Recent Blogs Posts

I don’t need the media or the government to tell me that the economy is heading south. I have a foolproof barometer of economic health in my own town. It’s called the scrap heap, aka, the metal recycler.

For about ten years, I’ve been collecting my aluminum cans and taking them to the scrap heap for recycling once a month. It’s a win-win situation. I do something good for the environment, and the metal recycler pays me per pound of aluminum I bring in. It’s not a fortune by any means; ...

I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie in the 70’s. Each episode had a moral to it, but it wasn’t until I staged a marathon viewing session courtesy of Netflix that I realized how many of those episodes dealt with the subject of money in some form. Maybe some of my money habits did come from TV, after all.

If you have kids and want to teach them some solid lessons about money this summer (or just for your own enjoyment) here are the episodes that dealt most heavily with money ...

Television has given us a lot of relationships with characters who we can never meet. I remember characters from a lot of TV shows better than I am able to recall certain childhood friends and classmates and I am pretty sure that I still know the TV characters better than I have known a lot of people with whom I once interacted every day. I am sure that you have television memories, too, and that some are shared with almost everyone you know while others are all but forgotten by most of us. ...

With this downturning economy, even governments are having a hard time. My own city is facing at least a $4 million dollar decrease in revenues, and my state is facing more than $140 million in shortfalls.

One alternative to getting out of the situation is to raise taxes, a solution that no one likes. Thus, the monetary shortfall means service cuts. I would be hard pressed to choose which city or state service to sacrifice. Should we have fewer teachers in schools or fewer police officers ...