According to Money Magazine and CNN Money, Moorestown, New Jersey is the Best Place to Live. The article describes Moorestown as a small, affordable town with a quaint feel. Beware: the town was founded by Quakers and you can’t buy alcohol. Have no fear, Philadelphia is only 15 miles away. (Is that always a good thing?)
Another New Jersey town made the top ten list: Chatham. Princeton, my next door neighbor, hit the list at number fifteen. That’s a little surprising since the borough is completely unaffordable and the public school system is not one of the best; anybody who is anybody in Princeton sends their kids to one of the many private or charter schools. It is a very pretty area, though.
Follow-up: Readers wrote to CNN Money berating them for not including their precious hometowns. Entertaining.
More accurately, it’s extreme poverty. That is the best way to describe living on one dollar a day in a pre-industrialized (farming) community. Now imagine this family, earning one dollar a day, has six children to support.
Forget about television (much less cable) and internet. Forget about cell phones (or any phone, for that matter). Forget about clean clothing and a good education. This story puts everything into perspective. While we’re all concerned with our own well-being and wealth, it’s difficult to contemplate what life is like on the other side of the world — or even elsewhere in this country — for those existing in poverty.
So why would this family, or any other extremely low income household, have so many children if there’s not enough to support them? Having more children means there are more hands to help in the field, and somehow the numbers show that an additional child helping when he or she is old enough will pay for that child’s expenses.
Perhaps the world’s biggest mistake was agriculture. When humans began adopting farming and leaving hunting-gathering behind, this is how they were rewarded:
* The average height of both men and women lessened by five or six inches.
* Life expectancy dropped.
* Increased cases of infectuous diseases and iron-deficiency anemia.
These are all signs of malnourishment in the skeletons of those early farmers. While many of these and other similar issues have been overcome by the modernized world (except for disease), not all humans have “progressed” that far yet.
If farming was so much better than hunting-gathering as progressives claim, why were people getting sick more often? Settling down and adopting agriculture allowed the already increasing population to continue increasing, but the quality nutrition provided by hunting and gathering gave way to higher quantity of less nutritious foods.
This point of view is quite anti-progressive and obviously more than a little controversial, but interesting.
I noticed some great advice written by Seth Jayson from The Motley Fool today: Ignore the Experts.
June sales numbers all over the map show that neither high-priced oil nor threat of housing bubble nor Michael Jackson acquittal can keep strong retailers from continuing to move their products.
The Fool advises readers to turn off the constant stream of news and realize that the talking heads can’t predict the future. Make investing decisions based on how the business you’re considering is performing and its price, not based on possibly impending but ill-defined macroeconomic doom.
I’m not considering it, but maybe someone out there is. As with anything, you have to take a realistic view of the ramifications of a choice.
It seems like real estate is a hot career right now, with stories about people making millions of dollars and membership organizations continuing their growth.
Here are some things to consider before making the career change:
* The business is getting much more complicated.
* The internet is replacing more traditional methods of buying and selling houses.
* Those who want the human touch opt for more experienced agents and brokers.
* Legal protections are arduous.
* There is huge turnover (80 percent) in the first year.
* There may be no income for six months while you continue to incur expenses.
Sidenote: It’s likely you’ve heard by now about the explosions this morning in London. It coincides with the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
When terror strikes, it’s easy to think about September 11 and the poor performance of the stock market following the event. It may be better to wait this one out before running for the hills and cashing out.
It’s better not to make hasty decisions based on world events. CNN Money offers that same advice. According to CNBC, European markets reacted worse to the events with major selling.
This sounds like it could be a good opportunity. If the dips aren’t permanent, it may be the right time to buy in. However, it still isn’t wise to make financial decisions rashly, whether buying or selling.
Tomorrow is pay day, which means my automatic investment in my 401(k) will take place. The investment will be about $160 including the company match. Perhaps the prices will stay low and I’ll get more for my money.
I don’t have spare money to play with and invest, otherwise I’d probably buy into the market in times of uncertainty and hold long enough that the gains should make it worthwhile.
This might not be the right time. Helene Meisler from RealMoney says this isn’t a buying opportunity and presents a thorough technical analysis of the charts.
Here’s another similar viewpoint from CNN Money. The markets are suffering “whiplash” but traders have concluded that there will be little economcal impact to this morning’s events. Oil, which dropped from $62 to $54 has already rebounded to $60. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
End of the day update: The stock market closed higher than it opened today. So much for uncertainty in the face of terror.
And finally, Amey Stone from Business Week’s Well Spent blog spoke to an investment strategist who explained why the upward turn in the market is a normal post-incident occurance.
I didn’t time a transfer correctly and it cost me five dollars. Thinking a couple of checks wouldn’t be withdrawn from my Wachovia checking account until today, I scheduled a transfer in from an ING Direct savings account for yesterday to cover the funds. It looks like the checks withdrew yesterday but the deposit didn’t clear until today, so my overdraft protection kicked in. That “service” carries a $5 fee.
I should build a cushion into my checking account rather than play it so close to the line.
Here is some common sense from Jeanne Sahadi: If financial success is important to you, and you are not as successful as those around you, you are not going to be as happy as someone who doesn’t care as much about financial success. In fact, setting financial success as a goal can make some people less happy.
There are some interesting statistics in the article, some of which may not be common sense like the statement above.
When a group of MBAs were asked whether they’d rather make $100,000 when everyone around them made $120,000, or make $90,000 when everyone around them made $70,000, a majority opted for the lesser salary if everyone at the company knew about the discrepancy, Schwarz said. But if the salary discrepancies were kept confidential, about half said they’d opt for the $100,000 job.
I’m not sure why they singled out MBAs, perhaps they were who was available. Maybe they figure MBAs are conrcerned only with money.
I write about personal finance on Consumerism Commentary. That topic, while broad, is really the sole content of this website. This is not because I am obsessed with personal finance; I have other blogs where I write about different aspects my life and the world. (It’s up to you to find them–no obvious direct links.) Personal finance is such a small part of my universe of interests, but it gets a large chunk of time because I have a big audience here.
I happen to be in one of the categories mentioned in this article, a category which supposedly makes me unhappy. Most of the people around me are doing better off than I am or seem to be. My friends have houses and families and I’m still a low-level worker bee in the office, with no sign of the CEO coming to my cubicle and asking me to run one of the divisions of the company, working directly for him.
My level of cash seems to be decreasing, so I don’t see a house any time soon, either.
If I decide to go to law school next fall, which is looking good right now, it’s not because I want money. I want to do something interesting. If I get paid more for it, great, but even still I’m going to be in debt for a while. Since I’ve been anti-debt for the last several years, that’s a difficult mental barrier for me to cross.
