American mortgage holders are optimistic that equity in their homes is rising, and that’s helping fuel— for better or worse — a huge increase in home equity lending, this has homeowners who are over 50 exploring their options and beginning to think about equity release and whether or not it [Keep reading]
There was much hand-wringing recently when Hasbro announced that it would make the popular board game Monopoly cashless. Now, players will use something more like credit cards. “My kids won’t learn math,” yelled parents everywhere, in perhaps the biggest indictment ever of the way Americans learn math. In [Keep reading]
I often think of FIOS as the good guy in paid TV – mainly because consumers seem genuinely happy with the product. It’s a little pricey, but the Internet speeds and channel choices seem to satisfy most people. More important, whenever FIOS arrives in a neighborhood, prices go down and [Keep reading]
If a hacker was “sharing” your Netflix account, would you know? And should you care? Security firm Symantec recently warned that around the world, hackers have created a thriving black market in stolen — well, let’s call it “shared” — video service accounts. It’s easy to see how this happens. [Keep reading]
Cable TV prices are high, and rising faster than most other prices. But you knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that the average cable bill would only be $35 per month, as opposed to $99.10 per month, had pay TV prices tracked with inflation during the past two [Keep reading]
When the Kansas City Royals won baseball’s World Series in November, much of small-town America was rooting for them. The small-market Royals had been terrible for decades, unable to compete with big-money teams like the New York Yankees. So while rivals from Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, [Keep reading]
Those worried about the U.S. government finding ways to disable encryption in consumer technologies have a lot more explaining to do. The American public isn’t buying their point of view. By a wide margin, Americans side with the FBI over Apple in the recent, very public spat over unlocking an iPhone used by one [Keep reading]
If you hate the Yankees, there’s a great new reasons to hate them even more. And if you love the Yankees, well, you might end up hating them soon. No team has ever embraced the workers of the free market more than the Yankees, with its endless stream of high-priced [Keep reading]
Something has been bothering me about this very public Apple vs. FBI UFC legal battle. Recall that a California judge has ordered Apple to help the FBI circumvent encryption on an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorists. Apple is refusing. Here’s my question: What does the FBI think [Keep reading]
Now that credit cards have been chipped, the banking industry has set its sights on modernizing another essential financial tool that’s stuck in the 1980s — ATMs. You might have noticed that the fancy chip-enabled debit card you received does you no good at the ATM. That means counterfeit debit [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan