While most of us don’t believe we’re out of the recession, no matter what the statistics say, we can all agree that we made a few sacrifices over the last year and a half. Some have made a lot of sacrifices. One of the things my wife and I cut back on was dining out. We would go out to restaurants several times a week, not counting weekend festivities with our friends. For a dual income, no kid household, it’s not uncommon because our other expenses are generally low. However, with the uncertainty of the recession and my wife starting a PhD program, we thought that cutting back on one of our largest expenses was a smart idea and we believe the changes will stick even after the economy truly recovers.

(click here to continue reading…)

Yesterday, the Department of Commerce reported that the annualized GDP (gross domestic product) grew to 3.5% in third quarter. This is significant because, by definition, a recession is two straight quarters of shrinking GDP. A 3.5% increase in GDP would mean, at least technically, the recession was over. Four straight quarters of negative GDP growth, the worst of which was the first quarter of 2009 (-6.4%), has finally come to an end.

Hooray! Right?

Unfortunately, no one living in the real world cares much for technicalities. Millions of jobs have been lost, with hundreds of thousands more each month, and so I don’t think many people feel like the recession is over even if the bean counters say so. One positive sign is that the growth beat expectations by 0.3%, which isn’t a bad thing.

Two things worry me:

• How much of the recovery was the result of various government programs meant to stimulate consumption? We had all the bailouts, cash for clunkers, first time home buyer credit, and several other programs that cost billions. People are still being laid off at the rate of hundreds of thousands a month, unemployment for September 2009 was 9.5% (not seasonally adjusted), and people without jobs tend to spend less (duh). Is this sustainable?
• Check out the 2nd quarter of 2008. In the 1st quarter of 2008, we saw a negative GDP growth figure. Then we “pulled out” of a potential recession in the 2nd quarter only to fall back into the trenches for a full year.

So, while we’re technically out of the recession, does it feel like we’re out of the recession? What do you think?

(Source: CNN Money)

An MSNBC article this week discussed how women are increasingly earning more than their husbands. Twenty years ago, 17.8% of women outearned their husbands. In 2007, 25.9% outearned their husbands if they both worked and 33.5% of married women outearned their husbands period. It’s estimated that the percentage bas probably jumped because of all the jobs lost in the recession, it’s estimated that nearly 75% were held by men.

The Shriver Report conducted a survey and found that 65.3% of women and 61.2% of men were comfortable with women earning more than men. I want to know, what do you think?

(click here to continue reading…)

We all have one. We all have that hobby we know we spend too much money on. Maybe you drop a paycheck or two every time you walk into Williams Sonoma because of some gadget you have to have. Or your spending goes unchecked on vacation, picking up trinkets and souvenirs from your getaways. Perhaps you’re a gadget hound and are the first on your block to get the latest electronic gizmo.

Whatever it is… you know you have one and I want to know what it is.

(click here to continue reading…)

There are a lot of “rules of thumb” in the personal finance world. We all know the classic ones: you should save at least 10% of your income, you should have 6 – 12 months of expenses saved into an emergency fund, and you should X% of your portfolio invested in stocks where X is 120 minus your age. In fact, rules of thumb are so ubiquitous in personal finance that I took a look at four rules of thumb in need of some refreshing.

However, those are publicly known rules of thumb that experts have repeated over and over again. What I’d like to know is whether you have any personal rules of thumb that you live by? It doesn’t have to be strictly personal finance related, it just has to have served you well over the years.

I ask because in my post about the best car for students, Financial Samurai offered up a great rule:

I use the 1/10th rule we coined. Essentially, the car you buy should cost no more than 1/10th your gross income. I’ve used this rule to a T, and it works well.

I think that it might be a little on the low side, especially if you only have one income, but you wouldn’t be wrong to use a similar rule.

Do you have any personal rules of thumb that have worked well for you?

Reader’s Digest conducted a poll of 150 people from 16 countries to find out what stresses them out the most. Voters could choose family, health, money, and the state of the world. First, I’d like you to vote on what stresses you out the most, then I’ll write about the results of that study. I’m curious to see how the results of Bargaineering Nation compare with the 16 other real nations.

Sorry, the poll seems to be broken so leave your answer in the comments below.

(click here to continue reading…)

Earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said the recession was “very likely over” but that the unemployment rate would likely still go up. There’s a lot of talk about a “jobless” recovery, that is a recovery in which new jobs aren’t created, with the unemployment rate not falling back to the normal 5% for at least another four years. Bernanke specifically said that the recession was likely over from a technical perspective, which is to say that we’ll probably still feel like a recession even if we don’t have two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

So I wanted to know from you – do you think the recession is over? It’s one thing to look at “statistics” and declare victory, it’s another to look people in the eye and tell them that the recession is over.

Personally, I think that you can throw technical out the window because regular people don’t really care. Until people stop being afraid they’ll lose their jobs because of the economy, the recession isn’t going to be over. There have been a lot of positive things about this recession – Americans are repaying debt and saving more, frugality has made a resurgence, and there’s been a greater emphasis on emergency funds.

So… is the recession over?

(Photo: arvindgrover)

You never forget your first job, right? At the age of 15, you can’t legally work in New York yet unless you jumped through all these hoops to get a work permit. It was this stupid little green card that said you would only work during certain hours of the day, the total number of hours per week couldn’t exceed some number, and was a really big pain in the butt to get.

I wanted the card because I needed one to work the cushiest job I knew about, the library. I heard librarians were making ridiculous money putting books away in a nice, air conditioned building. After getting the card, I soon learned that everyone else had the same bright idea and some crazy people were doing it for free! The wait-list for a summer job at the library was months.

So we went to option two and my first job ended being at a Chinese takeout restaurant. I answered phones, prepared people’s take out orders, and banked a lovely $5 an hour tax free. Turns out the stupid card was completely unnecessary if they just handed me cash at the end of the day. I think I worked there for a year or so, getting a couple raises in the process (I think I ended at like $6.50 an hour), and getting a good lesson in life. All in all, I think it was a great first job experience.

What was your first job?

(Photo: rhoran)

There’s been a lot of buzz in the news lately on the issue of organ trafficking. While this CNN story wasn’t the first time I heard Nick Rosen’s story of selling a kidney for $20,000, it is certainly a sign that the discussion of selling organs is coming back into the spotlight.

The story of Rosen probably isn’t all that different from other people who have sold organs. They saw an ad, answered it, duped the hospital doing the transplant, and got paid. The difference was that he then bragged about it in a “documentary” about how easy it was to do (I say brag because the video supposedly has him lying on a bed covered in cash).

What do you think about organ trafficking? I’m against the idea. I believe someone should be able to sell an organ if they want to but I think that making organ trafficking legal opens up a whole host of legal, economic, and moral issues we can’t answer.

For example, if the market price of an organ is $20,000 then anyone who can’t possibly pay that amount would simply die. Any “rational” person, in the economic sense, who would freely donate a kidney to a stranger would now demand $20,000 because that’s the market price of a kidney. What if the person is mentally unstable? What if they aren’t considered emotionally fit enough to make the decision?

It just seems like once you put a price on something like that, you introduce a lot more headaches than you’re probably prepared to deal with.

What do you think?

(PHoto: myklroventine)

Did you know that that the United States Postal Service is slated to lose $6 billion or more this year? It lost $2.8 billion last year.

With all the outrage over lending billions to financial institutions, you’d think more people would be fired up about running an operation that lost $2.8 billion last year and could lose $6 billion this year. No one is sending packages on credit for people without jobs. There aren’t multi-million dollar bonuses for anyone at the post office. It’s just a business that is spending more than it earns because mail volume is dropping.

In reading more about it, some people argue that delivery days is a red herring and that the USPS can save money in other areas. While I can appreciate that to a degree, sometimes it comes down to an argument of “less filling” or “great taste.” The reality is that the post office is losing money and we’re paying for it, with taxes and with higher postage stamp prices, and they need to stop arguing and start fixing.

I am perfectly fine with getting mail five days a week.

What do you think?

(Photo by icanchangethisright)