Personal Finance
Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet above sea level. That is the cruising altitude for commercial airliners. There isn’t enough oxygen for the human body or mind to function properly at that height, which is known as the “death zone.” Climbing Mt. Everest used to be a trophy experience for adventurous mountaineers and wealthy people. Now, […]
Staying invested is easier if you know how your portfolio will react to a falling market. Diversification is a powerful tool that can protect you from fickle times. Alternative investments can be important when stock and bonds are shaky. Everyone knows that the stock market is volatile by its very nature. Yet many people tend […]
Airliners used to require three pilots — a pilot, a copilot and the flight engineer. Now two crew is the norm. A flight engineer used to be responsible for monitoring an aircraft’s engines in flight, as well as other flight systems. Since the late 1980s the position slowly become obsolete with the advent of automation […]
About a quarter of Amazon deliveries are delivered within 24 hours. Preexisting delivery systems such as UPS and FedEx expedite the process. Yet the e-commerce giant struggles delivering to its consumers in rural and remote areas in the same timely fashion. Amazon’s short-term solution? Encourage some of it employees to take resignation buyouts and become […]
Target-date funds (TDFs) provide an investment mix whose objectives vary over time. TDFs are marketed as a way to ensure risk is allocated appropriately. Risk-tolerance should be carefully reexamined against any fund’s investment objectives. Introduced in the late 1990s, target-date funds (TDFs) were developed to provide those investors planning for retirement an easy way to […]
A vacation is usually an exercise in spending too much money through design or ignorance, like buying a pricey souvenir that gets thrown into a closet once it’s brought home. Consider that the average American comes home from vacation with over $1,500 charged to credit cards. Such debts are usually borne out of paying for spontaneous, […]
Got a cellphone? Get read for a flood of bill collector texts. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing changes to the 1977 Fair Debt Collection Practices Act The changes will allow debt collectors nearly unlimited ability to contact debtors via digital communication. The Act previously prevented debt collectors from calling and harassing people […]
According to recent studies, the rate of income inequality between the poor and rich in the United States hasn’t been this stark since the Great Depression. It’s all relative, of course. According to the elite private bankers you’re not really, really rich unless you have at least $25 million in the bank. Private bankers and […]
Voicing concern over America’s widening income inequality gap, multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett thinks he may have a solution — give poor people money via the tax system. Buffett believes that expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit system (EITC) will mean more money in the hands of hard-working but less-skilled Americans. A “refundable” tax credit, the […]
The founder, chairman, and CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, is advocating for immediate legislative action to improve the lives of struggling Americans, including a substantial increase in the minimum wage. Schwarzman is pushing for what he calls “Marshall Plan for the Middle Class,” named for the American-led fund that rebuilt Europe from rubble after World […]
