Today's Current News, Opinion & Advice
There are many ways to save money. For instance, you can fill up a drawer with loose bills, bury cash, pile pennies into a trunk in the backyard for safekeeping or choose from a myriad of bank products to earn interest and keep your money safe. Most people choose the latter. When it comes to…
Courtesy of Jim Tetro/U.S. Department of Energy Solar DecathlonThis house built by students from New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington was an entry in the 2011 decathlon. Since the first U. S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon in 2002, thousands of college students from around the world have designed and created houses that are efficient…
Tinder Plus, the dating app’s first step into the wonderful world of freemium monetization, will launch on Monday for $9.99, according to sources familiar with the matter. Tinder Plus includes at least one highly requested feature and a few others that are meant to add broader functionality to the service, which essentially boils down the…
Have you used Apple Pay or another mobile wallet? If so, you’re in a very small club. © Nicolaus Czarnecki/ZUMA Press/Corbis You may not know or care about mobile wallets — and the data pretty much backs that up — but the companies that offer the card- and cash-free payment technology sure love you. Indeed,…
American Express is making major changes to two of its most popular credit cards. The issuer announced Thursday that it was enhancing the perks associated with its Premier Rewards Gold Card and standard Gold Card. Effective June 1, 2015, Premier Rewards cardholders will receive double points for all restaurant purchases, a $100 airline fee credit…
They’ve got new tales to tell. After five years running Storify, which lets you collect social media updates into narrative timelines, co-founders Burt Herman and Xavier Damman are leaving the startup which was acquired by Livefyre in 2013. They’re passing the reins to several original Storify members, who will keep the service running. Herman’s plan is…
A rendering of what My Micro NY will look like in the final phase of construction. New York City has a housing problem: Real estate is too expensive, and there’s not enough of it. The city is betting on solutions like My Micro NY, a pioneering new project that’s currently in construction, with prefabricated units…
Steam ovens are becoming more popular in higher-end kitchens, said Adam Stickle, general manager of luxury home builder Primrose Homes in Pennsylvania. Some of the steam-cooking appliances have a compartment that can be can filled with water, but he said manufactures are starting to run water lines directly to the appliances. (50)
I’ve written a few blog posts about seniors and their cars. This blog post takes a different tack: how to keep seniors safer when driving their cars. Jack R. Nerad, the executive editorial director and executive market analyst of Kelly Blue Book, or KBB.com, has worked with me to provide Bankrate’s readers with some tips…
Story highlights Atlanta airport plans to go from 70 to 10 employee access points Airport now screening workers’ bags Earlier CNN investigation found only two major U.S. airports fully screen employees Until recently, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport had about 70 access points for what’s called “back of the airport” employees, including baggage handlers and ramp…
Some want to swim at Ko Phi Phi, where Leonardo DiCaprio found beauty (though not quite bliss) in “The Beach.” Some want to see if the pad thai in the Chang Mai night market tastes better than it does at their favorite Thai restaurant back home. (It does.) According to Thai public broadcasting service MCOT…
Getty ImagesMichael Strahan, shown here with Kelly Ripa at the Academy Awards, has sold the L.A. home he bought in 2013. Talk-meister and former NFL player Michael Strahan has quietly sold his Brentwood mansion in Los Angeles for $21.5 million, according to our friends at the L.A. Times. Strahan, the gap-toothed co-host of “Live! With…
Getty ImagesMichael Strahan, shown here with Kelly Ripa at the Academy Awards, has sold the L.A. home he bought in 2013. Talk-meister and former NFL player Michael Strahan has quietly sold his Brentwood mansion in Los Angeles for $21.5 million, according to our friends at the L.A. Times. Strahan, the gap-toothed co-host of “Live! With…
Shutterstock Saving for a down payment remains one of the biggest hurdles for would-be homebuyers. But many could look to land a home loan today without stashing away another cent. There are scores of programs that can help buyers purchase a home with little or no money down. The government also backs two zero-down lending…
Bet you didn’t react to gas prices rising steadily every day for the last month the way you did their dramatic fall in September and October. You might not have even noticed the increase. The national average has climbed every day for a month — 31 days in a row — to $2.343 per gallon.…
The Federal Communications Commission has just approved a policy that requires Internet service providers treat all content equally. That means your broadband company cannot block access to legal content, nor can it deliberately slow the speed at which you get data from certain sites. The so-called “net neutrality” decision — approved Thursday on a 3-2…
Boomers are housing magnates.Considering only primarily residences, people 65 and older account for 22 percent of all U.S. households, but they hold 40 percent of all home equity. That’s more than $4 trillion in assets held by older boomers and the generation that preceded them, calculates Merrill Lynch, which along with Age Wave consulting, studied…
A health clinic in Lakewood, New Jersey, serving new Medicaid enrollees. © Patti Sapone/Star Ledger/Corbis The expansion of Medicaid was one of the core tenets of the Affordable Care Act before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 reduced it from a nationwide mandate to a state-by-state option. Since then, the journey toward providing health insurance…
Serving your country seems to serve the best interests of your personal finances, too. A new survey conducted by Navy Federal Credit Union shows that active-duty military members of the millennial generation are outpacing their civilian peers with their money management skills. With responses from more than 1,300 active-duty and civilian respondents between the ages…
President Barack Obama has finally brought Capitol Hill together as he pledged to do during his campaigns. In response to a short-lived White House proposal to end the tax-free status of 529 plans, Democrats and Republicans in the House overwhelmingly approved a bill to expand the benefits of the college savings option. The House on…
Google Search was not built for mobile. It’s all about lists of web pages, but the small screen is ruled by apps. That’s why if Google launched today, it might look a lot like Vurb…which did launch today. Vurb is a mobile search engine that pulls info from partnered apps like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, and…
Courtesy of Bernard UechtritzSome of the cowboys have worked on the ranch for decades and hope to continue handling the 7,500 head of cattle. A huge chunk of Texas and one of the largest working ranches in the country is on the market for $725 million. The W.T. Waggoner Estate Ranch, a family ranch since…
yaruta/Getty Images By Kira Brecht Along with tulips and daffodils, “For Sale” signs soon will be popping up on neighborhood lawns. An improving U.S. labor market is expected to spur increased home sales in 2015, so if you’ve been wanting to sell your home, low interest rates and tight inventory levels should create an attractive…
Oh, BuzzFeed. Don’t ever change. The company just released what it says is its second ever mobile app, called Cute Or Not. As you might expect from the name, you’re asked to rate pets as (duh) cute or not, through a Tinder-style swiping interface. You can also upload photos of your own pets to see…
Editor’s note: Chuck Fishman is the media, entertainment and publishing director for Acquia. Super Bowl XLIX was the most-watched television show in U.S. history. It was also the most socialized Super Bowl ever measured, with 265 million Facebook posts, likes and comments, and more than 28 million global tweets. Today’s TV viewer doesn’t just watch TV…
There are hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter-related plug-ins for WordPress. Seriously, go look. And yet, in its nine years since launch, Twitter has never released an official plug-in to make WordPress and Twitter play friendly. Until today. I figure anyone reading TechCrunch knows what the words “WordPress” and “Twitter” mean, so I won’t be awful…
A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, features some good news — and a little bit of bad news — regarding consumers and their credit scores. The good news: More than 50 million consumers now have free and regular access to their credit scores through their monthly credit card statements or…
The U.S. Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision on a case it heard this week could have a big impact on the choice of investments available to employees in a company-sponsored 401(k) plan. Plaintiffs in Tibble vs. Edison International argued that the California-based electric utility offered retail class shares of six mutual funds in its 401(k)s investment…
On Monday the Department of Labor took the first step to re-propose a rule expanding the scope of fiduciary responsibility for advisers to retirement accounts. The DOL sent the proposal to the Office of Management and Budget at the urging of President Barack Obama. “Right now, there are no uniform rules of the road that…
You may think shelling out less money at the pump is an overall good thing. Not exactly, says one sociologist. There appears to be a link between lower gas prices and more collisions, according to a study led by Guangqing Chi, a sociology professor at South Dakota State University. A team of researches collected and…
I try to encourage seniors to delay taking Social Security. Waiting until at least full retirement age gives you a full benefit and some options you don’t have by filing early, and waiting until age 70 allows you to earn delayed retirement credits, and your benefit will be 24 percent to 32 percent higher than…
Naturally, she wanted to grab her phone and take a photograph … but the battery was dead. Rather than do what most of us would have — resign ourselves to fact that this was one moment our Instagram followers would just have to miss out on — she whipped out some thread and embroidered the…
