This post is by Deborah Dunham and comes from our partner site LearnVest, a site that helps people take control of their finances.
One Tuesday morning last November my husband called from work and told me to sit down—and not get mad. Whenever a phone call starts that way, you just know it’s not going to end well.
“(Insert jerk-of-a-boss’s [...]

Read the full article »

What I’m about to reveal I don’t like to bandy about. In fact, I try to hide it when in polite company. So I’ve got to ask you to please not breathe a word of what I’m about to divulge.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, I’m from Illinois.
I’ve lived here almost all my life [...]

Read the full article »

Remember back in August 2011 when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the US credit rating from Aaa to Aa+? Yeah, me too. S&P attributed it to:
“The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.”
And guess what? The [...]

Read the full article »

Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand, you’ve likely heard the term “sequestration” bandied about over the past few months, with increasing urgency in recent weeks. If you check out the linked graph of Google search traffic for that word “sequestration” over the past 12 months you’ll see just what I mean.
So what [...]

Read the full article »

My timing is terrible, but then, you can’t help when you’re born.
I got out of college in the early 1980s, when the economy was struggling and jobs were hard to find. Things got better both for myself and the economy, and I spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s recruiting job candidates at a [...]

Read the full article »

Ever wonder where your earnings stack up vs. those of a typical American? Well, wonder no more… CNN/Money has compiled an interesting set of earnings statistics from BLS data.
For starters, the median weekly income for in the United States for “wage and salary workers” in 2012 was $775. That works out to $40,300/year. Is that [...]

Read the full article »

Are you tired of uber-low interest rates on your savings account? Well, you can thank Federal Reserve policy for that. And it’s not likely to change anytime soon.
About a month ago, the Fed gave a clear indication of what it will take before they’ll start letting interest rates rise. They saying that, as long as [...]

Read the full article »

Over the past couple of years, you’ve been spoiled. You’ve had an extra 2% in your paychecks thanks to the payroll tax holiday.
Normally, you pay 6.2% in Social Security taxes. But during the past two years, you’ve paid just 4.2%. This was never intended to be a permanent tax break — in fact, it wasn’t [...]

Read the full article »

Every year around this time, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner. Their estimate include enough turkey, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and trimmings to feed a family of ten.
This year’s estimate comes in at $49.48, or just under $5/person. Compared to last year, than an increase of just $0.28 or [...]

Read the full article »

Years back, during the debate over the right to die via assisted suicide, I clipped from a newspaper an editorial cartoon I particularly admired. Drawn by Jack Ohman of the Oregonian, it is still tacked above my desk today, more than a decade after first glimpsed.
In the cartoon, a man and woman walk through [...]

Read the full article »