The company an employee works for makes all the difference. Over the course of a 40-year career, workers at some companies lose tens of thousands of dollars in 401(k) fees and earnings -- sometimes more than double the savings lost by workers at other firms, according to an exclusive analysis of about 2,300 company 401(k) plans by FutureAdvisor, an online financial adviser.
The number of Americans age 60 and over in debt is alarming. A recent report by the AARP’s Public Policy Institute and the research organization Demos revealed that Americans over the age of 50 carried substantially more debt on credit cards — an average balance of $8,278 — than those under 50, whose average balance was $6,258.
When Vernardo and Claire Simmons-Valenzuela married, they imagined all the trappings of a middle-class life. Soon enough, they had kids. Claire finished a master's degree. They held jobs as an Army medic and a physician's assistant. They dreamed of next steps: owning a home, taking their first vacation in years. Vernardo would return to school for a bachelor’s in nursing. But when payments for the couple's $187,000 in combined student loan debt came due, most of it accrued during Claire’s graduate education, they put those dreams on hold.
The push for Same Day Registration has encountered a curious adversary in some states this year – county clerks.
The latest example is Utah, where the state Senate killed a SDR bill last week on an 18-10 vote. Under current state law, Utahans must register at least 15 days before an election if they want their ballot to be counted. Since many voters don’t tune in until the waning days of a campaign, arbitrary deadlines like this come as an unwelcome surprise to a lot of people who hope to participate in elections.
When it comes to Election Day, Minnesota and Montana are very different animals. Despite its size, most of Minnesota’s increasingly diverse population resides in the state’s major cities, while three-quarters of Montana voters live in a county with fewer than 100,000 residents. And while Montana is solidly red in presidential elections, Minnesota hasn’t thrown its weight behind a Republican since Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972.
It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And forFelix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood.
The job market has been tough for older workers, but did you ever imagine that you wouldn’t land a job because of your credit report?
It’s possible.
As I wrote about in my Forbes blog, Bad Credit Can Cost You a Job, if you’re looking to change careers, find a new job, get promoted, or just hang onto the one you have, a messy credit report can trip you up.
When Barack Obama won a second term in the White House in November 2012, many observers concluded that new voting ID laws hadn't had much effect on turnout. After all, the election had swung in Democrats’ favor, and young and minority voters comprised a larger share of the electorate than four years earlier. So identification requirements aren’t the threat to voting rights that many feared, right?
More data from the 2012 election is in, and it’s tough to deny that the health of democracy and safety of your voting rights vary widely depending on where you live.
That finding comes through clearly in a new report from Nonprofit VOTE, a nonpartisan group that encourages nonprofits to engage voters. The report parses the latest data on the 2012 elections, and it should be required reading for the legion of state lawmakers considering changes to election laws this year.
Middle-income Americans age 50 and older are now carrying more credit card debt on average than younger people, according to a 2012 study released by Demos. This is a reversal of the findings from the Demos survey which took place in 2008.
The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.
Proposals to raise the minimum wage are enormously popular with the American public, but there’s a reason they are successful only on occasion.
The powerful business lobby is quite effective at getting through to lawmakers with their message that higher wage requirements will lead to less employment. That’s a particularly potent argument in today’s environment, after four years of elevated unemployment levels.
New Jersey was ready when Hurricane Sandy rushed ashore the evening of October 29, 2012. Teams from FEMA and the National Guard had been activated, nuclear reactors had been shut down, and the Red Cross had prepared meals and shelters.
Emmett Pinkston served in the military for 30 years, first in the Marines, then in the Air Force, then in the Army. He helped coordinate security for President George W. Bush during the G8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga., in 2004, and worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq from 2005 to 2007, some of the deadliest years of the war.
It's time to ensure that workers, no matter what their immigration status, have the same rights, and that their status isn't used an excuse to justify abusive behavior.
Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has come out swinging against a proposal to allow voters in his state to register on Election Day. Coloradans currently must register at least 29 days ahead of time, and Gessler is dusting the cobwebs off a well-worn bogeyman in an attempt to keep it that way. In a recent op-ed in the Denver Post, Gessler wrote:
I attended the oral argument in the Voting Rights Act case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and I came away even more convinced that the Court should uphold the contested parts of the law.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires that covered states "preclear" their proposed election law changes with federal officials. Nine states plus parts of seven others are "covered," and many of these areas are in the South.
President Obama and some members of Congress have made waves recently with calls for voting reform. But your access to the ballot probably depends more on what’s going on at the nearest statehouse.
With state legislative sessions well underway, lawmakers across the country have unleashed a raft of bills tweaking their states’ voting systems. Here are a few issues to keep an eye on.
Young adults are pulling back on credit-card debt for similar reasons, said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a public policy research organization. It found that Americans age 25 to 34 cut their credit card debt in half between 2008 and 2012.
All around them, young adults are seeing signs of financial distress -- job insecurity, foreclosures, high college costs. That's making them think twice about applying for loans, she said.