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 FiLifeGurus, 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?
We do list posts every Wednesday; last week’s was about a bunch of things we wish car companies would do better. Tomorrow, we’ll put the magnifying glass on 401k administrators (and the employers who let them get away with too much).
For more about FiLife, read the mini-manifesto we penned on the first day this blog went live. Our full site will launch soon. Until then, please set your internet dial here.
If you’ve been hanging around here a while, things will look a bit different to you today. (If you haven’t been hanging around here at all, welcome!).
We apologize in advance for the fact that the navigation up top doesn’t work for many of you. Please ignore it for now and continue reading our daily offerings as you have been all along. Everything’s still here, it just looks better (at least we hope it does).
And stay tuned for more on the full launch of FiLife.
If you’re one of the millions of people who heard the FiLife commentary on American Public Media’s Marketplace show tonight, thanks so much for coming to find us. If you didn’t hear it, you can listen in here.
The Marketplace piece was a riff off of a post we did a few weeks back ticking off seven reasons why it’s rude to give gift cards. We do list posts every Wednesday; last week’s was about a bunch of things we wish student-loan lenders would do better. We’ll have more to say about how universities handle student loans tomorrow, in fact.
For more about FiLife, read the About Us. Or check out the mini-manifesto we penned on the first day this blog went live. Our full site will launch soon. Until then, please set your internet dial here or sign up for an RSS feed.
If you found us through today’s Wall Street Journal Sunday story, thanks so much for coming to check us out. This post and this one will tell you a bit more about what we’re trying to do here at FiLife. While we’ve been busy here on the blog (glance to the left for the topics we’ve hit so far), there will be a lot more to show you once we launch for real after the holidays.
If you don’t get the Sunday WSJ personal-finance supplement in your local newspaper, click here to read my story about picking the right credit card to use during the holiday season. I’ll be using my trusty Starwood Preferred Guest American Express card.
Thanks for noticing. We may fiddle around a bit more with the way things look in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, we’re hard at work on the full-site launch and will give you a heads-up when we’re a few days away from pulling back the curtain.
Here’s the big idea: There’s so much about the world of personal finance that ought to be different: cheaper, easier, more personalized. So why don’t the companies that make things expensive and slow and generic just make them better already? We figured we’d actually ask them.
See the “Why Don’t They…” link over there to the left? That’s where you’ll find the questions we’ve posed so far. Please check the answers out and let us know what you think. If you have burning questions of your own, drop them in the comments field or send us an email. If we can’t answer them ourselves, we’ll post and figure them out.
For those of you who wandered here after having seen my Green Thumb column in the Weekend Edition of The Wall Street Journal, thanks so much for checking out FiLife. For those of you who didn’t see the paper, wsj.com doesn’t seem to have made the column free, so I can’t post a link here — my apologies.
In any event, the column encourages parents to talk to their kids about how they’re managing to pay for all (or a portion) of college tuition. Talking about money out loud is a theme you’ll see us returning to again and again as we roll out our site. Shira Boss, the author of “Green With Envy,” was a big help as I reported it, and I encourage everyone to check out her book.
Please share your thoughts on the column by clicking on the Comments link below, and thanks again for coming.
We don’t talk enough about money. Sure, we listen sometimes, when people shout at us from a television screen or deliver one-size-fits-all advice on the pages of a book or magazine. But how often have any of us had a brutally honest conversation about our financial habits with our friends or family?
It’s easy to explain away the silence. There isn’t much common ground if one friend is an actor and another is about to make partner at a law firm, and it’s uncomfortable when a single friend is on one side of the table while the couple about to have kids is on the other. Then there’s the matter of looking like an idiot. While we all may have the trappings of adulthood, it’s embarrassing to admit that we don’t know the difference between a checking and a money-market account.
Our new blog is written by a handful of personal-finance journalists in their 20’s and 30’s who are committed to talking about this stuff out loud so others can learn from our blunders. We’ll be introducing ourselves individually over the next week, and later on you’ll hear from others who work with us too. Though we’re paid to know better, we don’t always follow our own advice. We make mistakes, we get lazy, we forget stuff. But you wouldn’t know it by reading the things we’ve written in past gigs.
So this is where we’ll come clean about what we’ve messed up, what keeps us up at night and the writing elsewhere on the Web that we wish we’d created ourselves because it really made us think. When things go wrong, we won’t just whine into the ether. We’ll use our contacts and access when we need to – and invite the companies that cause us problems to diagnose the cause. And when we find something that makes it easier to sort our financial lives, we’ll give props to institutions that offer it (and call their competitors to find out why they don’t do it too).
This blog is a production of FiLife, a new personal-finance site that goes live later this year. Until it’s fully baked, please come back again and join the conversation.
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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.
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 
If you found us through today’s Wall Street Journal Sunday story, thanks so much for coming to check us out. 