There’s two ways to measure how people are doing financially: How much they earn, and how much they own. The second category gets less attention, but it can be just as important. And it’s very likely that you own a lot less than you did before the Great Recession. In [Keep reading]
It seems like a simple enough question: How much money does a normal American family need to afford to be…normal? You already know what I’m about to say next: Coming up with a realistic average family budget is fraught with peril. There’s obvious geographic problems — normal in New York [Keep reading]
There’s a beautiful story in Salon about an “unskilled” high school graduate in 1965 who took a night shift job shoveling taconite in a steel mill so he could move out of his parent’s house and buy a car. Why is that a beautiful story? Because he could. As a [Keep reading]
In the never-ending, “Things are getting better/no they’re not” debate, here’s a fresh data point, courtesy of the bright minds at the Financial Times. And it’s another sign America’s economy is perhaps more fragile than it appears, even to experts. Spending on “services” as opposed to “goods’ has plummeted in [Keep reading]
A funny thing happened the other day when I whimsically posted a picture of what seemed to be a $0 parking ticket I’d received in Iowa City, Iowa. NO ONE BELIEVED IT. Gotcha-weary drivers from all around the country — well, big cities anyway — seemed utterly convinced that [Keep reading]
Every high-profile death by apparent suicide launches a public discussion, often temporary, about the terrifying power of depression. Perhaps Robin Williams’ death can help generate additional discussion about the connection between financial trouble and suicide. It’s already far too early to know anything definitive about the brilliant comedian’s state of [Keep reading]
Since the invention of inventions, folks have debated a very basic question: Do advances in technology create or kill jobs? Clearly, innovation disrupts jobs. Think of all the tasks done by machines that were once done by humans, such as highway toll collection. It creates quite a paradox. Perhaps there [Keep reading]
We need drugs to sleep at night. Nearly half of us don’t have enough in a bank account to cover next month’s expenses, let alone any real head start towards retirement. We buy homes with mortgage payments our parents couldn’t fathom, or we make student loan payments almost that large. [Keep reading]
You’ve just been fired, or quit, and it’s time to job hunt again. But on your way out the door, your new former employer confronts you with an uncomfortable reality that sounds something like this: “You’ll never work in this town again.” What now? It’s not an idle threat. Noncompete [Keep reading]
Americans have less paid vacation time than workers in most developed economies. Amazingly, 75 percent fail to use the sparse amount of vacation time they get. The certain backlog of unanswered emails created by time off might be to blame. A new survey conducted by HR firm Randstad hints at [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan