Circuit City files for bankruptcy. This store is the latest victim of the current economy. You can look through the remaining stores, but I don’t think this bankrupcty will lead to fire-sale prices on electronics as we head into the holiday shopping season.
Is It Time to Have a Money Talk, Child to Parent? Will you have to bail out your parents? Finance is always a difficult topic across generations within the same family. This New York Times article includes a sample letter you can use to help approach the subject with your parents.
Reinsuring A.I.G. The Treasury Department added $40 billion to the bailout for A.I.G., bringing the total assigned to this company $150 billion. In return for the additional $40 billion, the government will own a stake in the company. A.I.G. will also benefit from a lower interest rate on the money it is borrowing from the Federal Reserve.
Fierce Financial Tips: The Carnival of Personal Finance #178, Struwwelpeter Edition. Today’s edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance focuses on a strange collection of 19th century children’s poetry from Germany! In addition to the articles featured as Editor’s Choice, start with What Has Changed in Personal Finance, Living Frugal With Other People’s Money, and The Importance of Doing What You Know You Should.
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Flexo: It’s still Monday, November 10, 2008 :)http://www.thesunsfinancialdiary.com/
Sun: I was getting ahead of myself, apparently. Thanks!
It gets me restless to think about big stores like Circuit City filing for bankruptcy. It was concerning when Starbucks started closing stores, but then again, they had too many in the first place. I wonder how Best Buy is holding up, the factors that went into CC’s decline must be affecting them too.
The NYTimes article is interesting; I always feel like openly discussing finances in tough times is taboo in the family even though its so necessary to talk it out. This might be one reason why many young people drown in credit card debt. In any case though, both kids and parents should acknowledge the crunch together and help each other in any way possible.
My capstone financial research project at my University in the second semester of 2007 (Sep to Dec 2007) was on Best Buy. One of the components of the project was our company’s competitors, which included heavy research into Circuit City. From what we found out, Circuit City was in deep financial trouble, with decreasing sales, since way back then. They were doing so bad, in fact, that one of the possible strategies for Best Buy was to buy up a bunch of Circuit City stores and convert them to Best Buys, or buy Circuit City outright. That Circuit City went bankrupt is no surprise at all, considering their situation, and it’s difficult to say whether they would not have went bankrupt even if the economy was still stable.
Best Buy, on the other hand, was doing exceptionally well, and although I am sure they were hurt by the economy just as everyone else, I’m sure they will continue to be strong.