Happy Labor Day! Now, can you answer my email? I’d like to use this weekend to ask a simple question. Do you think you work too hard? And does the answer lie in a 21-hour work week? Naturally, many people reflexively answer “yes” to such a question. Who doesn’t think [Keep reading]
You might recall that a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about speculation that the Russian government might retaliate against Western sanctions by unleashing professional hackers on U.S. and European targets. Today comes news that JPMorgan and several other banks were attacked, and some are speculating a political motive. [Keep reading]
Expect plenty more bad news like today’s Dairy Queen credit card hack story. As they say, there’s plenty more where that came from. There’s something a little different about this latest spat of credit card hacks, however, and you should know about it. Brian Krebs told the world last night [Keep reading]
There’s two ways to measure how people are doing financially: How much they earn, and how much they own. The second category gets less attention, but it can be just as important. And it’s very likely that you own a lot less than you did before the Great Recession. In [Keep reading]
It seems like a simple enough question: How much money does a normal American family need to afford to be…normal? You already know what I’m about to say next: Coming up with a realistic average family budget is fraught with peril. There’s obvious geographic problems — normal in New York [Keep reading]
There’s a beautiful story in Salon about an “unskilled” high school graduate in 1965 who took a night shift job shoveling taconite in a steel mill so he could move out of his parent’s house and buy a car. Why is that a beautiful story? Because he could. As a [Keep reading]
The horrific death of journalist James Foley, amplified by his murderers’ ability to spread their act of terror via Internet video, touched off an immediate and familiar debate: Should governments and corporations ever restrict access to images of horror? Firms like Twitter made their choice immediately and did all they [Keep reading]
(I’m doing a new series with Credit.com called “Debt Collection Files.” Have you struggled with a debt collector, or any firm harassing you for a bill you thought was unfair? Please message me and I’ll look into as many cases as I can. This is the first installment) Eduardo Austin [Keep reading]
In the never-ending, “Things are getting better/no they’re not” debate, here’s a fresh data point, courtesy of the bright minds at the Financial Times. And it’s another sign America’s economy is perhaps more fragile than it appears, even to experts. Spending on “services” as opposed to “goods’ has plummeted in [Keep reading]
It’s been a bad few days for consumers’ data. One of the nation’s largest hospital operators, Community Health Systems Inc., said Monday that hackers from China stole personal information belonging to 4.5 million patients. While the data was pilfered between April and June of this year from Community Health System [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan