When people say they own their home, it’s usually a half-truth at best. Often, a bank owns the home they live in — most of it, anyway. Still, Americans have a lot of real money tied up in their homes — on average, $150,506, according to a new report by [Keep reading]
Americans are terrible at taking vacations, and that’s a shame, because they aren’t helping their companies or themselves. People are just less productive in summer, for a whole host of reasons. So you might as well hang out at the beach anyway. Americans wasted a record-setting 658 million vacation days [Keep reading]
We’ve written a lot recently about the disappearing starter home. A combination of rising prices, aggressive investors, and flat incomes are turning America into a nation of renters … and making things very hard on young people just starting out. But there are still communities where plenty of starter homes [Keep reading]
Baseball has long celebrated cheating, but electronic cheating just sent a former team front-office worker to prison for nearly four years. Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, who earlier pled guilty to using old passwords to access a former team’s scouting database, was sentenced to 46 months in jail on Monday. Correa broke [Keep reading]
Rana Foroohar’s new book, Makers and Takers, is a first-class takedown of the way many American firms make money today. The book’s subtitle – The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business – lays out the sad paradox. Some people make money by making things. Others make money [Keep reading]
When I started researching age discrimination earlier this year, I thought I understood the problem fairly well. I had no idea. I had no idea how much the law favors corporations trying to dump older workers; and I had no idea how much casual age discrimination exists. I knew you [Keep reading]
There’s been a scary increase in successful ransomware attacks against large organizations this year. Specifically, hospitals have found themselves at the mercy of hackers who demand ransom payments to unlock critical system files. Recently, there have been signs that these criminals have moved on to universities, too. The University of Calgary [Keep reading]
Does being surrounded by people in debt make you more likely to land in debt? That’s one of the provocative questions posed by a new Urban Institute report that examines possible links between geography, neighborhood characteristics and unpaid bills. While one-third of Americans have a debt in collections on their [Keep reading]
It’s a struggle as old as air travel itself: Do I book this plane ticket now with my plans still in flux, or do I wait and risk prices skyrocketing? Airline travelers wrestling with this do-I-or-don’t-I dilemma have a new service at their disposal. For a few dollars, they can [Keep reading]
You may have heard some buzz recently about first-time home buyers, with millennials sitting on the sidelines instead of jumping into the housing market. Well, it’s not just them. Basically, Americans in every age group under 65 are showing historic reluctance to own homes, according to an email from Ellyn [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan