Is it okay to welch on a financial commitment? Yes, I know that 'welch' is a gambling term - and we're about to talk about mortgages. If an unproportional amount of recent mortgages were actually bets that house prices would continue to increase, maybe 'welch' is the right term after all? Anyway, Pew recently polled people to ask their opinion on the practice of 'walking away' from mortgages.
Close your eyes or do whatever it is you do when you meditate... ponder the following question, "At what salary would you be content?" Okay, end the meditation. Were you thinking $75,000 annually? That's the number that an analysis of 2008-2009 Gallup poll data by the economists Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman came up with. So, what does that mean?
The official U-3 unemployment rate is now 9.6%, up a tick from the 9.5% we saw last report. However, private employers added 67,000 jobs in August, while July's numbers were revised upwards to 107,000 private sector positions and June numbers were also adjusted to 61,000.
Carnivals and sweet posts for the week,
The Mission: Introduce a friend who’s been living in a cave to rock and roll, three albums at a time. Even he (she?) couldn’t help but be exposed to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, so you can give him other material. You have five care packages available, with spots for three albums each. No greatest hits albums. Also, write your friend a letter telling him what you found hard to leave out and what you had no problem removing.
... is higher than credit card debt in our country (hat tip: Wall Street Journal). How can this be?, you may ask, when the number of news stories on credit cards seem to vastly outweigh the corresponding reports on student loans. Well, yes, credit card stories seem to outnumber student loan stories by a ratio of about 15 to 1, according to StudentLoanJustice.org. How did this happen?
How about this title in the Wall Street Journal? "Credit Cards Take From Poor, Give to the Rich" is the name, in reference to a Boston Federal Reserve Bank report on credit card reward programs. The paper says just that: credit card rewards programs and merchant fees for credit card usage are increasing the overall cost of goods for check and cash customers.
Here's something you can really sink your teeth into - a calculator from the Tax Foundation which will let you input your tax data. What does it output? Well, your tax burden under the 'Bush' tax cuts (passed in 2003), your tax burden if the plan expires, and your tax burden if the changes in President Obama's budget are enacted. Now that you have this data, you can cut through the noise and choose which one you like the best by simply figuring out under which plan you owe the least! Joy!
What's grown faster than inflation the last 40 years? No, not medical expenses. What's grown faster than that? You guessed it (from the title of this post) - education costs increased almost 1000% from 1978 to 2008, compared to about 300% in the generally price level as measured by consumer inflation. Yes, inflation is one of the categories of spending which is increasing at an off-the-chart-rate.