You can probably do a lot of personality-development, self assessment, and skills enhancement to save your job or get a promotion. However, that wouldn’t help a bit if the economy isn’t on your side. Average Employee Overpaid May be the experts talk about correction in economy or depreciation in the unemployment rate. But what happens when you take a closer look at the bottom of the hierarchy. You or the experts will realize that a correction is needed there. Excluding the bonus and perks, an average American employee is paid much higher than the people with same roles, responsibilities, and designation, than the rest of the world. If the country wants to regain its momentum (logically, it definitely will), a cut down on employee compensation, perquisites, and benefits is inevitable. For [...]

As per the data revealed by National Association of Realtors (NAR), there a sharp rise in the sales of new homes in July and August 2009. However, the sales in month of August weren’t as high as expected which was quite disappointing. So, I ignored chasing the sales trend and didn’t look at the real estate market for some months. Later, in December 2009, the November data was released which again proved disappointing. There was a 16% fall in the sales of houses than October. This the first time the sales figure dropped since past 9 months. Experts had forecasted a 2% fall. When they were asked about the steep fall in sales, “People took a Breather,” is what David Crowe, chief economist in National Association of Home Builders, concluded. Another chief economist from NAR, Lawrence [...]

This year, Nexus One seems to be the newest smartphone on the block. Will it give tough competition to a Droid, iPhone and the Palm Pre is what we’ve got to see in the coming days. The Nexus debuts with an offer of discounted price and a T-Mobile contract something which you did not get with other smartphones. Nexus has stepped onto a stage dominated by the iPhone 3GS. So will it overthrow the 3GS and steal the show, especially when the Droid and Verizon wireless already seem to have captured a sizeable portion of the audience? As far as the users are concerned, good features do attract the cellphone enthusiasts but the costs of owning the phone are also something that need to be considered especially after the economically tough times. Here’s a Billshrink infographic that compares the [...]

The world of electronics is so very similar to the showbiz world! In both these worlds, something new comes up almost everyday, people go crazy over the new and the old is shunned off in no time. What a pity! Last Christmas, I presented my niece with a brand new expensive mobile phone but this year she was crazy after another model that her friend picked up from the market. According to a 2007 study of ISupply, there are over a billion used cellphones in America of which 10 % are being relegated to landfills and 37 % to household redundant drawers! Not only cellphones, but household electronic gadgets like tape recorders, electronic watches, kitchen and laundry appliances, also find themselves in old garages or in the attics. They gather cobwebs there! You keep them there where they get [...]

Business mergers are so much like weddings! Some of them are so successful that they become the talk of the town. America has seen some of the greatest business mergers worth talking about. Just like successfully wed couples, these merged companies are exemplary in setting new trends in doing business. A merger, like a wedding, is not a simple exchange of vows (agreement contracts). A lot of intellectual and materialistic transactions take place and that is a flippant affair by no means.  Let’s see some of the best mergers that have happened in America and why we consider them the best. AOL And Time Warner- The Tragedy Not all weddings are success stories and so is true with all mergers too. It’s painful to see that some great weddings end in tragedy and so do some mergers. The AOL [...]

I am not really a “New Year Resolution” supporter because I don’t want to halt my decisions till the year end. In simple terms, why do people wait for New Year to bring positive changes in life? It’s quite amusing to see people coming up with similar resolutions every year. I don’t like to have such procrastinated resolutions. But, out of curiosity, I did a bit of research to find the most common ones this year. Lose Weight: Not surprisingly, this is the number one resolution since last fifty years or more (I guess, since people knew about New Year resolution). Along with being most common, this resolution is also the most unsuccessfully kept one. People, who never worked out once a month, set up goals to works out every day. Why such unachievable targets? Rather than doing [...]

A new year has come once again and once again it’s the time to start working on the resolutions that you might have probably made by now. In all possibility, owing to the financially not so happy times, a firm resolution to improve your financial status must be top on the agenda. Improving financial status to most of us means curtailing our expenditure or improving our bank balances. Though, improving finances essentially involves these two activities, just these are not enough. There are more activities that you’ve got to do in this year which will help you in improving your finances. Here are some of them: Postpone your plans to buy property- Don’t buy a house now. The housing markets are not really encouraging and mortgages are really high. Wait for a more favorable time. If you’ve [...]

According to experts, America is on a path to recovery. Okay, I ain’t any expert nor am I going to display current economic graphs to back their statements. Frankly, they are pretty boring unless it helps us, directly, or they talk about us. If you look at the current American spending habits, it seems that the country is on the path to frugality, if not recovery. However, if they become frugal, recovery is certain. So, how do I know America is being frugal? Simple. Look around you. You will notice the disappearance of extravagant habits and inhabitation of frugality. Here is what I have been noticing since past many weeks: Enormous usage of public transportation and carpooling:Gasoline isn’t cheap at all, especially during the days when we are jobless or adjusting at a lower paying [...]

Did I just ask you to stop accumulating funds for retirement? Yes. Or maybe the precise sentence should be “Don’t accumulate funds for retirement at all.” I don’t blame you. The federal government and finance industry, consciously or unconsciously, have initiated and protracted the retirement con. They generated several retirement schemes like IRA’s and 410K account along with financial investment benefits like index funds and mutual funds, which induces every individual to save funds and lock it in safety (some unsafe) boxes and lug it out when you aren’t quite fit to enjoy the wealth you have created. The finance industry will, of course, promote saving for retirement. Till the time you are 60-65, they have generated fortune using your funds for several years. For them, [...]

Are you planning to save up for your retirement? Your Roth IRA account may offer you tax deductibles for you to save up a lot but the money saved may be well spent on other areas like too many bank accounts! Ask how? Banks charge fees for maintaining those accounts and you as a client lose out on a good amount of money paying up these fees. You might want to purchase a new car, a new washing machine or a sound system. One common strategy that we all apply when we don’t have enough money for a new household expenditure is to open a new account to save up money specifically for any new kind of expenditure that might crop up.  But maintaining so many small accounts is pretty expensive as many banks charge fees for maintaining accounts with low values. These accounts usually happen to be [...]