Feed items

The average Wall Street bonus was $172,860 in 2014. That’s just a bonus — and it’s more than three times the average high school teacher’s annual salary of $55,000.

And yet, America’s teachers have reason to feel pretty smug right now beside their financial industry peers. Sure, summer’s coming, and with it more than two months of guilt-free vacation for most teachers, or a chance to pull in some side income. But that’s not the only reason.

Take advantage of any professional development opportunities your employer offers, from discounted classes to company-paid conferences and networking events. Photo: Jenna Dosch/Tech Cocktail

One of the biggest financial fears that many people have is that they’ll unexpectedly lose their job, which will lead to a downward spiral of financial trouble. For many families, particularly those with children who are also living paycheck to paycheck, that downward spiral will happen very quickly.

Asking someone to co-sign a loan is almost as weighty as a marriage proposal. Photo: Kenji Ross

“Will you co-sign a loan?”

That’s almost like asking, “Will you marry me?”

Well, maybe not quite that intense. However, a marriage can end in divorce, while a co-signed loan can last forever.

A co-signer is generally needed when a person applying for a loan, say a car loan or student loan, doesn’t have enough credit, has bad credit, and earning a small income or no income at all.

Before we even get started, I wanted to note that this article is about your money, but we need to take a little journey into the realm of productivity first. So, just bear with me a little bit.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading Ed Batista’s excellent article on productivity in Harvard Business Review. Entitled The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore, the article’s main point is that people who are most productive with their time and energy succeed at least in part due to their ability to decide which people are actually giving them things worth thinking about and which people are just adding irrelevant “noise.” They stop paying attention to the “noise” and focus instead on the others.

Batista lays out the problem at the start: