FiLife

What a week. We considered an all Spitzer edition, but it just would have been too easy. Per usual, what follows is our take on the week’s money-related news in 5-7-5 haiku format. Please drop your own into the comments if you’re so inspired.

That 80 grand could
have been millions, saved in
A 401k

– Ron Lieber

Work for governor
Get exposure for your music
Soon you’ll have riches

– Ron Lieber

Bear Stearns is just fine
Whoops! Bear Stearns needs a bailout
So much for the Ace

– Ron Lieber

Today is Pi Day
Should Feds cut interest rates
3.14 percent?

– Tammy Hepps (more…)

There are probably not a ton of people who are both personal-finance geeks and the type that drools over the curves and angles of the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.

But I’m one of them. Which is why I’ve been horrified to see one of the scoflaws of the personal-finance industry appropriate an Eames icon to make itself look good, all with the permission of the Eames team itself.

See that lovely red chair? It’s the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair. A classic.

Recently, the chair has been showing up as a central figure in ads (see the Ameriprise Web campaign featuring the chair here and one of the Dennis Hopper commercials here) for financial-planning giant Ameriprise, which is decidedly not classic. Or classy. In fact, Ameriprise has been in a world of trouble in recent years.

Here’s just a bit of the Ameriprise lowlight reel: (more…)

Today’s post comes from Bruce Tulgan, an author, consultant and expert on careers, management and inter-generational relations in the workplace. He’s also a genuine, certified FiLife Guru. Like other FiLife Gurus, Bruce will be contributing articles to the site, answering questions on career and other topics and helping in innumerable other ways. But we’ll let him introduce himself further.

After law school and the bar exam, I went to work at a Wall Street law firm in the fall of 1992. I was struck by the fact that, with few exceptions, the more senior lawyers in the firm didn’t have a clue how to manage people my age, those known as Generation Xers (those born 1965-1977).

Don’t get me wrong, they are among the finest lawyers anywhere, and I have great personal affection for many of them. They just didn’t know how to bring out the best in the twenty-somethings who worked for them.

Severely misunderstood by those in charge, I and my peers at the law firm suffered in unhealthy management relationships. Of course, these relationships were the most common topic of discussion over lunch.

We laughed about one senior lawyer who was in the habit of summoning young associates to his office with a three word phone call: (more…)

Today’s post comes from Ali Rogers, a landlord, author, Realtor and all around real-estate whiz. She’s also a genuine and official FiLife Guru. Like other FiLife Gurus, Ali will be contributing articles to the site, answering questions from users on topics she knows a lot about and helping in innumerable other ways. But we’ll let her introduce herself further.

There are so many real-estate questions I wish I didn’t know the answers to.

Questions like:

1) What do you do when your bathroom ceiling lands in your tub?

2) What if you’re 48 hours before closing and your mortgage lender decides they want to try and deny your already-approved loan by asking for a new appraisal?

(Hit the bottom of the post for the answer key).

And some, er, skirt the law: (more…)

You heard about this, right?

The most obvious solution (besides packing light and doing laundry at your destination once or twice) is to stuff your stuff into one really big, heavy bag.

The risk, however, is that your one bag will weigh more than 50 pounds, causing you to pay an even larger overweight fee instead of $25 for the second bag. Thus, the Magellan’s scale pictured here, priced at $9.85, pays for itself quickly.

After years of refusing to check anything (or take anything that wouldn’t fit into a carry-on wheelie), my wife and I had a baby girl a few years back. Given all the gear she rolls with, we decided to cut down to a single, large suitcase for the three of us for all trips.

Thanks to this scale, that suitcase weighs 49 pounds each and every time we travel. One tip: At that weight, reading the scale is a two-person job, one to hold the scale (with the bag hooked onto it) and another to squint at the numbers. Magellan’s ought to be able to make this easier.

Anyone tried a bathroom scale for this job? I always figured that a big suitcase would block the numbers. That wouldn’t be the case if you had a doctor’s scale though…

– Ron Lieber

Amid all of the hubbub out of Starbucks recently – Howard Schultz’s now famous memo on the “commoditization” of the coffee giant and his return as CEO – one fact has gone little noticed: Starbucks appears to be getting ready to start a loyalty program.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine’s Andy Serwer last month, Howie admitted that the company has become “less passionate about customer relationships” in recent years and promised that “we will do more things to better reward our most loyal and best customers.”

For the caffeine-addicted among us who carry tons of little cards around in our wallet trying to earn freebies, this is amazing news. It’s enough to make anyone forgot about the latte factor.

So what should Starbucks do for its very best customers? I have a bunch of ideas – and hope you’ll toss yours at the bottom of the post too. (more…)

I wasn’t going to, actually, until the e-mail arrived from my brother yesterday:

Subject: When Should I Panic?

Body: …and start putting my 401k assets in bonds?

The answer was simple.

My reply: Not for another 25 years or so. And it’s what spurred me to push the “Buy” button. (more…)

I love automation in my financial life.

I love that my credit card pays my bills automatically, that the card company yanks money from my bank each month automatically and that my company deposits my check automatically so those first two things can happen while I suck down a root-beer float while catching up on Friday Night Lights.

What I don’t love is that I can’t yet automate my purchase of the goods I purchase most often. I still have to go to the gas station. There’s still no man showing up at my office with Indian food each day. And the fridge of the future, which orders milk by magic when it disappears, always seems to be just around the corner (but never in my house).

So imagine my joy at discovering that I could now subscribe to toilet paper. (more…)

Electing a president while the nation is at war and scores of people are losing their homes means that candidates can freely ignore longer-term issues.

Ignore, that is, unless someone dresses in an ostrich suit and follows them around primary states accusing them of putting their heads in the sand.

So today, we tip our caps to Jo Jensen and the crew at Students for Saving Social Security. You can read more about their antics in the hysterical story our cousins at The Wall Street Journal did a few days ago. It’s free, so click away.

Meanwhile, you can check out the organization’s web site here. Note the photo of Hillary Clinton good-naturedly (or mistakenly) posing with her Missing poster.

– Ron Lieber

A while back, we launched a feature called the Credit-Card Personal Shopper. Nice idea, lousy name.

The idea is to use my formerly useless knowledge of all-things credit cards to help FiLife readers pick a better card for themselves and their families. I ask a handful of questions to figure out what you need, then I tell you which card or cards to carry at the top of your wallet.

The original name made it sound like some kind of guided shopping spree though. Whoops. So let’s try it again, now with the new-and-improved moniker “Cardshark.” (more…)