It’s the pay, stupid. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on a simple, perceptive platform: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, the U.S. unemployment rate is remarkably low, but everyone seems remarkably unimpressed. Why? Because a job isn’t a good job. America has about 100 million problems right now, and no one’s [Keep reading]
Michelle Nix has lived in a lot of places: Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Oakland, Calif. But when it came time to start a family, she went home to Cincinnati. Smart move. The once-battered Midwest city is in the middle of a radical transformation – and it ranks 8th in our [Keep reading]
Online dating is HOT. How hot? Clicking and swiping for love has tripled among young people since 2013, the Pew Research Center says in a study released just in time for Valentine’s Day. Some 27% of Americans ages 18 to 24 now report using online dating, up from just 10% [Keep reading]
Auto insurers levy something akin to a home renters’ surcharge on policy-holders, and that’s unfair, the Consumer Federation of America alleged on Monday. The interest group says it secret-shopped for typical driver policies in 10 U.S. cities and found renter rates averaged 7% higher – costing those consumers $112 annually [Keep reading]
Remember the BillFixers brothers I wrote about last month (and I’ll write about each month in The BillFixers Files). That story got a lot of attention: I did a version for NBCNews.com, the New York Times picked it up, and NBC Nightly News is going to feature the brothers on national [Keep reading]
Let’s say you could use some extra cash, and someone offered you a quick-and-dirty part-time gig with OUTRAGEOUS pay. Say …$200 an hour. SCORE, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that just about every one of us has a $200-an-hour job lying somewhere nearby, if only we know how to [Keep reading]
Even under normal circumstances, racial discrimination can be hard to spot. Identifying discrimination in car purchases and loans is particularly challenging, however – auto dealers don’t have to log the ethnicity of borrowers, and car loan terms are often bargained as part of a complex transaction. Still, the Consumer Financial [Keep reading]
Call them the invisible victims of the housing collapse: The millions of homeowners who’ve spent nearly a decade dutifully making mortgage payments on homes worth less than the balance of their loans. Known as “being under water,” many in this crowd were never in danger of losing their home. But [Keep reading]
Middle-class struggles — the kind I am covering in my Restless Project — are now front and center in this year’s presidential election . And whatever you think about his ideas, Bernie Sanders deserves credit for sharpening the spotlight on those struggles. Whether his ideas — which are unquestionably radical [Keep reading]
U.S. consumers have finally been liberated from archaic technology that used to protect them and their credit cards from identity theft. Millions of Americans now have chip-enabled credit cards. And now the results of this sweeping change are in. Just as many consumers were hit by ID theft last year [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan