Personal Finance Advice

I have two friends who both run businesses. Both have told me similar stories lately about how, in such a down economy, they cannot find people to work for them. The first friend runs a construction business that specializes in renovating restaurants. He routinely has people come to him, begging for work. They plead for [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to be paid for the time you spend surfing the Internet for porn, I’ve got good news for you. It is possible to get paid to look at porn on the Internet. We all know that the Internet is a big place and that it is difficult to police. User generated [...]

You may have heard about the movement to automatically opt employees into their 401K’s. Right now, the default option is for you not to contribute. When you’re hired they ask you if you’d like to contribute and how much. If you say no, then nothing is taken out of your check. There is a movement [...]

I just returned from a trip to my local grocery store. The store manager, who has been with the company for thirty years, was at the front of the store greeting customers. The employees who have been working there for the past ten years smiled and said hello as I walked by them. Indeed, most [...]

It was not that long ago that a young person could find a job and expect to keep that job until he retired. Experience was rewarded. Seniority was respected. Pensions were offered. And at the end of a long career, employers expressed their gratitude. Those days are gone and it is now exceedingly rare to [...]

I see a lot of people these days working for very little money. I’m not talking about minimum wage work; that pays a fortune compared to the work I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who write blog articles for content aggregator sites for a dollar for 400 words, take hour-long surveys for $0.50, or [...]

My last “real job” where I worked full-time for someone else was a mess. There was sexual harassment, bullying, unfair hours and demands, and all sorts of other foolishness going on. I was young and hadn’t yet saved up a large emergency fund, so leaving wasn’t possible unless I had another job lined up. Not [...]

I am tired. I have been up for the past two nights until about 1 am trying to finish projects for clients and writing content for my website. I am also a bit under the weather, as I seem to have a sore throat and headache that just won’t go away. I can tell you [...]

Lately I’ve been speaking to a friend who doesn’t know what to do about her job. She hates it. She hates the work, the boss, and her coworkers. The environment is toxic, with a lot of sexual harassment and verbal abuse. She desperately wants to quit but can’t because she needs the money. She knows [...]

By now, almost everyone has probably read of the huge bonuses that AIG recently paid to more than seventy of its executives with money that AIG received from the US government as part of its bailout. If you have not read about it, take a few moments to do so. Although there is tremendous outrage [...]

For all the time and expense involved and for all the talk about how a college degree will help you land a job and make a higher salary, there sure are a lot of important things that many college curriculum don’t teach you about how to excel in the working world. Here are a few [...]

When you’re a young adult preparing for a working world that you haven’t yet experienced, knowing what to expect is difficult. Here are a number of things I wish I had known about work when I was 20 that would have gotten me off to a better start. Why learn these lessons the hard way [...]

Do you love your job? Do you wish you did? Your mantra may be, “there’s a reason they call it work,” but you don’t have to trudge through your weekdays forever if you don’t want to. The first step to landing your dream job is getting rid of the negative thoughts that are preventing you [...]

I have been out of work for a few months. At first, I enjoyed having a bit of stress free time. As I look back on the most tranquil times of my adult life, they were almost certainly the summer after I finished college, the summer after I finished my law degree and the summer [...]

I know someone who has been out of work for four or five months. (He had been a big-wig at a financial/investment firm and got laid off.) I greeted him the other day when we were both out raking leaves and asked how the job hunt was going. “It’s been hard. I can’t find anything,” [...]

As the old year draws to a close and a new year is about to dawn, I like to take a few moments to look back on the past year and to reflect on what went right and what went wrong, how things have changed and whether those changes were for the good. I am [...]

The company I worked for up until last Friday had been facing financial challenges for over a year. All of the employees knew that it was only a matter of time before the company resorted to drastic measures. We joked that one day we would arrive to work and find that our keys no longer [...]

At the beginning of this year, I was looking for a way to supplement our income. I do seasonal data processing and the spring season had not yet begun. I had prior experience with selling handmade jewelry on the internet and had all ready decided that I wanted to use the internet for my venue. [...]

I have been fortunate. For most of my adult life, I have been able to telecommute to work. Indeed, from 2000 through 2007, I was able to hold a position as a corporate vice president at a 700+ employee company. During that time, I only had to make a total of 5 business trips, totaling [...]

One of the most common wishes I hear from people is, “I wish I could work from home.” And the thought that almost always immediately follows that is, “But I don’t know what I could do or how to go about it.” Either that or I hear, “Poor me. There’s nothing that I can do [...]