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This article is by staff writer April Dykman.

Today I present the second and final installment of my property tax saga — the informal hearing. (You can check out the first post here.)

To briefly recap, I’m a new homeowner and my assessed property value shot up by 31 percent from last year. So that, along with the fact that I have a tax-protesting father to please, landed me in County Appraiser Brad’s cubicle for an informal hearing.

The bad news

First, County Appraiser Brad pulled up three comparable properties, meaning they were in my general area and fairly close in size, year built, etc.

This guest post is by reader Mike in New Hampshire. Mike wrote an Ask the Readers article last year, looking for ideas to help his dad get set for retirement. He wrote to us recently and asked if he could update their story. We were only too glad to provide a forum for them.

It has been a little over a year since I wrote in looking for suggestions on how I could help my father retire. I want to thank everyone so much for the comments, ideas, and support – they came at a time when I really needed it. In the end the solutions came not from me but from the relationships he had formed and the sacrifices he had made over the years. Everyone loves a story with a happy ending, right? Let’s get to it.

This article is by staff writer Holly Johnson.

Your car breaks down on the side of the road … again. It’s rush hour and it won’t start. You have to have it towed and you’re not happy about it. At all.

So what do you do?

You head to the local dealership in a fury, ready to replace it with something far more reliable, but also affordable. But the dealership has a few tricks up their sleeve and, according to Paul (the salesman helping you), it must be your lucky day. Amazingly, your car died at the most opportune time in history.

“Amazing deals are on the table for today only, folks, and we are in the midst of a complete liquidation,” says Paul. “Prices are being slashed left and right, and you need to act fast.”

“This is the sale of the century!!!”

This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

Have you considered how your life would freeze to a standstill if a general outage cut electric power for more than two or three days? As every summer dawns, it’s a question more and more people ask, because demand for electric power is growing inexorably, and summertime is when the grid always gets strained to the max. Many experts say all it will take is one unusually bad heat wave and a single computer glitch. The last major outage happened in the summer of 2003, and it affected over 55 million people.