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The initial public offering of Angie’s List, the membership-only site offering consumer reviews of contractors, mechanics, and other local businesses in hundreds of communities around the country, is being viewed as an enormous success. The company’s stock shot up 33% soon after it began trading early on Thursday. What’s perhaps most interesting is that, given [...]
When it comes to securing financial security, are you a doer or a dreamer? By definition, financial doers have a better shot at reaching their retirement goals. No real surprise, they also have a much better shot at raising children who are good with money, according to a new survey.
Everybody knows that Black Friday (or perhaps Black Thursday, since sales now start on Thanksgiving) has a reputation for terrific deals on electronics, clothing, and other holiday gifts. Is next Friday also the best day of the year to get a bargain on a new car?
With 14 million people unable to find work and job prospects seemingly bleak, why are more employees calling it quits?
Chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences: A team of American and British researchers found that when debtors are presented with information about how much interest they will pay if only minimum payments are made — information currently required on credit card statements under the CARD Act — they are more likely to pay [...]
Put another nail in the coffin of private pensions. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a government agency that insures corporate defined-benefit plans, has been running a record deficit. Now it’s sending up flares for either a taxpayer bailout or higher insurance premiums from the companies that still offer these plans. Good luck on both fronts.
While you’ll still hear the Salvation Army’s jingling bells this year, you may hear less change jangling into its red collection buckets.
The IRS has caught a lot more people cheating on their taxes. A crackdown on tax fraud this year prevented the issuance of $4.4 billion in bogus refunds, an increase of 171% over the previous year, as the agency ratcheted up its scrutiny of filings by prisoners, according to a report released earlier this month by the [...]
America’s middle class has had a rough go of things in recent years, and few in the middle anticipate life getting easier as they get older. In a new survey, three-quarters of American middle-class workers say they expect to keep working past the normal retirement age (65), and one-quarter think they’ll have to work at [...]
I’ve been on the road for the past two months, mostly in Bolivia and Peru, where I was pretty off the grid and didn’t keep up with the news. So I arrived home to find a strange phenomenon: Protesters “occupying” Wall Street. And Oakland. And Portland. And many other places as well.
Bank fees are an annoyance, but is there an alternative besides either paying up or pulling up stakes and leaving? Maybe. If you want to keep your bank for other reasons — say, convenience — but the fees are pushing you out the door, try negotiating. There’s no guarantee you’ll succeed, but you’ve got little [...]
