Personal Finance Advice

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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,” he [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As children, we are often taught by our parents to do well in school, go to college and get a good job to succeed financially in life? We have all heard that being active and hard work will make us healthy and wealthy. But being an active participant isn’t always good for your financial health. [...]

While I currently work for myself, there was a time when I actually worked for a large corporation. My time there taught me that corporate life wasn’t the career path that I ultimately wanted to walk down, but that didn’t stop me from learning a lot of solid advice from the mentors I met there [...]

Unless you’re very fortunate, at some point in your life you’re likely to have a job you hate. You might not hate it in the beginning but sooner or later, whether it’s because management changes, your responsibilities are shift, or your coworkers become morons, you’ll wake up one day and say, “I hate my job.” [...]

Someone told me the other day that I should want to earn more money so that I could afford the “finer things” in life. I responded by saying that yes, more money would be nice (isn’t it always?), but that the tradeoffs (working longer hours, more stress, more time away from my family) wouldn’t be [...]

It never fails: You encounter new people and the first question they ask is, “So, what do you do?” Occasionally you’ll encounter people that seem to ask this question out of a genuine interest in you and your life, but most of the time you can tell that it’s their way of quickly sizing up [...]

I have always assumed that if your career/job pays you decent money that you should have no trouble getting ahead financially as long as you’re responsible with money. But recently an old friend who works in a high powered, high paying, high stress career made me rethink that assumption.
My friend works for a large [...]