is increasing in value you can cash it out over and over again. You'll never gain equity, but you'll also be living in your house for free.
>you don't get equity with a dropping RE market
I forget we've got disadvantaged countries on here.

I'm sorry for your condition. It's a hell of a thing being born Canadian, but we make the best of what we're given, no? If buying doesn't pay where you're at, don't do it.

but please consider for a moment that not everyone is Canadian before advising everyone not to buy.

>but please consider for a moment that not everyone is Canadian before advising everyone not to buy.

please consider for a moment no country is immune to dropping markets in any asset class. or have you forgotten US 2008 already?

people have loans out the ass. student, car, house, possible medical loans. you end up income poor but house rich. if you asked someone if they'd rather have 1k extra per month or paying their mortgage with $100 left over, near unanimously you'd get people wanting the extra 1k. cash is opportunity. cash is quality of life. if you're were entrepreneurial, you'd have no recourse but to remortgage your house for more cash or take out business loans. more loans. unlike the stupid renter that has a significant reserves and can take out a smaller loan and thus have a lower debt service ratio.

thanks for avoiding all my other points. lack of mobility. lack of deferred payments like stock purchases.

for the vast majority of people, paying a mortgage is the only "investment" asset they have. and what do financial retirement planners tell people to do? DIVERSIFY.

renters don't have any obligation to stay once the home starts to go to shits. they will just move into a brand new home the difference in rent will be negligible. it's what i have been doing the past decade. face it most of the profit you claim is eaten up by the owners expenses most of the time.

but it all depends on a very simple ratio: rent/price if it's under 0.5% you rent if it's above 1% you buy in between it's very situational and subjective which is better.

>thanks for avoiding all my other points.
your points are valid you're just ignoring equally valid ones that disagree with you.

mostly it comes down to psychology though. If you give most people $1k/month to spend they aren't going to invest it. Buying a home forces them to invest.

also Veeky Forums operates under the false assumption that people actually have $1k a month or even per year to invest. In reality that only applies to basement dwelling emotional cripples, and even then mommy and daddy won't live forever.

>mostly it comes down to psychology though. If you give most people $1k/month to spend they aren't going to invest it. Buying a home forces them to invest.
>also Veeky Forums operates under the false assumption that people actually have $1k a month or even per year to invest. In reality that only applies to basement dwelling emotional cripples, and even then mommy and daddy won't live forever.

or you could actually be an independent adult with an okay paying job who doesn't spend money on stupid shit. once again tied to all those wonderful loans.

the reality is that your kind of attitude causes real estate bubbles. no asset goes up forever. the last time a bubble of this magnitude popped in canada, it took 15 years for prices to recover. and you would have of course advised people to buy rather than rent. just like vancouver this last spring. every other sector takes a bump small or large with RE dropping. your investment would anchor you to a region with shit economic prospects.

>no asset goes up forever.
it only needs to go up more than it drops.

I mean, real estate took a serious hit in my are in 2008-11. The market was fucking trashed. Inventory sat for years, and prices actually dropped by 10% for a while.

this doesn't change the fact that my house sold for $10k when I was 20 and is now worth $250k 25 years later.

I wish I had bought it 25 years ago but I didn't think I'd be living here then. If things keep going as they have it'll double in value before I pay it off though, so I'm fine with it.

sure, some markets aren't due for growth. California looks maxed out. But for most Americans if I had one piece of advice to give it would be buy a house as soon as you can. It MIGHT drop in value, but that drop will quickly turn to gains. There's a good chance your gains will be significant. How far does a $75k house in the south need to rise before it matches California prices? Millions. And until it does California will keep buying them and forcing them up.

Again, you have it completely backwards. Poverty does NOT cause low IQ. Low IQ causes poverty. This has been proven over and over again by longitudinal youth studies and adopted twin studies. "Helping" the poor mostly just creates more poverty in the following generation.

>Poverty does NOT cause low IQ.
actually there was a study that showed exactly that, iq took a dive in a crisis. turns out constant worry over lower priorities make you dumb.

How do you define crisis? If you are talking North Korean tier nutrition deficiency, sure. But again, the have done multiple adoption studies with identical twins and found that income level of the adoptive parents has little effect on IQ.

/thread

the comment is on par with "black holes is God trying to divide by zero" aka he doesnt know a goddamn thing and wants to feel better about himself

This also ignore cheap fixed rate leverage...

a million dollars is honestly a lot of money

A million dollars is not a lot of money, honestly.

i could live with it to the end of my days.

>Poverty impedes cognitive function
princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/75/69M50/index.xml?section=topstories

ya, 1 person maybe 2. You wouldnt be able to spend much though. You wouldnt ever have a large house, you wouldnt be able to go on any lavish vacations, you wouldnt be able to eat at nice resturaunts more than a handful of times. It's not a lot of money

well he got 171717171

>You wouldnt ever have a large house
well here where i live i could have a mansion and still have enough to invest and live off the yield like upper class.

U U
U U

>The rich tend to get richer, the poor tend to stay poor.
False. The rich get richer and the poor get richer as well.

>my first guess would be housing and land a lot cheaper back then. or at some point in between the dates.
Incorrect. Read Schiller's works on housing prices.

>That quote is equivalent to "the gap between the rich and the poor is widening" and that's a fucking fact.
Except you're being intellectually dishonest in your use. While the gap is widening the people who were part of the "poor" category in year will not be the next, same goes for the wealthy. You're doing the same thing most media does where it puts the image to mind that "the poor" is an unchanging group of people who's lot in life never changes except for the worse. In reality, the poor are getting better off over time, but conveniently those stats don't track individuals it tracks tax brackets.

>if the poor 50% of the population have a lesser share of the wealth of the country now than they did in 1916 then they are poorer, no debate about it.
There is a debate because that's a silly metric. Wealth relates to the nominal assets you have relative to the purchasing power of those assets, all held against any debts you have. The fact is that real purchasing power amongst the poorer brackets has improved.

>appreciate that much in value (real terms).
True, but it also doesn't depreciate in real terms either. Whereas rents paid are a 100% loss on all payments purchasing a house means that (depending on many factors, obviously) only 60-50% of your payment is a loss, the other half is maintained in full.

It took my wife and me 15 years to make our first million. The second took about 4.

>50th percentile is $22,500
Wrong again.

>empirically
Theoretically.

>pay off from pocket or from a years wage.
Why? A 3-4% loan is amazing. Also, if you're 97th percentile for earnings you're several hundred-thousand dollars a year, which fits your description of a year's pay.

You're being intellectually dishonest. The home carries far less overall risk than the stocks, provides the shelter that you neglect in your comparison, which could in effect outweigh any stock gains you've made.

That's not accurate. In America, if you have a high school education, don't have children until you're married, and work any steady job, you will not be poor. At that point you'd be considered middle class, with something around 90% chances by only doing those three things. Meaning, your child would now be born into a middle class family and have the socio-economic advantages as such. Meaning again, within two generations your family can become upper middle class.

>princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/75/69M50/index.xml?section=topstories

fucking lol

>cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, when faced with a unexpected large bill to pay

So, literally their study says, IQ doesn't change, but performance drops at the moment when you are poor and faced with unexpected bills (regardless of initial IQ).

None of which, has fucking anything to do with average life trajectories based on individual IQ vs parental income. If you feel like being bored to death reading 700 pages of sourced statistical analysis on the matter, read The Bell Curve. It wont make you happy or optimistic, but at least you will be informed.

60K*(1+(.05/12))^(12*30) = $268,064.66
So, for a 300k house, after the full 30 year mortgage is paid off, you will have more equity than investing in SPY.

no you wont replace the .05 with a .09 (market avg growth) and youll see the huge difference, even if you paid half in tax

.05 is much closer to inflation adjusted real growth

Instead of putting out lofty numbers like 1 million dollars, it is easier to produce goals that equal % of your current gross income. Like, the point where your investing reaches 10% of your non-investing income, then 20%, then 50%. It will probably snowball at that point because it will start accelerating past what you already put into it.

no not really, try a few $10k.
its local 2% not global.

>IQ doesn't change, but performance drops at the moment when you are poor
yeah semantics, doesn't change the fact that being poor makes you dumb and make poor decisions even tho your potential is unchanged.

No, exactly the opposite of semantics. Read the fucking summery. I know it's typed up in a typical liberal fashion to make you want to vote for communism, lots of "may"s and "might"s to imply their situational finding extrapolates to life outcomes with no evidence whatsoever. Longitudinal studies, you know, ones that follow real people their entire lives, are explicit: IQ is the most determinative single factor of life outcomes, no matter what economic bracket you are born in.

>if your house is increasing in value you can cash it out over and over again.

Forgive me for being an idiot, but where exactly is this cash coming from? I own my home in an appreciating market and I want to get in on this shit.

Imagine living in Romania, having had to have done your first, no questions asked, Romanian Leu (Romanian word for "Lion"). Or even worse, living down south, in Bulgaria, having had to have done your first, no questions asked, Bulgarian Leva (Bulgarian word for "Lion"). Talking about your first million $ is like knowing shit about THAT DOLLAR, to start with.
>$
Read the fucking book, people.

I (also) mean, in a country of Bible salesmen, they're still talking about their first million $.
>only in America
>not even our land, not even our gold, back east our moms, forward west, oops Japan
>in the meanwhile, stuck here with OUR WOMEN
>that dollar: $!