The end-of-year holidays are festive for most people: attending parties, decorating, giving gifts, listening to music, visiting family, eating a bit too much. At work it sometimes means announcement of raises or year-end bonuses when there’s profit to be shared. People may be entering the new year with a fatter wallet and a bigger paycheck. … Read more
Gresham’s Law now has small business backing. There’s a fair bit of activity on eBay buying and selling 95% copper cents, and the coin sorters to distinguish them from the newer zinc variety. Why the interest, you might ask? It’s the copper content of the cents that’s interesting. These high-copper cents, minted for part of … Read more
Free Money Finance regularly posts questions that are e-mailed to him by his readers, with the intent of having other readers offer advice. Recently a reader asked about refinancing a mortgage that is currently under water (meaning that more is owed than the house is currently worth). Here’s the skinny: $225,000 is owed against a … Read more
The author’s marketing firm was kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of Mark Gilbert’s new book called Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable. I enjoyed the book. It was well-written. (Mr. Gilbert has written a regular column for Bloomberg News for over a decade.) What this book brings to … Read more
(If you have a true love, then you have thirty of them from last Christmas! Most people really only need twenty-nine French hens.) Regifting this year is up. Way up. A Consumer Reports survey found that a little over a third (36%) of American adults said they’d recycle a gift this year, which is a … Read more
This economic downturn hasn’t been kind to a lot of people. Jobs that haven’t been taken away from people have had their hours cut, their workload increased, or their cost of living allowances taken away. Jobs that people used to be able to count on are on very fragile ground. If this US Debt Clock … Read more
Liz Pulliam Weston had an article today on the new tip-jar economy (article link broken as of 10/2014) — that new business practice of putting out the tip jar, raising the “customary” tipping percentage, and adding other tip-like fees that are no longer discretionary, but mandatory. Her take regarding the tip jars was, in essence: … Read more
Dawn over at Frugal For Life discusses some of the ethical implications of stockpiling foods. She gets into a few rules of thumb for testing to see whether stockpiling has crossed into greed, or just plain inconsideration. Talking to the store to have them do a special large-quantity order is much more considerate than cleaning … Read more
Subscribe to get this ebook, great content, and other goodies by email! All free!