Sorry I haven't been too prolific on the hard-hitting articles. I recognized that our calculators and visualizations page is getting a little stale. We've got some big things in the works over the coming month - make sure you're paying attention, and subscribed!
Links We Liked
- Have you ever heard someone utter the complaint that they aren't getting enough back from their investment in Social Security? Free By 50 runs the numbers on that little myth. Even if you roughly double the contribution to account for employer contributions, you'd have to quickly die childless and single after retirement.
- One of our favorite recurring features at Political Calculations is when Ironman boils income distributions into easily readable graphs (or even better - calculators, which I hope this evolves into). This week he had a must-view graph of the distribution of income by age in 2012.
- Control Your Cash challenges you to make the ultimate personal finance sacrifice - that's right, putting down the booze. They go on to slaughter other sacred cows, but the key line has to be "Amassing college credits, without respect to what subject they’re in, is like consuming calories without respect to what food they’re coming from." No word if Greg left the preposition at the end of the sentence to specifically annoy English Majors - but now we're delving into conspiracy theories. (That's outdated advice anyway.)
- We're no stranger to IBM's Many Eyes (hat tip to Ironman for first recommending that product, see our efforts on this page), and I do enjoy a good visualization. Check out this graph on cigarette smuggling between states on the NYT Economix blog.
- One of the more epic houses hit the market a few months back, and Burbed has the late scoop! Woodside's Flood Estate can be yours for the asking price of $85,000,000. Oh, but it appears that Proposition 13 has done its job - the tax burden was only $8,000 last year. Before you ask, yes, I paid more in property tax. Also check out their feature on 'Blueseed' - literally a shipped anchored in international waters off the Bay Area who will take the poor, huddled masses that America won't. Epic startup idea!
- While World GDP has been on the upswing since Q4 2009, the percentage increase has been declining since an inflection point in Q2 2010. The Economist has the scoop - let's keep an eye on this one, okay?
- Andrea at So Over This wonders why broke people drive nice cars. The key? "Bed Credit" lenders insist on minimum quality so they can recoup more if they need to repossess. Interesting way to go about it, I suppose...
- Our pal M&M at The Budgeting Tool tackles the Fed study linking suicides and depression to jealousy in upper-class neighborhoods. Interesting stuff, and you can read my comment there - but I do think television has picked up on the rich neighborhood theme!
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