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. [...]

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 [...]