There was a time when air travel was fun, exciting and basically hassles [...]
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In 1978, Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (as an amendment to a 1946 similar but watered down version) making the federal government responsible for the act’s titled [...] The media has been full of stories about the U.S. deficit and buildup of debt. Should we be concerned or is this just another issue bogged down in perennial partisanship and scare mongering that passes for analysis and debate these [...] The IRS, along with some 40 states, is taking a closer look at independent contractors, individuals who work for a business but are not classified as [...] The Federal Tax Code contains some 20,000 pages. If you’re bothered by confusing terminology, arcane rules, complicated credit qualifying criteria, your financial transactions are complicated or you simply don’t want to spend your time doing tax returns, you need to hire a [...] A guy hires a plumber to fix the pipes in the bathroom. When done, the plumber hands the guy a bill. The guy looks at it and exclaims, “Wow, you charge more than my doctor!” To which the plumber replies, “That’s why I quit practicing [...] By one guesstimate, about 25 percent of the mortgages in the U.S. are underwater, meaning that the home value is less than the mortgage. Chalk it up to the general decline in home prices throughout the country, with some areas getting hit much harder than [...] I just received a “statement of clarity” from my credit card issuer. Basically, it outlines in simpler language what the bank can do to adjust rates, assess penalties and change other items contained in the fine print of the agreement that I signed on my original application for the card. The changes are in keeping with the new federal law scheduled to take effect next [...] Every day, the spam folder in my main e-mail account gets a growing number of new messages. I scrutinize them because the ubiquitous spam identifying programming sometimes captures innocent messages; a reader responding to one of my columns, for [...] “You’d be surprised how many people are not completely devoted to their hair stylist,” says Michael Howard, co-owner of Beautiful Hair and a self-described “socialite,” who doubles as receptionist, publicist, music coordinator and [...] Almost two years ago (February 2008), I wrote a column titled, “Forget the American Dream, Rent.” The article was not meant to be a forecaster of imminent housing price decline, but rather an economic analysis of the costs of home ownership versus [...] Labeling a decade is an attempt to capture its essence. Think about past decades. The ‘60s, for example: protest, civil rights, drugs (anyone who remembers the ‘60s wasn’t there); the ‘80s: the decade of greed (junk bonds and “Barbarians at the Gate”); the ‘90s: the tech boom and the Internet. So how do we label the past decade, the [...] Once, in my banker days, I traveled to Asia with a stopover in Guam on the way. Before I left New York, I purchased some short sleeve shirts to augment my wardrobe of warm weather clothes. When I got to the hotel in Singapore, I discovered my new shirts were gone. Clearly, at some airport, the baggage handlers were sporting spiffy new duds. [...] There’s an old Chinese curse that says, “May you live an interesting life” (or something like that). The word “interesting” is, of course, a subtle description of wished-for events, the translation being “horrible, with very bad stuff [...] |
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