In an uncertain economy, securing your financial future may seem harder and more important than ever. As anyone who has struggled with their finances knows, there is no magic formula to solving your financial woes. I recently spoke to Laura Rowley, Yahoo! Finance personal finance expert, who says that everything to do with money ultimately comes down to trade-offs.
“If you’re trying to get a handle on your finances, keep in mind that you’re paying for the things you buy with your life’s energy,” Rowley said. If you want a $500 Prada handbag, for example, how long and how hard do you have to work in order to get it?
The storyline in recent months has been that we are in better financial shape than we were this time last year. While that may be true by some measures, CardHub.com released the 
I remember reading a profile of the now-dearly-departed Fred Rogers in Esquire magazine about 12 years ago. Mr. Rogers was looking up at a clock and commenting on how big it was, and wouldn’t it be nice if we would all wake up one morning and concentrate on doing something small, not big. Quiet, not loud.
There has been some talk about a ‘Cash for Caulkers’ program that would refund homeowners 50% of their costs to renovate their properties in order to make them more energy efficient. The program,officially called Home Star, is unofficially being dubbed ‘Cash for Caulkers,’ and represents another effort in getting us out of the recession.
In a 
The current Job Bill being debated on Capitol Hill, in its most recent form, holds at its core an incentive to hire people who have gone more than sixty days without a job. Businesses that hire these workers are allowed to forgo paying their social security taxes throughout 2010. The extent of this benefit depends both on the employee’s rate of pay and on the length of their employment. The hope is that this will provide employers incentives to create new jobs.
It is frustrating that American banks, post bailout, are paying out record bonuses given that many of those banks would not be in business if they hadn’t received a handout at the tax payers’ expense. In response, President Obama is now threatening to heavily tax these bonuses to send the banking industry the message that the American people will not stand for such behavior. The depiction of these banks in the media and by the government, however, is far too simplified. Not all banks are the same. Some banks simply didn’t need the bailout and other banks received aid indirectly when the government bailed out their debtors.
More and more American families these days are learning to live within their means. They’re making trade offs about what they want, what they need, and what they can afford. They’re trying, during these hard times, to make their dollar stretch as far as possible. You’ll notice that what they aren’t doing, or at least not in great multitudes, is borrowing against their future so as to maintain their lifestyles. Sure, the draw to live as one has become accustomed is strong, and likewise, the ability to buy on credit is still a possibility. Were there no repercussions, were it simply a case of someone saying, “here take this, no strings attached,” we wouldn’t need to make sacrifices so that we can live within our means. However, when we know that there will be repercussions for our spending, that the credit card bill will come or that the bank will want their money back, we also know that we are going to have to do more with less.
Is your fat costing you money? Suze Orman thinks so. On this season of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” weight-loss competition reality show, Orman quizzed the participants. Turns out that yes, an unhealthy waistline can contribute to poor fiscal health. This is bad news for the 34% of Americans who are obese.
Our government suffers from a naivete with some of its plans to resuscitate the economy which consumers simply cannot afford. To be more specific, the current administration needs to come to terms with the fact that business practices are dictated by laws and potential for profit. Businesses cannot, and should not, be counted on to change their policies out of the goodness of their hearts.
We’re coming up on the close of the year, so we thought we ought to take stock of some of the ideas we’ve put forward that we think are central to our commentary on the world of finance. Since starting Wallet Blog, we’ve found that our mission to provide information on the nation’s economy, consumer advocacy and commentary on the financial news of the day has become deeply linked to the recession. Because of this, we’ve written many articles on what we think our country’s leaders should do in order to fix the economy, as well as what we think about what they’re actually doing. During that process, we’ve noticed that a number of major factors keep coming up to describe the problems with the state of our economy and our recovery. We wanted, then, to take a moment to summarize the ten things we see as endemic to the economic problems we are facing and the steps we see as necessary to achieving their solutions.
As Americans, you and I are part of a country with a great history of overcoming obstacles. However, that history has always been rooted in the basic understanding that during extraordinary times, we are called to extraordinary courses of actions. In order to overcome the problems we have faced, we have had to reinvent ourselves and the manner by which we handled our problems. When our economy crashed in the late 1920s, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, organized work projects and made our nation strong enough to engage in combat against the threat of world-wide fascism. After decades of isolation following World War I, when America was called into action by the attack on Pearl Harbor, we rose to the occasion waging a new kind of war in Europe and the Pacific. When it became clear that the fascist forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan posed new kinds of threats to the peace and stability of the world, we met that threat by creating the atomic bomb. When our country was faced by civil unrest, when the edifices of our nation’s governance proved unequal to its nation’s citizenry, we changed the manner of our laws and even our society to work towards civil rights and equal opportunities for all people. We are a nation composed of people able to make drastic changes to meet our extraordinary circumstances.
Lawmakers and the media seem to have dubbed greed as the primary evil responsible for the downfall of the American economy. Insurance companies are routinely accused of greed, as are credit card companies and networks, investment banks, CEOs and so on. In these times of economic hardship, when the nation’s economy is in desperate need of examination and revision, our federal policy makers are eager to put checks on greed in order to help fix the economy. However, the truth is that in a capitalist economy, profits aren’t a sign of greed, they are a sign that a given company’s business tactics are successful within the competitive system in which that company operates. If lawmakers think that specific companies are making too much money, then the problem isn’t corporate greed, it’s that there simply isn’t enough competition to keep those players from making excessive profits. The President and Congress are determined to use their legislative powers to bail out the U.S. economy, but they ought to be concentrating their efforts not on greed, but instead on the lack of competition in the marketplace.