As a leader of the oft-paranoid-sounding-privacy-sensitive crowd, let me be the first to congratulate Samsung for its honesty. Plenty of my friends in paranoia have pointed out the language included in Samsung’s new SmartTV privacy policy. Because the gizmo uses voice recognition to let owners change the channel and do [Keep reading]
Tax ID theft is reaching epidemic proportions. Well, it did last year when the IRS issued seemingly endless warnings about it. That wasn’t enough to get state taxation agencies to fix their systems, apparently, as TurboTax announced it has taken the extraordinary step of “pausing” state tax return filings for [Keep reading]
Day 2 of the Anthem hack, and we don’t know much more than we knew yesterday. There are intriguing grain-of-salt reports that Chinese hackers stole the data as part of a never-ending quest to build intelligence on U.S. government agents. There are plenty of reports — which must be true, [Keep reading]
This is part II of my interview with Ron Lieber, who’s new book The Opposite of Spoiled teaches parents how to teach their kids about money, and the other important life lessons that brings. You can read Part I here, where I ask about scam-proofing your children. Today, I ask [Keep reading]
Another day, another massive computer hack that sets millions of people in a tizzy about something they can’t control. The Anthem health data leak isn’t the Big One — that’s still coming, believe me — but it’s pretty big. Perhaps 80 million people now have to worry that a criminal [Keep reading]
Kimberly has been the subject of two Restless Project series stories already, but I promise the third one is charming. I wrote about her last year, when her family was in dire straights after she lost her job. They were going to be $700 in the red each month, mostly [Keep reading]
The majority of Americans pay someone else to do their taxes — about 3 out of 5 taxpayers. This is tragedy to me on many levels. For starters, it’s insane that our tax code is so complicated that people feel they can’t do it on their own. Those that do [Keep reading]
Ron Lieber has spent the past seven years penning some of the smartest consumer stories you can read at The New York Times in his Your Money column. The last time you saw him, perhaps he was (politely) arguing with Suze Orman’s about her personal-branded prepaid debit card (he [Keep reading]
The first signs of elder financial abuse are easy to miss. Maybe there’s a new, overeager “best friend” who gives off a strange vibe. Or excessive secrecy around an online lover. Paranoia or anger when talking about money can be a tipoff, too. Don’t count on discovering sudden large withdrawals [Keep reading]
It can be boring to read stories about the problems created by Wall Street professionals who don’t want to own anything, but merely make money by moving money around. Once in a while, these traders — rightly called, derisively, speculators — get a little more attention, such as the gasoline [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan