Category Archives: Debt
Seniors, You Don’t Have to Struggle With Debt in Silence
Loneliness is terrible for seniors; the media have been saying this for decades, and yet, the senior loneliness epidemic has only gotten worse. In the next few years, many thousands of American “solo agers,” that is, unmarried people without children, will enter retirement. If you are married, you have spared yourself the worst of… Read More »
Is the Middle East Conflict Pushing Your Finances to the Brink?
The news you receive on your phone is an echo chamber. Your social media feeds keep feeding you more content about the things that you have previously clicked on. This has been going on since before chatbots came along to give you apparently polished mono answers that do little except repeat back what you… Read More »
Is Credit Insurance Just Another Junk Fee?
For the entire length of its existence, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been railing against junk fees, which it defines as fees that do not provide a service to the consumer. Of course, it is difficult to pin down a definition for junk fees. Companies will always provide some justification for why… Read More »
How Can Young People Bounce Back From Risky Financial Decisions?
It only makes sense to associate risky behavior with youth. Bold moves that risk physical injury or harm to one’s reputation tend to be concentrated early in life. When you see someone over 30 driving at double the speed limit, making incendiary statements on social media just to get a rise out of people,… Read More »
How Bad Is It to Withdraw Money From Your Retirement Account Early?
Debt relief is for everyone, not just people who are experiencing crushing poverty. You have probably wondered how celebrities can file for bankruptcy and still live in lavish houses. Debt relief options, including but not limited to filing for bankruptcy protection, are available to anyone who cannot keep up with payments because circumstances have… Read More »
The Many Faces of Disillusionomics
Everyone has an opinion about Generation Z, but Americans born between 1998 and 2010 are not a monolith. It is difficult to generalize about what today’s young adults and older teens do, even though plenty of old fogeys try to do this, but it is easier to generalize about what they do not do…. Read More »
Meet the Parents Shielding Their Children From Financial Dystopia
The sound of your creaky bones and the sight of your gray hair and your wrinkly face are a bummer, but it is easy to count the ways that you have it easier than today’s young people. If your children are in their 20s, you are probably painfully aware of the financial struggles that… Read More »
Your Debt Problems Aren’t Just Money Dysmorphia
There’s a new diagnosis going around on social media, and its name is money dysmorphia. Its main symptom is feeling like everyone else is rich. Like so many other dysmorphias out there, the media make it worse. For example, you have probably heard the frequently cited statistic that most Americans whose annual household income… Read More »
Can Tracking Your Spending Help You Get Out of Debt?
There is an app for everything these days, but what most of them have in common is that their main goal is to get you to continue to engage, and therefore to get you to continue paying the subscription fees, rather than to help you achieve the goal with which they promise to help… Read More »
Relief From the Subscription Trap?
How many subscriptions do you have? You probably have more than you realize. The big ones are for services that you use frequently, like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and YouTube Premium, but if you look carefully at your bank statement, the list of subscriptions probably goes on and on. So many websites and software applications… Read More »