Unemployment rate being 9.8 % is the highest in the present times. You might be an unemployed person, but you can always think about employing yourself one way or the other. You might have been given the pink slip by your employer but the world does not end there. Do you know that a lot of people are taking up two or more part-time jobs on a short term or long term basis to meet their financial requirements? A lot of people are finding freelancing lucrative. I prefer freelancing because I never liked office politics. Going to office involves a lot of expenditure. Transportation costs, cost of eating out, and money spent on clothes etc. is an overhead that I can prevent when working from home. Also, I don’t have strict timings of reporting in office and I can work even while on a holiday. [...]

The rate of unemployment was 9.8 % last week. Many owners have shut down their offices and now the busy commercial hubs are empty chambers with a few workers here and there. There’s a lot of vacant space and that too at very low rental charges.  This is the time you could think of hiring office space. The rental charges are the lowest in a decade according to New York real estate research firm Reis Inc. The owners are trying their best to attract you and this is the time you could cash on the advantage that you have in the situation. They’ll be more open to negotiations. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the vacancy rate is about 16.5 % which is a high in five years time. Plummeting rents and rising vacancies spells more hard time for the real estate industry. There’s already [...]

You might be young today, but oldage will come in eventually. Old age brings in a lot of health and functional limitations for which you’ll need the services of a health care professional or a non-medical nurse. Even if you are acutely ill you might need help with your daily activities like bathing, dressing, etc which you’ll need assistance for. Long term care involves years of expenditure which is quite a lot for many people. We generally tend to overlook long term care. Most of our health insurance coverages concentrate on short term specific illnesses. The new health care bill does not offer much on long term care.  Here’s an interesting read from Prime Targeting on what the government health care bill has got for long term care. You have so many reasons justifying why you should [...]

As the G-7 leaders meet the future of the dollar was of prime concern. If there’s been any issue that’s been topmost on the minds of the political leaders and the financially savvy in the present times, it’s been the value of the dollar which does not seem good owing to the bad economic conditions. With the world seeing a shift in the focus of world economy from America and the European countries to Asia, particularly China and India, the question  becomes all the more pertinent. There is an indication that economic power is shifting from the West to the Asian countries. Some economists predict that there might not be an actual shift of economic power, though it might temporarily appear to be so owing to the current recession which has been the worst since the last world war. According [...]

If you make a purchase on a credit card, your retailer gets less money because he has to make some hidden payments as fees. For example, if you are making a payment of $ 150 its not that the entire money is reaching the retailer. He/she is getting only a part of it. If you use a card that offers benefits, the store will be getting even less than what it would if you’d use a card that does not come with any benefits. For example if you are using a card that offers you airline miles to buy something at a mall, the store will get lesser than it would if you would have used a card that does not offer you any perks.  This is the reason the stores have decided to price their items higher. On the other hand, there are people who don’t use credit cards. Till a few days ago stores would offer discounts [...]

Christmas is still more than a couple of months away, but you might be contemplating starting your shopping for the event. After the recession, if you are comfortable with your money, you can always go ahead right now, but shopper news doesn’t seem to be very encouraging. Well, I really don’t want to disappoint you but with unemployment rate at almost 10 % and the foreclosure episodes still being quite frequent do you expect people to shop big this holiday season? In August, we might have rejoiced about consumer confidence rising up to 54. 5 %, but according to the Conference board report it has again plummeted to 53.1 % in September. A confidence index of 90 % is indicative of sound economic health for the nation. When our confidence is so poor, can we really spend much on shopping this [...]

Personal Savings seem to have reached an all-time low this year. I’m not surprised. Given the very stormy economic conditions, the average American would have been thinking about surviving in the present day, rather than saving up for the future. Apart from the economic conditions, the level of financial literacy of the youth and the public in general is also responsible for this. Americans being spendthrifts by nature and being too optimistic about the future, till the recent recession, did not find the necessity to save up for the future, but the economic famine has woken up people to the harsh reality. Another reason that seems to have made the Americans sleep over the personal savings issue was the highly available consumer credit which has grown at an alarming rate in the last few years. [...]