Low interest rates generally lead to inflation, which is bad for everybody. But if inflation were really low, then low interest rates would tend to follow, and in that situation,
There are risks in any investment. The market might go down--or the market might go up, but your investment might go down anyway. The company that issued your stock or bond might
Money laundering is not a simple concept. It's two simple concepts, because there are two different activities that are called money laundering. Here's how to do both of them.
There are those who point to the 1980 peak gold price of $850/oz and observe that the price would have to go up to $2149/oz just to get back to that point. I say, take a second lo
There are a lot of advantages to having a private foundation to use as the vehicle for your charitable giving. Sadly, the tax laws make setting up a private foundation impractical
One of the most frugal things you can do is have capital. Whether it's money in the bank or a nice chunk of reasonably liquid investments, having capital not only makes money (thr
When I was in college, I worked in the computer center. When my boss wanted to hire a new operator, he asked a couple of us to go over resumes. That experience, which gave me som
I was going to write a piece on how frugality was a tactic, not a goal. The point I wanted to make was that the goal is living the life you want to live, and that frugality is a ta
Over and over again, in budgeting articles and even books on personal finance, I see sample budgets that include debt repayment as if it were an expense. This shows a fundamental
They key problem with energy is that it's really hard to store--it's tough to buy energy now and use it later, and most energy storage techniques lose a large fraction of the energ
A story in the New York Times says that exercise helps human brains build more neurons (a process called neurogenesis). It also reports on some mouse studies that show that exe
In response to the recent credit squeeze, the Federal Reserve did something unusual: they cut the discount rate without cutting the federal funds rate.
The federal funds rate is the rate at [more]
Businesses, especially big businesses, try constantly to shift work from their paid staff to their customers. It's one of the major trends in business today. [more]
Along about the middle of the dot-com boom--when the market had already had two years of 20% annual gains--I read an article that suggested that individual investors had no need of a cash res [more]
I briefly worked with a senior technical manager whose wife also worked for the same company, but at a different site. They'd bought a house about halfway in between, but they both
For a worker down in the cube farm, it's easy to see the dysfunction of your own company, and to imagine that almost anyplace else would be better. The thing is, companies are all
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