Using A Credit Calculator To Figure A Car Payment Human Services: Fill & Download for Free

If you’re looking to clean up your credit and restore your credit score, you probably need the services of credit repair companies or agencies. Right here, you can quite possibly find the help you need to fix and rebuild your credit score as fast as is humanly possible by contacting Eversole Inc. A few weeks ago i needed to get a credit repair to get a mortgage and then i got in contact with Davis Eversole here on Quora, check out his profile on Quora and reach out to him through is mail so you too can achieve this.5 Steps to Repair & Restore Your CreditBelow we lay out how to restore your credit in Canada. We also have another in-depth discussion on this topic including how to fix your credit score fast (if that’s possible in your case).Here are five steps to credit restoration or ways to repair your credit:Make sure the information on your credit reports is accurate.Remove all collection notices from the public records section of your credit report.Reduce all revolving credit balances (credit cards, lines of credit, and overdraft) to under 75% of your credit limits. Then reduce to less than 50%.Make sure that a good amount of credit is available to you that you are not using. If you have bad credit and don’t have any form of good credit right now, consider obtaining a cash secured credit card to rebuild your credit. Here’s where to find the money to do this.Establish a good history of always paying your debts on time with no late payments.1. Correct Any Mistakes on Your Credit ReportsIn Canada there are two credit reporting agencies Equifax and TransUnion (in the US, there are more). All banks, credit unions, and most lenders report the consumer debt you owe along with your payment history to one or both of these credit reporting agencies. Using this information, these companies create a three digit score that predicts how likely you are to repay your debts. This is called a credit score. Credit scores range from a low of around 300 to a high of 850 or 900 - depending on the company that's generating the score. The higher your score, the more likely you are to repay your debts in full. With a good credit score of 700, it's estimated that there is only a 2% chance that you won't repay your debts as agreed. With a credit score of 750, it's estimated that there is only a 1% chance that you will fail to pay your bills. However, if someone has the lowest credit score of 300, it's estimated that there is a 55% chance that they won't fully repay all their debts. You can learn more about credit scores and the factors that are used to calculate them.How to Fix Your Credit FastThese are often the fastest ways to boost your credit score:Clean up any inaccurate or old information on your credit report. There should be no negative information on it that’s more than 7 years old. If there is, get it removed.Clean up the public records section of your credit report. Get rid of the old parking tickets, unpaid cell phone bill, utility bill, etc. Pay them but arrange for them to be removed at the same time.Pay down any high credit balances as quickly as possible. Carrying a balance over 50% of your credit limit will start to impact your credit score. Balances over 75% of your credit limit will really hurt your score.Make sure you have a fair amount of credit that’s available to you that you’re not using.If you currently don't have any credit or only have bad credit, getting one form of new credit and paying it as agreed can really help your credit score. A cash secured credit card can be a good way to do this.Because banks and finance companies have millions of customers and credit reporting agencies create credit scores for many millions of people, mistakes are going to be made from time to time. Most of the time these mistakes are only minor, but sometimes they are big enough to negatively impact your credit rating. The first thing you should do to restore your credit score is to obtain a free copy of your credit report, and carefully look through it to make sure all the information it contains is accurate. If you find any errors, you can either speak with your creditor who is incorrectly reporting information and ask them to correct it, or you can dispute the information through the credit reporting agency's dispute process. Here is where you can file a dispute with Equifax, and here is where you can dispute something found on your TransUnion credit report.It’s important that you check both of your credit reports with each agency as not all creditors report to both agencies. Each agency also allows you to put a message on your credit report explaining your side of the story if you are unable to resolve a matter (or if your personal information has been stolen and you want to warn everyone to make doubly sure that it’s actually you applying for new credit). Putting a message on your credit report should be a last resort because it usually doesn’t mean much to anyone but you. Most financial institutions have automated lending processes or strict lending guidelines that don’t give front-line employees much room to make an exception for someone who was caught up in a bad situation. You really need to have inaccurate information changed. You can't just try to explain things away. While your explanation might sound great, it’s unlikely to help your credit situation very much.One additional tip for this section would be that if one of the credit reporting agencies is reporting negative information on a debt or a form of credit that is more than 7 years old, you can request that they remove that information because it should no longer be reported. Removing old, negative information from your credit report could really improve your credit score.2. Get Collection Notices Removed from the Public Records Section of Your Credit ReportWhen you obtain a copy of your credit report, you may notice that it has a number of sections. The main section shows the different types of credit or debts that you have (credit cards, line of credit, overdraft, car loan, student loan, and possibly even a mortgage), what company the credit or debt is with, your credit limit, your payment history for the past 7 years, when the account was opened, when you last made a payment and the amount of the payment. This information cannot be removed from your credit report. It is what the lender’s computer system reports (if there is an error, your lender will need to correct what they are reporting). However, there is a public records section near the bottom of the report that can contain old, unpaid parking tickets a city is reporting, an unpaid cell phone bill, an unpaid utility bill, or a small debt some company claims you owe them.Information in the public records section is not permanent. It can be changed, and it’s usually worth changing because it can have a devastating effect on your credit score. We have seen a lot of people get this information removed from their credit report by contacting the creditor who is reporting it, resolving the matter, and requesting at the same time that the creditor remove the record of the debt from their credit report as part of the debt repayment arrangement. As soon as the public records section is cleaned up and completely clear, your credit score should improve dramatically as long as you don’t have a lot of other derogatory information on your credit report (like a lot of late payments, a bankruptcy, or a consumer proposal). This tip, however, does not work for the main section of the credit report where different types of credit and debts are reported. That information remains on your report for 7 years.3. Reduce Your Credit BalancesIf the balance you are carrying on any of your credit cards, line of credit, or overdraft is over 50% of your credit limit, this could be hurting your credit score. One of the big factors in determining your credit score is how much credit you’re using compared to your credit limits. If you have a $5,000 limit on one of your credit cards, and your balance is $500, then you are using 10% of your limit. However, if you have a balance of $4,500 on the card, then you’d be using 90% of your credit card’s credit limit.If you were the credit card company, what would you do if someone in the first scenario asked you for a credit limit increase? Since they only have a balance of $500, it would appear as though everything is fine, and they are using the credit responsibly (since they have another $4,500 in credit they could use but are not). However, if someone with the second scenario asked you for a credit increase, you may be a bit more cautious and ask a few more questions. If all their other credit cards are close to being maxed out and they don’t have any savings, one emergency, job loss, or illness could push them into a bad situation where they might have difficulty repaying their debt. This is why the amount of debt you are carrying compared to your credit limits is important to lenders. It’s one way of estimating how much room you have before you have a problem.By now you’ve probably figured out that getting close to the maximum limit on your credit cards and other forms of revolving credit (lines of credit and overdrafts) is not viewed as a good thing by the credit reporting agencies. You actually don’t want to use more than 75% of your credit limit. Doing this will significantly hurt your credit score. If you don’t want to hurt your credit score at all, make sure all your balances are under 50%. Reducing them to under 30% will make you look even better.4. Make Sure You Have a Fair Amount of Credit That You’re Not UsingContinuing our discussion of credit limits, based on the information outlined above, you can see that if you are not carrying a balance on a credit card or line of credit of more than 30% of your credit limit, you’re going to have a lot of credit that’s available to you that you’re not using. This is one of the best ways to restore your credit score: have a good amount of credit that’s available to you but don’t use it. This shows that you are not only responsible, but it makes it unlikely that an emergency or minor financial setback could derail your finances and prevent you from being able to repay your debts.Having a good amount of credit available to you doesn’t mean you have to have a $20,000 credit limit. If you have a $3,000 credit limit, but never carry more than a small balance on the card, this should work fairly well at enhancing your credit score.If you have bad credit and no one wants to offer you new credit right now, you could save up some money and get a secured credit card. To get this type of credit card, you put down a certain amount of money as security for a credit card and you receive a certain limit in return. Cash secured cards start at round $200 to $300, and your cash deposit guarantees the credit card issuer that they will be paid. In a worst case scenario, they could close your card and use your cash deposit to pay off your outstanding balance (this would really hurt your credit score: a credit account being closed by the creditor for non-payment. So don't ever let this happen if you can help it).If you’ve heard the sales pitch of credit repair companies and are wondering whether a loan or a credit card is the best way to repair your credit, here are our thoughts on which one is better (our review of the pros and cons).If you’re wondering where to get a cash secured credit card, here is a list of cards to have a look at. Just select your province and then you can compare the cards. Here is another list with a few more cards that aren't included on the first list.If you’re left scratching your head wondering where you’re going to find the money for the cash security on a card, here are a whole bunch of ideas of places you might be able to find it.5. Establish a Good Payment Credit HistoryWithout question, the very best way to bring about the restoration of your credit is by always paying your bills on time and establishing a solid payment history with no late payments. This takes time, and that’s often what people with bad credit don’t like to hear. But that’s the way the credit system is built. It’s built to recognize good payment credit history over time. If you have had a particular credit card or line of credit for a long time, you can use this aspect of the credit reporting system to your advantage. The credit scoring system likes to see a lot of history. If you can clean up a credit card that was opened many years ago and establish a new history of no late payments, the age of the account can help restore your credit as the old late payment history falls off over time.

As a preface to readers: this is HYPOTHETICAL.Hypothetical-1. of, based on, or serving as a hypothesis. 2. a hypothetical proposition or statement.The fact that you have to tell adults…with computers, who can ostensibly read higher than an 8th grade level that something is hypothetical online now says far more about people than the internet.Money FoundThis will take time to work out, you have to know that as soon as you’re standing there looking at the pallet. If possible, sit down with some paper and a pen next to the pallet and write out your first 10 steps. You’ll need a basic map before you launch into action. 1 hour to plan.I agree with: tell no one. Ever.Your cover story is a dying relative in California. Go, within 3 days. You need a 3 day head start. All of us have about a week or so before jobs, family, friends would inquire about us. Buy a burner phone—you lost yours at the airport and call a short list of people every week, destroy burner, burn the burner to a smokey, plastic cinder. Always call from a new burner from a new location. If possible leave them on vehicles heading THAT way. North, west, south, east, any direction you’re not going. Trains, buses, planes.If you do it right you can even reappear in your old life in 5 years after you have secreted, moved and secured the cash…..elsewhere.My HYPOTHETICAL logic to this scenario and the action is that you can’t be absolutely sure that the money is untraceable or won’t be missed. Assume, in this HYPOTHETICAL scenario, that someone, somewhere, even if all of the drug dealers are dead, knows about the money.Year 1Logistics and MovementFirst issue: how much does $1 million weigh?$1M in $100 bills = 22.05 pounds.$1M in $20 bills = 110.5 pounds.So it’s 24x the above. Let’s say it’s probably $20s. So half a ton. 24 trips to move it. You’ll need a van or a U Haul truck.I’d get boxes, duffel bags and rent a car/SUV. Rent a storage room. You have about a day to move it. I would make a stop at a motel room and drop off a few duffel bags, just in case I returned and something was going on—-I still got 10%-20%. $2–$4 million in the hotel room, this might be my expenses cash anyway.Let’s say I get it all. All $24 million safely into the truck.Go back to the hotel room and rest, make a reservation at another hotel. Find a car/truck to buy for cash—-under $2000 online/newspaper. Get this truck—-better yet an RV, buy it, transfer money from storage room to RV/truck. Most storage places aren’t paying attention if you’re going back and forth, in and out. You need to move the money from your first stop and scatter your trail.Your first trail is to the storage place and the hotel.Then to a New hotel.Then to a New storage place.In the interim, you get your van/RV (preferable) and you decide where to go. I would go South, first.Once South I would buy another truck/van/RV for cash. I’d want a POS. Nothing fancy. Leave the first old van/RV in front of a motel that you’ve rented a room for several days. Long enough for you to get back on the road. The beauty of the cash is that you can pay for gas, food, supplies in cash along the way and your trail is reasonably scattered with similar vans/trucks/RVs.You have to keep moving to scatter your trail.(The logic of scattering your trail is that if someone were to follow you, it’s harder to follow someone who stops places, ostensibly to set up—-you have the #1 Storage Room—-so they have to watch that room or break into it. Are you coming back? It’s going to be difficult to break into a storage room so they have to wait. While they are waiting, you’ve boogied on to another storage place and down the same thing. What this does, for a minimal amount of time and money is it forces anyone trying to track you to stop and watch a cold trail. Are you near the storage room? Is the money in it? Are you coming back to it?My HYPOTHETICAL acts as if someone will come after you. The key to evading a tracker, legal or otherwise, isn’t speed or distance, that can always be surpassed but time. You want to wear out your trackers. You want them criss crossing their own tracks trying to discern yours and your intentions. If I find $24 million, I’m balls to the wall going to play this out once I touch the money and move it. And I play to win, on my terms.)Then I’d back track to NJ if I started in NY. You need to be somewhere that you’re familiar with but new to where you’re going.You need a ghetto/lower middle class neighborhood to rent a house in.(The logic of this—but I didn’t consider this, because Black and Latino people don’t think about this as Black and Latino people is that we can hide easier among our own people than not. $24 million is cartel level cash—-that’s White and Latino, Mexican, Colombian, etc.. They won’t be able to ease into a Black/Latino ghetto unnoticed by the residents. As an individual Black man I can rent a room or a house and drop in and be invisible and quickly build rapport. Poverty is all about relationships. I passively can get half a dozen watchers keeping their eyes open faster than I could in secure community whee I stand out.)Another storage room. Cash.(The logic is now I’ve created 3–4 storage rooms in 3–4 parts of the Eastern seaboard. if I paid upfront for 6 months to a year and left boxes, and even some money in them — one if trackers break in, they find the money or they find nothing. But they now have to break into a place, commit a crime, evade storage security. News, the storage place, someone will alert me that my unit was broken into. This immediately answers whether I’m being tracked or not. Anyone tracking the money will have an idea of it’s size and weight so they’ll think a storage place is logical as I figure out what to do with the money. Not the RV/truck itself. Especially if I’m on my second or third truck/RV. It generally takes the DMV in multiple states anywhere from one month to six to update ownership records.)I might not even transfer title of the vehicle I’m in until I get a another one. I dump one truck in Charlotte. Buy another in Raleigh, don’t change the registration. Drive it for a day to Virginia and buy the next truck there. A tracker again has to wait for North Carolina to update. That’s potentially a month before they start expanding to neighboring states. If I’m really hot, I’d not buy the 3rd vehicle in a neighboring state but in the state on the other side — instead of Virginia, buy in Maryland. A tracker now has to systematically go from state to state using NC as a start point — but should they track west, south or north? That questioning — gives me time.In California you can buy a brand new car, and not have plates for 6 months (they’re changing the law — but Steve Jobs regularly replaced his car with the exact same car before the plates deadline occurred…so technically he was driving a car with no traceable plates.)Your next goal is to get something in another state that you control. Another storage room.I would separate the money. Maybe three or four drops over two or three states. At some point you might need to walk away from everything and you’ll need to walk away, period, never look back, don’t go back to your place, no clothes, no mementos, nothing. Just walk.(The logic is I’ve bought some time. Maybe a month, maybe 3–4 months. I’ve also created a human network (storage attendants, police, newspapers, etc.) as unknowing watchers to keep an eye out for trackers after me. But I’ve gained time. Now I have to long-haul ass because the east coast is too hot. Yet on the other hand that’s what a tracker might think I’m doing so I have to double blind myself. I go old school. Old Native school.Native American war parties would attack a camp, fort, etc.. Draw out the enemy. Sometimes the force was too great and the war party would have to run, retreat. The enemy might know that it was Sioux or Apache or Narragansett so they would know we’re heading upland 200 miles to where the tribe camp is with their reinforcements and more importantly women and children. The war party on the run would intentionally do this criss-crossing game, leaving behind war party members to distract, delay and confuse the enemy. This might mean if there were 10 of you that along the 200 mile trek, you left behind 5 people to sometimes start a fight, the enemy would stop. 3 to run tracks to the east rather than the north east, creating the tracks of ten, the enemy would follow. 2 more would circle behind the enemy and attack them from behind. This gave the fastest 5 men time to get to the village and move the village.But with $24 million I have to always assume trackers are coming. I’m playing for time. I also have to assume that the trackers will get close to me, no matter what, so I must have a bug out plan. Because no one can be left alive over this $24 million, once you take the money, any of it, it’s now your life. Or your death. Your only chance is to decide, on your own terms, how you’ll live and die. Like a Sioux war party.)The Art of Disappearing in Plain SightNow the real work begins. You have to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life and where. The challenge of America is that you’ll always be looking over your shoulder from wherever this money came from. Maybe you can get scot-free away, maybe not. $24 million is different than a few million. $24 million suggests the originator can travel abroad, so you have to consider where you can and can’t go. The places are limited.Monaco.Fiji Islands.Australia.Africa (South Africa — maybe).Rio.France.I would go to the airport and buy tickets to several North American cities leaving on varying dates. Go to the loading gate, check in and then walk away if possible. You need to create a trail, a lot of false positives. This is easier to do with trains and buses, at least a dozen tickets going to multiple points. You have to become a ghost. When someone comes looking for you, you need them checking a dozen trails by train, car, bus, plane — it might mean your life.I’d then use a year in seclusion, bouncing from cash hotels to cash hotels, using a fake ID to plot and plan my next moves.(A point about ID came up, needing it for hotels. Credit cards. You can use gift cards and even Hotel gift cards or online site gift cards. You can make a reservation with a card and pay in cash when you arrive.)The next big question is how much money are you willing to spend to keep $20 million? It will cost you several million to keep the $20 million.I’d use the year to find people in financial distress. Real estate developers. Financiers. Attorneys. Auctioneers. But they have to be knowledgeable and right on the edge of desperate. Not a criminal. Someone who is motivated to help you, hopefully several someones who don’t know each other. You need someone INSIDE of a high money system to move your money.Test cash — say 10% as a brokers fee to someone to move $1-$5 million. You need a credible lie as to why you have this cash. That’s the biggest challenge. Now here’s the kicker: the government will eventually notice cash deposits but how long is that eventually? A tax period? A year? What if I deposit on say January 1st of 2020? Then logically I might not have to answer for it until 2021–2022. They’ll wait a year to see if you file/answer. Then pursue. That’s 2 years right there. Time. You’re always playing for and with time.But you have to make sure that you’re willing to lose your test cash. Say at first a million to move into an account. Set up a business account. Then write one check from one account to another. Set up another business. Invest in several, small businesses. A Chinese restaurant, a laundromat, a grocery store, a bodega, a cell phone store, a discount store, a thrift store. A shifty lawyer (How do you find a shifty lawyer? A criminal attorney that specializes in drug cases. I would hang out at a court house, watch who has the most clients and what their charges are.) would help you set up seed money that you could then move into legit businesses fast. Perhaps a dozen or more businesses, partnerships. I buy 25% of Bob’s laundromat and pay Bob $1000 a month in money orders for 5 years. I just have to buy a money order every few days and I could do this for a dozen businesses in varying states.(The logic is — I don’t need a dozen businesses or partnerships to succeed, I need one or two. The rest are McGuffins. Distractions. I’m dropping seeds, planting them, creating a legal mix and scattering across multiple states in very small ways to obtain legal, financial access. Once I get that I can start parsing cash into accounts I control or have access to or can mix my money into other businesses.Note: Someone brought up tracing the cash itself. Drug dealers don’t possess the technology of the Secret Service/Treasury Department to do this. But let’s give these mofos the benefit of this just to make the exercise fun. In order to track money, generally by serial number it has to get into a banking system, a reserve. There are several large ones through the country.I spend $100 at Joe’s Gas Station in Southern Jersey.I buy a truck for $2500 in Southern Jersey.I buy food and supplies at several stop and go shops along the highway from NJ to PA, $1000.I spend $200 at a motel in eastern Pennsylvania.I buy a truck for $2200 in Pennsylvania.I spend $500 at a storage place in Charlotte.I buy food and supplies at Wal-Mart in North Carolina, $1000.I spend $1000 in Raleigh on storage.I buy a truck for $2000 in North Carolina back woods.I buy another truck in Virginia for $3000.Here’s the problem with even a government entity tracking money:Circulation.There’s estimated to be a trillion dollars floating electronically around the world in bank accounts, unclaimed.There’s estimated to be billions in cash in the USA that has not been retrieved back into the Reserves. (Under mattresses, hidden, forgotten, lost, DB Cooper.)It takes time for the cash from all of my purchases to move into circulation in a specific way.My above list isn’t as simple to track as it looks, in cash money. Instead look at it as it’s depository/hand.StorePrivate citizenMultiple stores and private citizensCash/credit businessPrivate citizenBusiness-cash and creditLarge retailerBusiness-cash and creditPrivate citizenPrivate citizenWalMart. I used to work at WalMart, they collect and store and then reuse cash throughout their regional store systems. That money is not getting to a governmental or a bank scanning system soon.Private citizens—where are they going to spend that money? Bills, food, leisure—WalMart, bank, movie theater. A third party removed from me will deposit the money, if they deposit it at all. Is it unusual to have a few hundred, a few thousand on hand at home, to split it up with the wife and kids. That’s the reason why I’m buying under a certain number. Large amounts get deposited, smaller amounts get held and spent.Business and Cash business, will hold it’s cash. Or deposit weekly. Probably not nightly because as a storage place how much cash do they get that they run out the bank with? They need that cash on hand for more possible cash customers. Now those cash customers come to storage place, change a $100, get 3 of my $20s and take those and go to…..Walmart.Total: $15,000 spent. Times 5 $20s that’s 750 $20 bills.Dispersed, imagine 750 $20 dollar bills scattered across the above 5 states, cities, towns, small towns, highway stops. Let’s say you got serial number pings, it would take awhile to get the pings because the bill has to make it’s way back to a bank/reserve. $20s for a reason. $100s are less common and you’d stand out. Remember that fat guy who paid with a $20 bill in front of you two months ago at the Piggly Wiggly? Yeah, I didn’t think so.The below map is now a HYPOTHETICAL illustration. It has no bearing to the words printed on it. Imagine each one of those dots is our tracked $20 bills. What does this tell you?The dude with the $24 million dollars is on the East Coast maybe.Now imagine it’s me, you think I’m not going to burn trails across the country, leave cash on buses and trains and in cars? Not a lot. A few hundred, here and there. Nothing of consequence that someone won’t pick up, count their lucky stars and go spend on casual, normal purchases. Ten or twenty of these drops, I bet less than 3 of the drops actually gets deposited to a bank. And if it does—-let’s say I put $300 in $20s in a wallet on a seat on an Amtrak going to Washington, DC. I hop off before the train leaves. The wallet is found in Washington D.C. or someone finds it at a point beforehand, gets off and a whole new cluster is created in Baltimore. I’d have the entirety of the USA covered in less than a month with false-positive trails.Every one of the major reserves and banks would flag money.I would plant money on trains, buses, cars going in a variety of directions, in abandoned purses and backpacks on college campuses, get the money into circulation. Everywhere.Scary Fact: Cocaine traces found on 4 out of 5 of every US currency bill,. Not because it was used to snort coke but because it’s such a fine powder it transfer easily.)Here’s the loophole of taxes—-you have time to declare what it is and where it came from. Time is what will allow you to implement your next plan. Which is why you need time to figure out what you want to do with your life and to lay reasonably low for awhile. It’s easier to hide among poor people than rich. Plenty of hotels take cash and you can live there week to week or change every few months.(Most poor people, even middle class don’t plan their lives. Rich people do. The planning creates the success, not the success. With time and adroit planning, you can manage all of this. Hell, you’re not working full time anymore and you’re just ostensibly taking care of that dying relative, right? As an aside to this, I would add that there are constant questions about what do “rich” people do that poor people don’t. Rich people start from the premise that there is a solution, complex perhaps, to their challenge. Poor people throw up their hands when their FIRST thought proves unworkable. Rich people people say shit, and get a pad and say there are at least 100 ways to do this, I’ll chart them all, investigate them and come up with 10 and then find 10 people to answer what’s workable and not. From those 10 and those 10 people, I’ll narrow it down to 5 ways that will work.)Accept The New Reality: Your old life is over. Accept it.Your new goals are to find the people who will help you set up your new life.You need a new identity. Several, in fact.I would avoid criminals and instead find somewhere populated by immigrants, maybe even do some Home Depot day labor work. Talk to them. They know ways to get ID. That’s what you need. A new identity. Several in fact. Get several identities, stash them with the money drops. Act as if one day you will only have time to get to a stash and run. I’d slowly set up cars, used, with the money nearby—-long term parking.(Logic. You need to learn from people who are surviving, living, taking care of their families, living on the margins, perhaps even hiding in plain sight how they do it. Juan and his buddies in the pic? Your new mentors. They know how to live off of the grid but access it as different identities for what you will need. You spot Juan a couple of hundred for his contact for a SS card, birth certificate and you can get a new license, grow a bank account and credit cards.)I’d also go to a gun range and take private lessons. Buy guns at gun shows t avoid paperwork and have a gun within six feet of you and the money at all times. I’d also go out into the wild and practice killing animals and gutting them, get past squeamishness at killing.At some point you will probably have to hurt someone who is after the money or who tries to take the money from you. Or the trackers will find you and you’ll have to fight/escape. You must be your first but not your only weapon. I’d take aikido lessons if I were a woman, boxing lessons too. Aikido and boxing and wrestling as a man. You’ll need to know how to fight, even if it’s at a gas station late at night on one of your sojourns. But your first defensive tactic is to always get away.I would also take security guard lessons and keep taking more and more of the classes to understand fire alarms, buildings, transport, weapons, observational skills. Your biggest weakness will be the police and law enforcement. If they get to close to you or have reason to search your premises, you can’t have anything that looks like more than what you are. Which is why the money has to be secreted and broken up. If your hotel gets drug raided, they can’t find your laptop and books or gun (I’d keep it small, maybe in a bag in my pocket, a Starbucks cup, something innocuous.) You have to walk out every day ready to never come back to that room and ready to dump anything on you that connects you to you.That means your clothing will have to be more basic, monotone, boring. Slacks, khakis, a suit, shirts, shoes, sneakers, hiking boots, a travel bag. Anything you can replace, you do replace. Anything that can be replaced, you don’t carry. That immediately lightens your load. I would leave bags with clothing at hotels, happens all the time. You put $200 in cash in it, no one will ever report the bag.(Logic-DNA: I would also at this point start getting weird about DNA traces. By that I mean I would frequent sex clubs, adult book stores, gyms and start gathering hair, semen samples, blood samples and liberally leaving around places you’ve been. Again a higher level trail scattering.)I would also buy, with cash, financial planning books and then dump them on buses, trains, etc. so that the hotel staff never sees what you’re “thinking” about.(You have $24 million in cash. Money will make you a target and you will have to burn the night oil to keep it. You have to constantly think about that now as your full time job so you need a crash course on financial planning and international finances. With enough of this scattering you have maybe 1 year to pull this off, it’s literally a heist. I’d cut that to the bare-wire to 6 months.)Someone will be a problem one day. You have to get yourself in your secluded year to a level where you’re ready to handle problems at a level most people are specially trained at. I would spend time at the gym, a personal trainer, and tell the hotel I do something stupid like data entry and go to my classes several times a week. I wouldn’t isolate myself though, you might need teh protection of a crowd to alert you to danger and facilitate your getting away. I go to movies and concerts quite often, several times a week. This gives you the protection of the crowd but more importantly, if anyone is following you they will stand out because it’s more difficult to blend in to a crowd, two, three, four times in a row AND keep track of following you.The secondary effect of all of this physical working out this has is you’ll probably look different than you did when you got a hold of the money. This gives you time to physically grow into new identities and to grow your new identities that you’ve obtained. You can now play with hair color, eye color, beards, clean shaven. I would have IDs with a variety of looks—-shaven, bald, bearded, something I could change in a short period of time or explain away but different from the other.Again buy travel tickets scattering across the country from several different outlets, make it weekend gigs to go places and just buy tickets. This is your new hobby, false positive trails.When someone tracks you, and eventually someone will, you need to have gone back and forth over your own trail half a dozen times. So that no one can see where you started or stopped. You’ll probably have to keep track of this in some basic way—-don’t keep this list/map on your person, on your computer nor with any of the money. I’d say a USB drive with just a list that you only access from public-library pcs or Fed Ex/Staples. You’ll need to avoid your own clustering. Or create so many clusters that it’s impossible to discern what’s a clustering.You will also have to no longer use any of the social media you have used, the search history, websites. You have to change everything. I would spend the year slowly deleting what I could and recreating false positives again. Family in different states, pictures from places you’ve never been, etc.. People don’t realize that we create “internet fingerprints” as individual as our physical ones when we go online based upon how you think and therefore how you search. You’re going to have to work diligently at scrubbing this, changing this, being a new person. I would start creating social media for new identities, attaching emails, uploading pics of places, people you’re “related” to. You have to grow the identities Juan helped you create/buy.HYPOTHETICALLY, This excessive diligence might seem insane but you have multiple short and long term problems:You don’t know what you don’t know. (Where did this money come from, is anyone looking for it or knows about it? You might never know the answer to this question but you have to act like there’s a 12 man bounty squad after you. Because....there might be.)You don’t know what you need to know, yet. (You’re learning how to move, safe guard and launder $24 million…on a Thursday. Give yourself a break. But create rules about how much cash you carry, spend, what you buy and don’t buy. You can’t flash money. Yet.)You don’t know what others know. You have to become the kind of person who controls the narrative about yourself. That’s not just simply lying, that’s filling in the blanks that people nose in about. Money draws attention and you’ll have to deflect it even as you use a little bit of money to keep the majority of it.You are playing a game about how much of the money you can keep and can’t. I would say the best case scenario is $20 million. Worse case $12 million. Between bribes, walking away from, costs, etc., you have to accept it’s not all yours, keeping it might cost half of it. But you’re $12 million up, not $12 million down, right?You will have to defend the money/yourself without the help of the entire police, legal or justice system. You’re on your own. Which means you have to be ready to cross the line when your crack addict hotel neighbor breaks into your room, when someone attacks you at a gas station, when someone tries to carjack you. Something will happen, mainly because you’re alone and what often insulates us from danger is that we travel in small or large packs of people at work, school, family. You’re out of that club, you’re a lone wolf on the prairie. You can no longer call the police. Ever again. You have to run from danger or seriously harm your attacker and then get away. You in essence have become a criminal, the irony is that no one will know you’re one until they catch you, interrogate you, imprison you…as a criminal for something unrelated. Therefore you can never get detained by the police, even if you’re the victim.It will be years of this obscuring and obfuscation before you can rest. But it will be worth it when you calculate the payment you get for each of these years. Best case scenario: $20 million with 20–50 years of life left. Worst case scenario: $12 million with 20–50 years of life left. But that’s before you invest it for a profit….You must control your image in a world that records all of us. This means that you have to assume that unless you’re in a room in the dark, you are being recorded—-video. You must control what that all seeing eye sees. A boring data analyst staying at a Jersey cheap hotel leaving with a laptop and gym bag every day by noon. The goal isn’t to become invisible, the goal is to become one of the herd. The herd will make you individually invisible. But you have to be ready to slip out of the pack at any time. (I’ve been thinking a lot about this one—-there’s make up, prosthetics, wigs, fat suits. I would also start looking into glasses, altering them to cause reflections and refractions from your face with light as well as micro-filaments to apply to eye brows, cheekbones. Hell, I’ve got free time, I’d watch a lot of facial special effects videos on YouTube and experiment for a few months. Nothing will be a perfect disguise—-it’s easier for a woman to change her appearance than a man. If I were a smaller framed man or could lose weight, I’d go drag the whole year, live as the opposite sex than the one being looked for.)You have to play your life as a long game now. In increments of years. I would take up meditation to learn how to calm myself quickly and deeply. Maybe even go to retreats. You need to relate to Time differently. You need to have greater control over your emotions and impulses because you need to hone your sense of intuition vs your sense of fear.I would use escorts/prostitutes in various cities for sex. Again your data analyst cover. You may have to avoid deep relationships for years because the money is your primary project and you can’t have someone too close, snooping around your apartment. If you date someone then rent a hotel room in a second hotel-—never bring anyone back to your A Spot. if you play it right, you’ll get the money into places, accounts, and businesses that you wholly control in a few years and then you can discreetly marry them (marriage will help you double hide in their identity. The problem is they are married to a false identity and this is why you might forsake deep relationships for a few years.) Another problem would be spending money in front of them, you’ve just created a witness to the fact that you paid for dinner with a wad of $20s. If the Trackers are good they’re going through each person, proofing money to event, to purchase. Eventually they might find an ex. Or an ex will look for you. Or an ex will become a stalker. Intimate relationships are dangerous until you’ve established a whole new identity, moved all the money and have control of it. Then you can date in your new identity.You’re not sure yet where you’ll end up. You have to accept that you’re moving to move at first. Then you’re moving to obscure. Then you’re moving to obscure your obscuring. Then you’re moving to drop seeds. Then you’re moving to check your buds. Then you’re moving to reap your harvest and ship it away. A lot of your life will be this movement so you’ll need to become a more encapsulated person who is flexible enough to move and disappear at will or intuition. This would also disrupt any long term relationships or even answering what your “life plan” is. Your inability to answer or sudden disappearance might raise a red flag. All of the scattering work has one crucial element: you’re not attached to it. Running around, creating false trails, all of this has been done by an invisible hand-—the last thing you need is someone who can identify you on such and such date in such and such place. That identification, say 6 months in, would obliterate any scatterings you’ve created up until then and immediately put you on the run. And a running rabbit is easier to catch than one that’s had time to hide in a forest. Running itself is the worse thing that can happen now, so you have to make sure you’re in control.Years 2 to 5You’re in better physical and mental shape, you’ve had time to think, plot, plan, pull together some pieces, be quiet, check some people out.Someone has helped you get a small chunk, say $750,000, into a bank account you control. Now you can do something.Buy a cheap house (s) with the company, rent a couple of them out. New storage places for cash, again dividing it up. Conceivably you could end up with a dozen or twice as many hiding places. This is perfect. Trackers are looking for $24 million, a thief might consider it a boon to find $500,000, you can walk away from $500,000 easier than $23,500,000. You’ll be willing to cut bait if you spot something out of whack on $500k, your instinct would be to fight for $5 to 24 million, you need to work against your own instincts.You can start easing cash into the accounts of each LLC, not much but some. Done properly and quietly, as if you have tenants, you could probably get a million or so in. I would furnish the homes, AirBnB them (get a student to manage it for you or a neighbor or property manager. Pay well but not too well. You need them to help maintain your mundane existence as you “travel doing IT projects as a consultant”—-just saying that alone and eyes will glaze over and take they’ll paycheck), stage them as if people live there, light timers.I would encourage AirBnB folk into them, you want again a steady flow of traffic in and out, lots of faces and people. Always assume that wherever you are you’re being watched. I would arrive at these places with a suitcase like a traveler. Any chance, no matter how remote you get to lie about yourself, about what you are and are not, take it. Your favorite food, color, type of music, I would fill the trucks and RVs with different music than I liked, buy clothing two sizes too big or too small, pepper my stuff with women’s clothing and make up to look like a couple traveling together. Whatever it took to make someone, a Tracker, doubt. Scattered trail, multiple trails, doubt, false trails.You have to treat the money like you’ll only have 1 hour to retrieve it one day so you can’t lump it together. If a million is 50–100lbs you have to consider how fast can you move 500lbs? What kind of car can do that and not look suspicious? A packed car in a garage of a house or two, maybe even one rented down the block from where you live. If you arrive and it looks hinky you want to be able to keep driving by and go to another house. I would get my house at the end of a cul de sac so that I can watch who comes in or out—-I would slowly buy the surrounding houses in the cul de sac under varying LLCs and own the whole neighborhood in a year or two—-and be able to cut through the backwoods. Or on a corner of an intersection, it will give you good visibility of who is watching the house.Assume you will get caught in one of your hideouts. Someone will break in. There will be a natural disaster. A fire. Your whole bundle can’t be in one spot.But with cash in the bank and time, you can now branch out. You can invest in things, create partners, limited partners who put in cash every month. Stores, restaurants, bodegas, laundromats can do 10%, maybe even 50% better in business every month to get cash into their working accounts. And that cash can be used to set up something else until you have a network where you can slowly infuse cash into it. But you’ll need time and a drawn out plan. Think of it like a chain of Christmas lights of businesses and accounts that you control.Now you can run business deals, get paid in cash slowly to get passports, to get out of the country. Which might have always been your long term goal. You’ve been taking flights to places, checking places out, checking out the strength of your ID. I would do tourism junkets to one country, leave the group to check out another. Again improvising your scattering your trail internationally.Insanely it’s easier to get INTO Mexico than out of. I’d start experimental trips down the coast. The coast is safer because there are American military boats and bases on the Pacific side and the Gulf inner side. Inner country, consider it bedlam, too risky and you would stand out. You want to go from seaport to seaport, military town to military town, you’re scoping out with $750k in the bank, how to get out of America. You might want to get out as one identity, secrete the money legally internationally where you have access and control and then come back into the country as another identity, who works for/owns the company that now has the money. That would be perfection, this would be to my mind, my end goal.Scatter.Leave America with money under one identity.Have the ability to return to America as another identity with full control of money. I would look like just an employee/business person with international business. I might even do something insane like get government contracts or do catering or something for law enforcement so that I was always surrounded by police. Another layer of protection.This might take you several years with that much money but you want to travel around Mexico and the Caribbean. Get to St. Kitts. Bimini. Deposit and transfer small amounts of cash. Start taking short flights to there and back. Private flights. Watch security. Could you get through with a duffel bag? $500k? $1 million?Your goal might be to over the course of 5 years get cash to a friendly foreign bank (Your nest egg of $12 million). But it will be a full time job just scoping out spots and moving money. Never trust anyone with the full story, the whole nut. Always be piddling, a fool with half a million in cash, maybe $1 million max in an account from multiple legitimate sources.But your security training and self protection training will make you someone who can spot a problem, get away from one and fight out of one if there’s no other choice.Steps.Move and separate money.Obscure your identity.Train yourselfCreate new identities.Bribe others to move small amounts.Repeat steps 3–5.Not that, you know, I’ve thought about this……..Note: TrackersI got several messages about them. HYPOTHETICALLY. It wouldn't be the criminals in any way tied to the money, it would be one person removed. Say the secretary (or a family member) who tied up wads and wads of $20s learns her bosses were killed by each other and the money is gone. (If possible, I would torch the place where the money and bodies were, burn some cash.) She’s not going to run around the country with a gun looking for you. She’s smart so she’s going to hire Skip Tracers around the country to keep tabs on your identity if she can figure it out. She’s also going to hire a handful of private investigators and/or bounty hunters with your pic and a substantial cash reward for your capture. If I were her, I would build up a BS charge of divorce, child support, alimony, and running off with a million in cash.Smart Trackers would also be looking at a certain economic level, high and low, medium is broad. High, because suddenly you’ve got lots of cash so someone would go wild, high on the hog. Easiest to find. Low would be someone who doesn’t fit. Medium though, Best Western, Comfort Inn, Motel 8—-there are thousands of them and a dozen ways to register and get a room, it would be a nightmare to search through these.Highways and byways. If they assumed you drove then I would put investigators and watchers at major highway intersections/interstates. The best bet is to pull out a road map and only travel blue roads and thin red ones. Nothing built by the state, only roads built by the county and back roads. Interstate have tolls, and tolls are cameras.I would shop at WalMarts. WalMarts are crowds and the disparate kinds of things you can buy at WalMarts make it difficult for even the sales associates to remember if you bought a wagon of food, women’s clothing and a power saw all at once. Also it’s a high cash place, you can get everything from gum to glasses to weapons, to food to computers there with less tracking. Their video system is extensive yes, but Trackers won’t have time or legal right to subpoena video records. This leaves you a gap of time to keep moving.Trackers on commission/bounty are never going to stop, (DB Cooper!) which is why you have to give them something to do with all of your false positive trails. All of the scatterings give you a tangled ball of yawn for Trackers to undo while you isolate/create your new identity and slip into it. Once you accept they’re after you, forever, it becomes easier to work your program of vanishing.Smart Trackers will also be watching newly incorporated companies with large cash deposits which is why you might want to sidle into an existing business.Trackers won’t be expecting you to have trained to turn and fight them. But Trackers will be able to stop, harm and detain you so you have to be ready to go to war with them, the closer they get.Trackers will never give up if there is a 10% bounty on your head. Ever.Your best and final hope is to vanish in America, get out of America, return to America, if you so choose, as someone else.#KylePhoenix

Both are among the greatest cities in the world, financial powerhouses, centers of fashion, entertainment, media and academic excellence. As far as quality of life is concerned, however (and assuming affordability is not a problem), London is ahead of New York.For me, the equation for this is relatively straightforward. As of the late 2010s, London has pretty much all of the positives of New York without most of its negatives. It offers the same convenience, entertainment, dining and shopping without the burden of crumbling infrastructure, substandard sanitation and anti-social behavior. Central London’s hubs manage to convey the pulse and excitement of the densified areas of Manhattan without resorting to its chaos and excess. Above all, the city marries this urban experience to layers of culture and history that US cities can only fantasize of.London is inexorably on the rise as a global city, even in its tumultuous transition to a new economic paradigm. This is something we were assured would be impossible by economic models which underestimated the city’s axiological advantages. In contrast, New York has suffered intractable problems since Lehman Brothers imploded in 2008. Though domestic direct investments and real estate have been enjoying a boom, the municipal and state governments are still coping with strangulated services (the MTA, DSNY, NYCHA all struggling with funding) and ongoing ablation of the middle class.Two points need to be clarified before a city-versus-city comparison of this kind.1. London is currently changing at a frightening pace. A survey of the horizon shows a panorama of construction cranes and new high-rise developments. Public spaces everywhere are being renovated. Given the pace of change, it is likely that many of the points raised in this answer will be outdated within 3 or 4 years after posting or updating. This also means that care has to be taken when weighing anecdotes based on visits more than a decade ago.2. Central London, the metropolitan area's equivalent of Manhattan, is similar in aesthetic and density to areas such as the Flatiron District, SoHo and Central Park East. However, because this zone is nestled among vast conurbations and not delineated by natural geographic features or high-rise clusters, people often draw upon a wider dispersal of experience in London. This means that they sometimes, unfairly, compare areas as far out as inner London and the suburbs with the high-rise hubs of Manhattan.To avoid skews such as this, my answer will compare Manhattan specifically with Central London. That is not to disparage the idea that there is more to New York than Manhattan (likewise for Central London and Greater London), but comparing the outer boroughs is a much more lengthy and complex subject probably deserving of its own topic.Neighborhood and Area EquivalentsThe West End - Midtown WestCity of London - Financial DistrictKnightsbridge - Flatiron DistrictFitzrovia/Bloomsbury - Greenwich VillageChelsea - SoHoVictoria - TriBeCaKensington/Belgravia - Upper East SideMayfair/Marylebone - Upper West SideCamden Town - East VillageShoreditch - Lower East SideSouth Bank - Brooklyn PromenadeRegent Street - Prime Fifth AvenueBond Street - Madison AvenueOxford Street - West 34th StreetTrafalgar Square - Times SquareCovent Garden/Somerset House - Lincoln CenterExhibition Road - Museum MileO2 Arena - Madison Square GardenRoyal Albert Hall - Carnegie HallTheir signature cityscapes are worlds apart. Manhattan is a feral urban jungle constrained by towering edifices of industrial concrete and brownstone whereas Central London is essentially an ancient city retrofitted with high technology, in which you see a dynamic synergy between history and the ultra-modern.Because of this juxtaposition, London intimates its modernity in a number of interesting ways, for example, in the glass spires of its embryonic skyline or the historic buildings with futuristic or minimalist interiors. London is currently constructing dense clusters (of the order of 500+ high-rises, either under construction or in planning, as of 2018) mostly as part of mixed-use masterplans along the riverside and seems fully committed to building a skyline impressive enough to reflect its global standing.In contrast, the housing stock and many commercial buildings in New York are some of the oldest in the USA. Manhattan has been incorporating bolder architectural designs into its skyline, but its predominant architectural style remains that of the early 20th century. Rectangular art deco motifs lend the city a romantic dignity and inspiring appeal.Both cities are distinguished by their intangible factors. By this, I mean a transcendental quality or a magic in the air that defies simple description, which is independent of the more tangible beauty of places like Paris or Rome. New York's intangible feeling is one of an unparalleled sense of opportunity, where underdogs are filled with aspirations of 'making it big', whereas London dazzles you with its dynamism and sophistication.New York has an amazing culture of drive and ambition that is prevalent among blue collar and service sector workers, giving the city a very visceral, gritty "rat race" street vibe and physicality, which many refer to as the energy or pace of the city. In London, the prevailing atmosphere is more like a jetset prestige and a sense of dimension transcending the physicality of New York. Accordingly, my experience is that New York is more stimulating to those who dream of success, whereas London is more exciting to those who are specialized and established.Global connectivity in Knight Frank’s Wealth Report. The international jetset community revolves around London, reflected in the ambiance of its work environments.Manhattan’s grid arrangement and density allow visitors to access many of its amenities without need for regional foreknowledge. Walking to and from points of interest is straightforward and there is a geographic synergy between adjacent neighborhoods due to this ease of movement. The convenience of this cannot be overstated to those who have lived in cities such as Los Angeles, which is an urban sprawl undergirded by minimal public transit infrastructure and where owning a car is essential. In Central London, the streets are arranged organically in the classic European style, with thoroughfares flanked by quieter tributaries. Some may argue this is a more interesting layout, but this is also much more demanding of your local knowledge or map-reading skills if you’re a newcomer to the city.The preconception from a generation ago is that New York is more crowded than London, but that distinction has become blurred ever since London’s transformative developments, along with its recent boom in retail, tourism and international dining, started transfiguring the street-level environment. Some footfall statistics are now showing London’s public spaces to be busier during the daytime.Both cities have concentrated hubs around which most street-level activity occurs. In New York, this would be parts of Midtown and the Fifth Avenue corridor. In Central London, activity is concentrated around the West End and Kensington. Both areas are similar in size, geographically, but the crowds in London are more orderly, create less congestion and demonstrate more diurnal variation. Paradoxically, surprisingly large areas of Manhattan beyond the theater district are often tired-feeling and depressed during the working day. This is something that you rarely encounter in Central London, or even inner London.In my experience, the evening environment in Central London is more vibrant than that of Manhattan, but most business activity comes to an abrupt halt after 2 AM. London has an increasing selection of 24-hour convenience stores and all-night eateries and there are usually large crowds around the tourist hubs well into the small hours, but there is no question that it falls far short of the night-time culture of convenience in Manhattan. That may change once 24-hour Tube operations extend to most lines, but as it stands right now, limited opening hours encourage a binge-drinking culture in London that can be an inconvenience for non-alcoholics seeking a quiet night out in the city.Gotham rules the night. The nocturnal environment in Manhattan is New York City at its most entrancingly beautiful, due to the illumination of thousands of high-rise windows and concealment of the grittiness that is evident by day. Not everything is open at this time, but the city offers nearly every possible amenity for night people, shift-workers and insomniacs from every walk of life.New York is a veritable wonderland of affordable dining for the average food enthusiast not plugged into the latest word-of-mouth-disseminated culinary trends. The success of its dining scene is as much to do with retail density and accessibility as availability, areas in which the city’s mixed use developments come into their own. Not to mention, the service culture is in a different league compared to that of London. Though London is making waves within the global foodie scene, too much of it seems overly specialized or exclusive to a small minority. Assuming one is reasonably well-connected, though, it doesn't take painstaking research to discover world class dining venues in London, and the gastronomy here is catching up quickly.The shopping in London is more luxury-oriented. The quality is also noticeably different, excluding bulk-imported brands, with bespoke clothing and accessories made of more durable materials and careful craftsmanship. Manhattan offers greater variety and cost-efficacy, from prime Fifth Avenue to the boutiques in SoHo. However, the West End offers a more convenient and elegant arrangement of high quality retail than Midtown. Central London also doesn't suffer from the blight of empty storefronts that is progressing through many parts of Manhattan, from the northern reaches of Broadway in the Upper West Side, the Village and areas south of 34th street, even Madison Avenue. A row of empty storefronts in London generally signifies redevelopment, whereas in Manhattan it signals regress.The public realm is where Central London shines in comparison to Manhattan. The historic architecture is a sublime mix of orderly elegance and grandness, the infrastructure is second only to the likes of Tokyo and, thanks to extensive streetscaping in recent years, the whole environment radiates a surreal beauty in fine weather. Excluding major events, the core of the city is very clean for a major western urban area.London is one of those rare cities in the world where the quality of the urban environment is distributed evenly throughout the city core. A cross-sectional expedition will take you through Edwardian shopping avenues with white stone facades, Victorian public squares with stuccoed Regency and Georgian townhouses, Italian plazas, palaces, shopping arcades, courtyards and sprawling public parks. Walk many blocks away from arterial routes such as the Strand, King's Way, Brompton Road, Exhibition Road or Pall Mall, and you will continue to come across grand public spaces and architecture for quite some distance, in many cases, much more impressive than the main avenues themselves. Or you may stumble upon a street full of luxury apartments or a road full of beautiful terraced houses, all underpinned by decent infrastructure.London’s irreducible edge, however, is in its internal environments. From marbled opulence to high technology, ornate versus minimalist, vast glittering ballrooms in glass-front high-rises to cramped lofts in Chinatown brimming with paraphernalia, the internal environments in London are by far the more varied and interesting of the two.Unlike New York, London is portrayed poorly in social media, and it's rare to come across videos and images that convey the first hand experience. The video below, however, comes reasonably close. Note the attention to streetscaping, such as the floral displays.In New York, exploring the city beyond the high density hubs and main avenue facades (many of which don't even bother to paint the sides of their buildings) occasionally yields something interesting, such as the regenerated neighborhoods around the High Line, streets with charming Federal Era row-houses, or secluded 19th-century gardens with ornate stone statues, but for the most part it is seldom fruitful. And often you will be coming across neglected areas that can be unpleasant or shady. The New York cityscape presents its most interesting assets up-front, like the towering art deco and beaux arts edifices around its transit hubs, but it doesn't reward exploration like London does and simply lacks the beauty and cache of its sister city.That is not to say London isn't without its share of ugliness. An embarrassing number of dilapidated 1960s concrete buildings still remain from post-war reconstruction, originally intended as a stopgap to replace the historic buildings cratered by the Luftwaffe in the Blitz. Unfortunately, these carbuncles are in high profile areas, such as the South Bank Centre, which occupies the Thameside opposite the neoclassical facade of Somerset House. A redeeming factor is that they are now being replaced with more attractive buildings.For those acclimatized to meticulous urban areas such as Tokyo, be warned: Manhattan is unapologetically and irredeemably filthy. Subway stations are covered in layers of mystery grime that have stratified over decades. Sidewalks in many neighborhoods are falling apart with weeds growing through the cracked paving. Dog waste and fecal markings are everywhere, even on subway platforms and other transit and access hubs.The Manhattan silhouette is visually stunning from across the Hudson, in films and photographs, but, up close, the whole experience is a little underwhelming. You notice quickly that many of the tall buildings are in variable states of disrepair, with garish, drab textures reminiscent of the Corbusian style of socialist architecture. The street-level furniture hasn’t been renovated for decades in many areas, and the city often reeks, especially in Summer, when the mountains of trash start festering in the humidity. Only Central Park and a few areas with very new developments, such as Columbus Circle or Battery Park City, are clean by any reasonable standard.Inept governance and local culture are equally to blame for the mess that the city is in. Infrastructure is often left languishing in a badly deteriorated state even as billions of private money are poured into shiny new greenfield developments, many of which misfire badly due to poor planning. If the streets, sidewalks and underpasses are crumbling and poorly maintained, people feel less inclined to take care of their urban environment. This is exacerbated by an ingrained cultural mentality towards littering and poor pet waste discipline. The best hope you have is to become desensitized to it over years while you do your best to convince yourself that it's not so bad. It is bad, but cognitive dissonance or oblique coping strategies are sometimes essential to surviving in New York.From the perspective of someone brought up in the Midwest, native Londoners generally come across as radiantly classy. Many of the pre-Millennial white collar men, in particular, have a poise about them that is distinguished compared to those in New York. It's difficult to make generalizations about the women in both cities, but personally, I find New York women more attractive and pleasant as an overall impression. In London, however, you are more likely to encounter young women who are at the extreme ends of elegance and beauty, very rare as they are in both cities.Londoners usually dress formally or politely, wearing unobtrusive, balanced colors. They form orderly lines at checkouts, use trashcans properly, don't push you around if you stop in the middle of a busy sidewalk and they don't hold their car horn down for 20 minutes straight, in the middle of the night, outside your apartment.The downside to this formality is that native Londoners are sometimes notoriously reserved, class conscious and difficult to befriend when compared with New Yorkers. If you are happy putting up with episodes of in your face New York bluntness, the open and interactive attitude of native New Yorkers comes across as much warmer and more soulful than the considerate, yet often distant, politeness of Londoners. When you are not with friends or family, riding in a busy Tube train can be as private an experience as eating breakfast alone in your apartment.Looking superficially at crime statistics will show higher annual records of homicide in New York City (333 versus 82 in London), and higher rates of violent crime in London (950 per 100,000 versus 639 per 100,000 in New York). This discrepancy arises because the UK adopts a broader definition of violent crime.In the UK England/Wales, violent crime is defined as: “…where the victim is intentionally stabbed, punched, kicked, pushed, jostled, etc. or threatened with violence whether or not there is any injury”.In the USA, violent crime is defined as: “murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault”.56% of Police Recorded Violent Crime in the UK results in no injury at all. Crimes resulting in cuts and bruises that would be categorized as Actual Bodily Harm in the UK would be considered a misdemeanor in the state of New York and not even recorded in felony crime statistics. For a fairer comparison, New York needs to compile and publish all 3 degrees of misdemeanor assault, not just the figures for felony assault. Adjusting for semantic disparities like this is not a simple task. The US’s Aggravated Assault is defined more stringently than the UK’s Grievous Bodily Harm and there are methodological differences in how crime figures are collected and compiled. The numbers are also affected considerably by differences in the attitude, culture and training of law enforcement.Despite recent news concerning violence in London, the roughest neighborhoods in London, such as Brixton, are tame in comparison to the roughest areas of the Bronx. Serious gang warfare and the general rate of public misdemeanor is much more evident, and lethal, in the streets of New York than in London, despite the progress that was made under the Giuliani administration.Public transport in Manhattan is categorically unpleasant. Subway stations are cluttered, crumbling and, doubling in function as public bathrooms, sometimes so foul-smelling that they make your eyes water. At the turnstiles, you're accosted by aggressive pan-handlers and people begging for free metrocard swipes. In crowded subway cars and on the platforms there are high school dropouts doing somersaults in your face. For most people doing 9–5 jobs, there’s no escape from this subterranean ordeal every rush hour given that commuting by bus is often slower than walking. And given the traffic and state of the roads, owning and driving a car is generally more hassle than it is a convenience.The chronically underfunded MTA may seem to be performing well despite its workload, and its services are generally functional, reliable and cheap. However, as a showcase for the premier city of the leading industrialized nation of the western hemisphere, it is an embarrassment, beset with allegations of corruption and inefficiency, and lumbered with aging infrastructure that will require costly and time-consuming asbestos removal from wall linings to upgrade to the standard of other global cities. London has been investing billions into visionary, new transit infrastructure, such as CrossRail, which is on course to meet its schedule and cost targets. By comparison, New York’s 2nd Avenue subway extension has been stuck in limbo for decades and is only now beginning to make progress, albeit significantly over budget and at a frustratingly slow pace.Compared to the Subway, the London Underground is refined, clean and technologically accomplished. Many Tube station interiors are spectacularly modern, combining futurism with a distinguished brutalist style. Live departure boards are at regular intervals on every station platform providing arrival countdowns in minutes, and underground lines are color-coded consistently across the network. London's new buses are cutting-edge modern, operating a regular service, and the city is now phasing in 24-hour Tube operations which will transform the night-time environment. Contactless payment is also integrated seamlessly into the transit network, including the buses, whereby you can use a credit card (or any NFC-enabled device) in the same way that you use an Oyster Card.The downside of all of this is the cost. A single journey within zone 1 currently costs £2.20 (around $3.00 at the current exchange rate) if you use Oyster or Contactless. The price of a journey rises if you move across zones, in contrast to the flat flare system used in the subway. Also, the Tube carriages, though modern and plush compared to the Subway's versions, are more compact and more liable to become crowded during rush hour.London’s new buses are cutting-edge modern. Not to mention, beautiful to look at.Both subway services are equally plagued by planned maintenance, breakdowns and other contingencies from time to time, though they are more consequential in London due to its single track system. However, TfL broadcasts scheduled closures far in advance and notifies commuters of any problems through a more comprehensive variety of media.Mindset is an important factor in any quality of life assessment. From dozens of discussions I’ve had on this topic over several years, I find that many people gravitate towards one of two dominant personality types. The first prefers discordant, gritty urban environments, is averse to gentrification, typically socially liberal and not so bothered by uncleanliness or aesthetic nuances. The other is drawn to qualitative properties such as elegance or refinement, holds socially conservative views and prefers orderly and organized cities. The use of conflicting vernacular can sometimes make things confusing ("vibrant" means something different according to your personality type), but I find that those of the latter mindset tend to favor London overall, whereas those of the former mindset tend to prefer New York. There are plenty who don’t fall into this trend though.A good way of describing the lifestyle dynamic in New York is as a constant struggle for limited resources: Parking, seating on the train, a table at a restaurant, waiting in line or even personal space. There are constant hassles in every imaginable form at every turn that make even the most trivial of tasks needlessly challenging. For example, New York’s Citibike scheme markets itself as a fun and convenient way to navigate the city. Reality has little resemblance to brand image, however, because riding a bicycle in New York is tantamount to gambling with your life. Navigating from Central Park to SoHo along the cycle lanes, you're forced to merge into traffic numerous times to avoid joggers, confused pedestrians, double-parked cars, cabs that pull over without indicating and vehicle doors opening at random. Apply that frustration to just about every other task you do on a daily basis and you have a reasonable idea of what to expect from your life in New York. For the first few months, all of it may seem new and exciting. Beyond that, anyone with the barest residue of sanity will start to dread every new day that begins.The typical native retort is that you are simply burnt out, or not appropriate for New York if you can't cope. In reality, the rat race is undignified and dehumanizing. For those without a cohesive social network, constant exposure to the stress and hassle can spill over into deep-seated resentment or even outright loathing of the well-being of others.A good day in New York is a simple roller-coaster thrill, whereas in London even the feelgood factor is nuanced. Swiss Toni would describe a great day in London as like the electrifying feeling men may feel around a beautiful woman. And while we’re talking cultural capital (in the vein of further Swiss Toni macho-isms), if New York is a swimsuit model, London would be a runway model. The atmosphere is more refined and elegant, somewhat more delicate, and evokes deeper feelings in a classical sense.An entertaining op-ed on the residential real estate market in London referred to it as "the largest oligarch whorehouse on planet Earth". A sizable proportion of Central London is set aside for luxury real estate and there is, for now, more concern in London than New York that the city is morphing into a massive Monaco full of spas, services, retail and luxury accommodation catering only to the ultra-wealthy. Even when compared to the aggregate old money wealth of the Upper East Side, London offers palatial levels of opulence for the brazenly rich in the way of exclusive cultural offerings and events from the Platinum Triangle to the City.Whether or not this is a good thing, in ethical terms, is down to individual polemic, but what is undeniable is that this high society culture renders nearly everything in London more expensive, aside from rent, which is roughly equivalent.An approximate rule of thumb to follow when calculating spending in London is that, at the current exchange rate, one will usually pay in British pounds for goods and services that will cost the same number of US dollars in New York City. This can be tough to those within certain income brackets seeking a reasonable quality of life in Central London. Most property here is now unaffordable to all but those in the ultra-high net worth bracket. New York City offers a very decent lifestyle on a relatively more affordable scale, but cost of living in both cities is high in absolute terms. I think that anyone, regardless of socioeconomic bracket, would do well to pursue a frugal and moderated lifestyle should they choose to live in either city.Stuccoed townhouses in London's "Platinum Triangle". As in Manhattan, many of these residences are left languishing in an empty state by absentee owners based abroad.Residential real estate prices in London are decoupling rapidly from income levels.New York is effectively uninhabitable for much of Summer due to brutal humidity and the urban heat island effect. Winters are often bitterly cold and miserable, though the snow can make the place look magical. New Yorkers often celebrate the thaw come Spring, but this time of year is often too rainy to be enjoyable. Fall is the most pleasant time to be in Manhattan, a meteorological Goldilocks Zone of several weeks during which the weather is not too cold and not too hot, but just right for normal human habitation. This lasts for a month or two before it suddenly begins to rain, then sleet, then snow heavily while temperatures drop precipitously and people cower indoors.London is miserably grey and damp over 2-3 months in Winter. The weather during this time rarely has the dignity to rain or snow properly, but subjects the hapless to an intermittent drizzle that can be intolerable for those with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Post-Christmas blues here can be considerably more depressing than the bitterly cold, yet interesting, snowy winters in New York City. Fortunately, short daylight hours during this time of year usher in earlier evenings when the architecture is under-lit and the city switches to a nightlife ambiance. Spring in London is characterized by sunny spells randomly interspersed with sudden heavy downpours to harass unwary tourists.Late Spring, Summer and Fall in London is magical. Temperatures in Summer reach around 80-85 degrees with mild humidity and a cool to warm breeze. Light scattered clouds and an abundance of sunshine make for some spectacular days out.London seems to be trending towards a southern European climate pattern. Many natives still have memories of London in the 1970s/1980s with the constantly grey skies, but London today is a very different creature climate-wise. Spring thaw sets in earlier, skies are much clearer from Spring to Fall, Summers noticeably hotter and Winters a little warmer. Downsides are the lack of snow, heavier and more unpredictable periods of rain, with more frequent extremes of sunny and wet weather. In contrast to previous decades, there is now a burgeoning need for air conditioning in Tube carriages. This is something to bear in mind for those who balk at the idea of being stuck deep underground in sweltering heat.