Personal Finance

Ok, so until NOW, you two have worked just fine together. Sure, he's a sort of sloppy spender who runs a credit card balance every once in a while, but you keep the household accounts neat, the bills get paid, and you never (ok, rarely) bicker about money.

Whether you’ve been laid off, are getting out of debt or are just trying to save as much as possible for possible rainy days to come, we know you (like most smart businesswomen) are paying more attention than normal to your personal bottom line – and cutting as many expenses as possible.

“In the short term, cutting your cost of living can be hard as your biggest costs are fixed in the short term,” says Mary Claire Allvine, PINK’s finance editor and a financial planner with Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth, Inc.

The doom and gloom news goes on – regardless of a little pep in the stock market lately. The real economic factors in our lives keep us jittery: job losses mount, taxes are going up, gas prices seem to show no weakness and mortgage rates are skyrocketing, even while underwriting standards are getting tougher. While these factors remain out of your control, you can use this new era of financial sobriety to change your personal financial culture.

With the promise of a fortune-teller, I sound less like a financial planner than a circus soothsayer! Still, even the most appropriate financial planning advice depends on you knowing yourself. Many super-achieving, type-A types still fail in their own financial success because they lack perspective on themselves.

This lack of perspective can actually be linked to our successes! Many of us are achieving because we are born with or have cultivated vision – vision of what works best! Then we have the gumption to go do it.

PINK’s provocative challenge this week relates to the economic component of our environmental sustainability. In previous blogs, I’ve issued the challenge to calculate another point of financial stability: your personal financial sustainability. How long could you live on safe assets/earned income before gyrations in your portfolio force you to sell at a low?

And Tomorrow Ain’t As Bad As It Seems! Billy Joel still sings. And it’s still true. A friend recently lamented the loss of pensions. “We have nothing to rely on!” she exclaimed. “Our parents generation had pensions and social security. We might not have either.” This friend is right – but only superficially. The truth is that companies’ pension obligations eventually overwhelmed many a once-strong balance sheet.

My dad was born in 1930. He was one of five boys, his dad was lucky enough to have a union job, and they scraped through the Great Depression, inviting various down-and-out relatives to share their limited living space over my dad's growing-up years. He never had his own bedroom – more often, there were 3 or 4 sleeping to a room. He and his brothers all got jobs as young as they could. Summer vacation involved spending all day at the beaches on the south side of Chicago.

GE and other big-name financial services companies have recently cut or eliminated their dividends. Historically, if a big company were to reduce its dividend, the market would fear the worst. In these cases, however, corporate management is arguing that cutting the dividend will lead to more strength. Corporations are conserving cash to get through the economic crisis.

I just returned from a 5-day trip out of the country to find three more friends holding pink slips. There's an old joke in economics about the unemployment rate: it's either 100% when you're out of a job, 50% when you're worried about your job, or 0% when you're employed.

Two high level political appointees tumbled today from tax problems. As with all the crises our country is facing, opportunity arises. All of Congress needs to take note that complying with tax law is either too expensive or too complicated or both.

I study and work with the income taxes every day in my job. Still, I need an accountant to help me file in the multiple states that stake a claim on my income. I also need his help with my various nanny tax issues.