If you’re like me, you’re afraid to answer your cell phone. And that’s a bad thing for a reporter. It wasn’t always this way. For years, my cell phone number seemed to be out of the public domain, and even businesses that had it were pretty respectful of my need [Keep reading]
Watching athletes stand on the podium, sniffling as their national anthem plays, it’s easy to get swept up in the romance of winning a gold medal. It’s also easy to forget that television has the bad habit of compressing time for viewers. Michael Phelps makes winning gold medals look easy. [Keep reading]
Sometimes, a glitch is more than a glitch. Sometimes, that glitch grinds much of the country to a halt. And it gets the company involved hauled in front of Congress to explain itself. Recent airline techno-disasters at Delta and Southwest — and United last year — have made one thing clear: Systems [Keep reading]
Americans are doing a little bit better at saving money in an emergency fund — but women, some minorities, young adults, and the less educated are still woefully unprepared for a financial emergency, according to a new study. Overall, there have been marginal gains in the number of Americans who [Keep reading]
People often ask me: “Why travel with your dog?” It’s a hassle. It severely limits the hotels I can stay at, and usually costs me more. It slows me down. It’s hot. I have to stop so he can pee. It makes dinner meetings almost impossible. Well, any normal meeting [Keep reading]
Go on vacation. Your heart needs it. Really. In the long list of studies I’ve shared extolling the virtue of holidays and warning about overwork, this one is the most important: A massive study published last year showed that employees who put in more overtime had much higher likelihood of heart [Keep reading]
The switch to chip-enabled credit cards last year came with a serious deadline: New rules went into effect in October making merchants more liable for fraud. As is obvious to everyone who’s swiped when they should have inserted their card at a checkout line, the changeover hasn’t gone as smoothly [Keep reading]
SOMEWHERE BEAUTIFUL BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SEATTLE — America, we need to talk. And not on Facebook. I mean, really talk. I’ll have many thoughts to share from this summer’s cross-country road trip (#RoadTrip201^), but one is screaming at me so loud I have to spit it out immediately. While [Keep reading]
One of the most common recommendations for using a credit card successfully is to pay off the balance in full every billing cycle so you avoid interest charges. Just about everybody knows that — but that doesn’t mean everyone does it. In fact, despite some modest improvements in credit card [Keep reading]
Never had this happen before: When I tried to email a company accused of scamming a consumer to ask for a comment, the company immediately tried the same scam on me. Read on… — She was accused of check fraud, and theft by deception. She was told that she owed $4,526, [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan