<p>I am starting to think about planning for a default and the first thing that came to mind was covering my mother’s social security income - something that I’d need to talk to my siblings about. I think that this wouldn’t be difficult to manage but I don’t have a full picture of the financial pictures of my siblings (though they seem to be in good shape from what I can tell).</p>
<p>Then I got to wondering if there would be any college impacts - grants, research projects, etc.</p>
<p>What other things should I start thinking about or is it too early to start worrying? It would seem to me that this might have a moderate impact on college students.</p>
<p>I’m watching my holdings carefully - I’m not in panic mode yet because of very good earnings as you mentioned. If there is a pullback, I do expect it to be sharp because most everyone is preparing to hit the sell button if a decline really gets going. The financial stuff I can deal with fairly easily as we’ve had lots of experience this decade with big drops.</p>
<p>Even post debt ceiling, consider your mothers health care. It looks like there will be “changes” to medicare that are likely to significantly increase medical costs for seniors. Either loss of medication benefit or the voucher system being thrown around could cause individual financial problems. Just keep an eye on that. I am so hoping that they come up with some sort of idea that does not impact seniors too much. It is us in the middle generation that will end up picking up the financial gaps for our parents!</p>
<p>We are already discussing medical issues but yes, I do think that we’ll have to pick up more in the way of expenses, whether through insurance or direct payments. A default or some kind of agreement wouldn’t matter - her expenses are going to go up which may mean that our expenses go up.</p>
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<p>Well, that’s probably the way that it has to be. It’s probably the group that is best able to provide and that has the responsibility to do so.</p>
<p>I had one child that graduated this past year as did one of my sisters so expenses are somewhat less. He’s in graduate school and he’s earning some decent money this summer and will be during the year.</p>
<p>I think that things do get better as they finish up their schooling.</p>
<p>DrGoogle, I hope that is correct. But loss of the medication benefit would affect current recipients. And I will not believe any of the rhetoric until I see the final legislation/repeals. To me, all of the recommendations are not clearly defined. And changing way too quickly to keep up.</p>
<p>The feds send out 70-80 million checks every month; if some folks don’t receive their checks next month, things are going to get critical for everyone real fast.</p>
<p>True, Lizard. In my heart, I want to believe that “they” will not let it come to that. But I have been called naive on more than one occasion. Even if the debt ceiling is raised, or an agreement reached, I do believe that there will be long term ramifications to all of us. I am very concerned about the cuts to the seniors.</p>
<p>vlines, I never read that the voucher system is for older than 55 crowd(Ryan’s plan). But of course, some people like to keep stretching the truth or as Pelosi referred to it as “the gift that keeps on giving”.</p>
<p>The WSJ has a blog running on the debt-ceiling stuff and the latest entry is about what banks should be doing to prepare. I recall getting a chunk of cash out of the bank after 9/11 in case the banking system ran into problems. I eventually put it back into the bank.</p>
<p>The banking system should be far more resilient today as it has had to withstand a number of large shocks since then - but I bet that there would be unexpected glitches that pop up.</p>
<p>qdogpa, I agree with you. Much ado about nothing. Rest assure if we’re defaulting every single Rep/Dem/President/VicePresident will be voted out. What’s to loose? We can start over.</p>
<p>Well, nothing happened (or at least not much), because of very good preparation because people were worried about what could happen.</p>
<p>I had a customer where we had written their accounting software on a 16-bit system in the 1980s that used 16-bit integers to represent dates. 16-bit integers have a range of -32768 to 32767. The format was the thousands represented an offset from 1978 or 1977 and that the rest represented the day of the year. There would obviously be a problem with year 2000. There were also many reports that sorted on the last two digits of the year. The feeling was that the accounting system would have been replaced by then (how many accounting systems last for 20 years?). I believe that a rewrite was done on a newer 32-bit system using a larger (64-bits I think) date format - basically a lot of assumptions were looked at again.</p>
<p>At any rate, the default scenario is coming up on us fast - mainly because nobody thinks that it could happen. That’s quite different from Y2K.</p>
<p>BCEagle, I agree. I was working for a software/MIS consulting firm in 1989, and they were aware of the Y2K problem then, and planning fixes already.</p>
<p>It is virtually impossible to comment on the current situation without being political, so I will refrain. :)</p>