Personal Finance

Apache is functioning normally

Buying things takes less time these days — you can have your week’s groceries, a new outfit and a used car headed to your front door in a matter of hours, thanks to technology. But this convenience comes with a price.

New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals fewer people are shopping on any given day than they were 20 years ago, and those who do are spending less time on the task. However, we’re spending more money, likely because we no longer have to even open our wallets, let alone leave the house, to buy all of the things we need or desire.

While our efforts have eased, online shopping has helped drive a dramatic increase in retail spending over the past few decades. Whether it’s your groceries or wardrobe, you’ve likely succumbed to more impulse buys because it’s just so darned easy.

We’re spending less time shopping

From 2003 to 2023, the share of people shopping on any given day fell from about 46% to just under 40%, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that examines how we spend our hours.

Further, when we do shop, we’re being a little quicker about it. The amount of time spent by those shopping on a given day fell by about six minutes during the 20-year period.

One way of looking at this, in terms of efficiency, is that we’re getting better at shopping — we can do what we need to in less time, on a fewer number of days. However, efficiency implies we’re getting greater returns on our efforts. In this case, it may only be a little time back, because we’re actually buying more.

Our efficiency is costing us; online shopping likely to blame

Retail sales data, a measure that gets close to the definition of shopping (though it doesn’t include shopping for services, which the time use survey does) indicates a 37% increase — from $437 billion per month in the first quarter of 2003 to $597 billion 20 years later, after adjusting for inflation. And one category within this data has seen far more dramatic growth.

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen online shopping go from novelty to commonplace. Spending on “electronic shopping and mail order houses” — the quaint-sounding U.S. Census Bureau category that applies to your late-night, couch-side shopping sprees — has grown from about $17 billion to $99 billion since 2003, after adjusting for inflation. That’s an increase of about 470%. And the inflation adjustment means we’re not just spending more, we’re buying more “stuff.” Turns out, when you don’t have to leave the house or even get dressed to go find a new hat, or three, you’re more likely to buy them.

Slowing down the shopping process

Personally, as I prepare to take a vacation, I know for a fact I’m purchasing more items for my trip simply because it’s convenient. I’m ordering two scarves to compare and keep the one I want; blister balm and a few kinds of bandages for the inevitable foot pain I’ll encounter walking around; travel-size everything to ensure I don’t have to check a bag; and a few new outfits to break in while abroad. Twenty years ago, this would have likely required multiple trips to multiple stores, and I wouldn’t have made all of these purchases. But I do now because I can. And it’s this frictionless shopping experience that makes it easy to overspend.

It’s one thing to shop within your means for the things you need, and another to be hit with pangs of guilt when the packages pile up outside your door. If you find you’re buying more stuff than you’d like, introducing speed bumps to the otherwise seamless process could help:

Shop with intent. Browsing with no purpose in mind can lead to purchases of things you don’t really need. Before you navigate to your favorite retailer just to “see what’s new,” ask yourself what you’re really looking for. If there’s no pressing need for new pants or yet another basic white tee, maybe you wait until there is a definitive need or reason to shop before placing yourself in the center of your favorite virtual stores.

Set shopping times, and avoid impulse buys. Limit the days or times of day when you allow yourself to shop. While it’s not the same as having to leave the house, find parking and contend with crowds, limiting yourself to certain shopping periods can help focus your objectives. Not to mention, it builds in a waiting period when impulses hit.

Instate a holding period, when possible. Filled your cart? Great, now walk away. Take a timeout between the selection and buying processes. This pause can help you gain perspective on potential purchases, and you may delete a few things before checking out. Some retailers are onto this tactic, however, and give you a limited amount of time before they empty your cart for you. Don’t let their timer rush a buying decision you aren’t absolutely certain about.

Review your purchases on a regular basis. Once a week or once a month, sit down and look at your shopping from the prior period. What did you buy? What did you end up returning? What should you have returned but didn’t? Reflecting on your most recent purchases can help you spot patterns or spending categories that you may be able to work on.

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Apache is functioning normally

Editor’s note: Live Nation / Ticketmaster, a dominant force in the live concert market, from venues to promotion to ticketing, was sued on antitrust grounds by the U.S. Department of Justice in May. Long-simmering anti-Ticketmaster sentiment crested with a major fiasco during presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022, leading to a congressional scolding and, finally, the current DOJ action, which has not yet been resolved. We asked longtime music writer and historian Jim Washburn to give an account of what ticket-buying was like before Ticketmaster, and before the internet.

“Good afternoon, young man. May I help you?”

“Yes, thanks, ma’am. I’d like six peanut clusters and two Jimi Hendrix tickets, please.”

That 13-year-old young man was me in 1968, and that’s pretty much what buying concert tickets was like then. In Southern California, you’d either get your tickets from the event box office, or at a Mutual Ticket Agency, which had outlets wherever they could put one: department stores, Clifton’s Cafeterias, college campuses and all manner of mom-and-pop shops.

In my case, that was the See’s Candy shop at La Mirada Mall, where I was usually helped by a matronly woman with her gray hair in a bun, who likely didn’t know Jimi Hendrix from Jiminy Cricket. You’d tell her the artist, date and venue. She’d call the Mutual Agency’s Los Angeles headquarters to see what was available, fill in ticket blanks with your seat numbers and such, and you’d pay the face value of the ticket — $4.50 in this case — with no service charge.

The Mutual agency had been around since at least the 1930s, and it was still working pretty well in the late 1960s. But it was a rapidly changing world. The first concert I bought tickets for was Cream and Spirit at the Anaheim Convention Center in March 1968. My stepdad thought “concert” meant “society event,” and made me wear my J.C. Penney’s burgundy suit with a clip-on tie, ideal attire if you enjoy having hippies laugh at you. Thankfully, Dad had relaxed his dress code by that summer, when I was seated in a sweltering dirt field amid some 60,000 seemingly psychedelicized folks at the Newport Pop Festival, there to see Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds and other rock avatars for $4.50.

The following year’s Woodstock festival and its subsequent film were a major accelerant to the live music scene, and to ticketing. When 1955’s “Blackboard Jungle” had opened with Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” blaring from movie-house speakers, it was a clarion call for kids who’d been waiting forever for music they could call their own. The Woodstock concert film was that on steroids, plus acid and weed. Its audience had grown up seeing their heroes assassinated, their friends shipped home in body bags and fellow students shot dead on college campuses for protesting. Now they had music that spoke to and for them, delivered via the loudest damn amplifiers anyone had ever heard.

A lot of us thought the questing music of the 1960s would lead to a utopian era of peace, love, flying cars and computers that could solve any problem. We settled for Ticketron.

The Ticketron era

Founded under another name in 1966, and functioning pretty well by the 1970s, Ticketron was the first successful computer-based ticketing system. There was certainly a need for it. As nice as the folks fumbling with the phones at Mutual agencies were, there was no way they could cope with the burgeoning crowds now seeking concert tickets. Had you seen the Who in 1968, you’d have been among maybe 1,500 hardcore fans, but by 1970, the Who were playing in arenas and stadiums, sometimes to more than 30,000 people.

Ticketron outlets were most often found in upscale department stores, such as the Broadway, May Co. and Robinson’s, and generally located deep in the stores’ customer service nook. Some had competent, trained staff who were sensitive to music fans’ longing to get the good seats before they were snatched up at other outlets. But some employees seemed to revel in frustrating the rockers infesting their tony store: “I’ll be right with you, dear, as soon as I’ve shown this couple our full array of gift-wrap paper.” Meanwhile, entire sections of concert seats would vanish.

That’s one reason why many fans chose to join the line at a concert venue’s box office, another reason being the perhaps mythic assumption that box offices had the best tickets. But no one shunned Ticketron to avoid the service fee — it was only 25 cents — or the convenience fee — since there wasn’t such a thing yet.

Ticket prices, meanwhile, had only moved up a buck or two in the early ’70s. Consequently, fans were outraged in 1974 when prices for Bob Dylan and the Band’s arena tour were jacked up to $8 and $9.50. But what performers and promoters noted was that, outrage or not, every show sold out and scalpers were getting record prices for tickets.

Scalpers enter the scene … and ticket prices rise

That was the first spark igniting the quick and apparently never-ending climb in ticket prices. When scalpers started to get $200 or $300 for tickets with a $15 face value, bands, promoters, venues and other stakeholders saw that as money that should be going into their pockets, not some scuzzball street vendor’s.

As a result, deadpans longtime concert-goer Matt Rosney, “Not that much has changed, except the decimal point. In 1975 I was paying $6.50 for a Stones’ ticket; now it’s $650 if I’m lucky.”

I’m mixing some different voices into the story at this point, because I became a music critic in 1983 and for the next quarter-century scarcely ever had to pay for the hundreds of concerts I saw. Poor me. So I asked friends and Facebook friends to weigh in with their experiences.

Philadelphia-raised Matt has seen the Rolling Stones in six different decades, beginning when he was a young teen in 1966: “I went with my mother and brother to Atlantic City. While they shopped or something, I spent one dollar and three cents tax to see the Stones in the Marine Ballroom on Steel Pier. They only played six songs in a half-hour set, with the audience screaming and going nuts, and I told myself, ‘I need more of this!’”

Matt hasn’t missed a Stones’ tour since, and once managed to see 19 shows on a 25-city tour. For the band’s 1969 jaunt, he had to drive to where the distant shows were a month early to try to buy tickets. When the Stones next toured, in 1972, Matt learned that if he could get the Ticketron code numbers for their gigs in other cities, he could buy the tickets right from the Ticketron outlet in a Sears store in Philly.

The communal side of standing in line

Matt and several others told me that one thing they miss about those days is that, alongside the competition to get good tickets, there was also a lot of camaraderie. When you’re in a queue sharing a joint or bota bag of wine with people as nuts about a band as you are, you sometimes form lasting friendships. One of Matt’s line-made friendships was with a huge collector of Stones memorabilia, who in turn was friends with the band’s security manager, who would sometimes get them into shows.

On the West Coast, Orange County teen Andrea Waters first saw the Stones at the L.A. Forum in 1972, and the following year spent a night in a sleeping bag in the Forum’s parking lot to get tickets for a benefit concert the Stones headlined. (She was amazed when famed concert promoter Bill Graham himself handed out the ticket slips in the morning.)

Like Matt, Andrea hasn’t missed a Stones tour since then. Sometimes the ticketing was done by mail order, and — taking a tip from a friend who’d mail in for TV game show prizes — she used colorful, hand-decorated envelopes labeled “Pick Me!” But it was Ticketron, and then Ticketmaster, outlets she had to deal with for most of the rock concerts she attended.

“That involved running at full speed through the local Broadway or May Company to the floor with the ticket counter,” she recalls. “They frowned on running, but that never stopped us. Once there, my friend Mike and I usually brought a clipboard with a sign-up sheet — like we were officials — so people wouldn’t try to jump their place in line.

“Unlike the old ladies at the May Company, at the Tower Records stores the Ticketron, and later Ticketmaster, crews really knew what they were doing. The problem was everyone knew that, and there’d be a hundred or more people lining up at Tower before they opened, so your chances could be dim there, too. We lucked out, for a while, when we found a Ticketmaster outlet in an out-of-the-way stationary store. Of course, people found out about that before long.”

When the Stones toured the U.S. in 1978, Andrea and some friends took to the road to catch several of the shows, and made some far-flung new friends in the queues. Matt Rosney was still doing the same, and at the Stones’ Cleveland show that year the two met and clicked. After clicking even more when they both turned up at subsequent shows in various states, Matt eventually moved west, and Andrea became a Rosney when they married in 1983. Forty-one years later, they’re still hitched, are grandparents, and still joined in the ticket scramble on the Stones’ current tour.

Ticketmaster, before the internet

These digital days, it’s not entirely surprising that a number of people I spoke with refer to the Live Nation-aligned Ticketmaster as Ticketbastard. But back in the service’s brick-and-mortar heyday, a lot of people on the business side of the counter did their best to make it work for ticket buyers. Lorraine Chambers, a writer and editor at the Hollywood Times, was part of the Ticketmaster crew at the Costa Mesa, California, Tower Records two decades ago.

She says, “We operated like a great assembly line, with a precisely delegated setup.” That entailed prepping the hopeful buyers in line outside: issuing wristbands; pre-checking IDs; instructing buyers to have cash and credit cards ready rather than fishing them out at the counter; and requesting they be quiet inside, so everyone’s orders could be heard clearly.

“Our goal was to keep the Ticketmaster machine printing out the most tickets possible before a show sold out,” Lorraine says. “The last thing we wanted to hear was a buyer moaning when that happened.”

Getting creative in search of tickets

I’ve heard several stories of other means of getting into shows. One couple mixed a gallon of screwdrivers in a plastic milk jug and traded it for tickets outside a multi-act stadium concert. One less consumer-minded person sold rabbit droppings as hashish outside a Tom Verlaine show. In more than one instance, people got to the front of a ticket line by carrying pizza boxes and saying they were making a delivery to the box office.

And then there were the Grateful Dead fans. In 1978, the Dead recorded a song called “I Need a Miracle,” and it became a mantra for fans who followed the band from city to city but lacked tickets. Sometimes they’d find someone with spare tickets; sometimes a sympathetic stagehand might slip them in a side door; but most often they’d find a poorly guarded fence to scramble over by the dozens.

That was at least more civilized than the heyday of rock festivals, when hordes would tear down parameter fences. As then-young concert-goer Mike Ritto put it, “Palm Springs Pop Festival: no tickets; got in free when the fences came down. Newport Pop Festival ‘69, Devonshire Downs: no tickets; got in free when the fences came down.”

Sometimes serendipity gets the job done. When Leonard Cohen’s final tour made its way to Seattle in 2013, my friend Karl Zwick went to the theater ticketless because he usually lucked out buying last-minute unclaimed comp tickets from the box office. He had no such luck this time, and was even less cheered when he saw a woman simply give away her two spare tickets to a man with a laminated “I Need Tickets” sign hung from his neck. Karl recognized him as a scalper he’d seen outside other shows. Since the fellow had paid nothing for the tickets, Karl offered him face value, $50, for one, but he insisted on $100.

“Then a guy who’d seen this came up to me a minute later and asked if I needed a ticket,” Karl recalls. “I said, ‘Hell yes,’ and then he quizzed me with questions like, ‘Where was Leonard born?’ ‘What’s the title of his second album?’ I guess I passed. He pulled a small stack of tickets from his pocket and handed me one.

“It turned out he was Leonard Cohen’s road manager. He didn’t like scalpers, and told me in a not too threatening voice, ‘If it’s not you in that seat, I will find you.’ And he did come out from backstage before the show started, saw me in the seat, shook my hand and said, ‘You’re a man of honor.’ That’s something I’ve never heard from Live Nation.”

Ah yes, Live Nation. They don’t get, or give, much love. Matt and Andrea Rosney certainly have no fun navigating Live Nation’s Ticketmaster site. Matt doesn’t like the surge pricing, where a ticket’s cost can suddenly lurch upward based on demand. He doesn’t like the convenience fee, so named because you have the convenience of buying tickets on your phone or home computer, without Ticketmaster factoring the massive convenience it is for them to not be paying for computers, printers, ticket stock and people in a zillion physical locations.

And don’t even get Matt started on the service fee. Oh, what the hell, let’s: “On my Stones ticket for Las Vegas, the service fee alone was $110. What service did they provide? Well, it hurts when I sit down. That’s the service they provided.”

(Grateful Dead crowd photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Apache is functioning normally

Summer breaks can feel like a pressure cooker for parents — it certainly feels like one for me. I’m tasked with working full time, keeping my pantry fully stocked, entertaining my energetic 6-year-old son and engaging him in learning activities.

But as summer ends, the pressure surrounding back-to-school shopping builds. I’m sure many parents can relate, especially with the recent increases in the cost of living, even though inflation is cooling.

According to NerdWallet’s 2024 back-to-school shopping report, those who are parents of K-12 or college students and who plan to do back-to-school shopping this year will spend $541, on average, on school supplies and clothing for their kids’ upcoming school year.

Four moms — including myself — with children of various ages share tips on how to shop for clothes and supplies on a budget. Even if you’ve already gotten a head start on shopping, these gems may still come in handy for next year.

Separate needs from wants if you have a larger family

Back-to-school supply lists can seem endless. When you do finally get to the end of the list, you may find that you’ve broken your budget. Kimyatta Williams, a day care owner from Atlanta, has a vibrant family with six children and has mastered staying within her budget by separating needs from wants. Williams’ oldest child is 23 and her youngest is 9, so she’s well-versed in back-to-school shopping.

“I can’t afford to get all these things on the list. So I’m making the priority to prioritize the needs from wants,” Williams says.

“So crayons versus markers. I’m not gonna buy both. They both do the same thing. So I may purchase the markers versus the crayons or I may purchase the big pack of 64 crayons versus the markers, especially at a grade level of a first grader or a second grader,” she adds.

Additionally, Williams attends back-to-school events, which usually give out free supplies. You can search for these events on Google, Eventbrite, Facebook or your local government’s website.

“When you’re a family size like mine, I can only do what I can. I make sure that they have everything they need for the first day to be successful in school,” Williams says.

Consider sustainable clothing if you have younger kids

Clothing can be a major expense for parents when their kids are going back to school. Gyna Uhrlass, an entrepreneur and content creator in Manhattan, New York, is a mother of three who focuses on using sustainable clothing options to help budget for clothing expenses.

She says one of the most frustrating things about back-to-school shopping for her is how expensive everything is, especially because of inflation. She finds that clothes and shoes are her biggest expense.

“My family is Caribbean. When I was growing up, we never did any hand-me-downs. Now that I’m older, I am all about hand-me-downs,” she says.

Uhrlass regularly gets used clothes from her friend who has a son a year older than hers.

“I have not had to buy a significant amount of clothes for him in years,” she says.

She also keeps the tradition within the family by keeping items like her older kids’ vests to pass down to her younger kids.

Set a budget and negotiate if you have older kids

Samantha Danielle Sharpe, a content creator and mother of three located in Nashville, Tennessee, has a home full of teenagers, ages 14, 16, and 18. Since her kids are older, she approaches back-to-school shopping by setting a budget and negotiating with them. However, that’s sometimes hard to do because of social media’s influence.

“I think there’s just a lot of pressure to get your kids so many different trendy items,” she says, adding that her daughter requested all pink supplies.

Sharpe tackles this issue by setting a budget for each of her children so they can learn to manage money and prioritize.

“As a single mom, I’m really honest with my kids. For me, it’s not just about the resources that I have. It’s about me wanting to make sure that I set my kids up for realistic expectations in life,” she says. “I don’t wanna set the expectation that everything that you want, you’re gonna always get.”

Other strategies Sharpe uses include following moms who share saving tips on social media and tapping into her community. Her family has a group chat where they post any items they aren’t using and share sales they come across.

“It may only be for like $100, $150, but it’s like my little reward back to myself for shopping for my kids,” she says.

Shop multiple sales and buy over time

I’m a single mom with one child who is going into the first grade this year. I opted to give myself one less thing to stress about by spreading out back-to-school shopping. I started buying my son new shoes — which he outgrows in a scarily short amount of time — during the summer. When buying household items in stores like Ross and Marshalls, I would also pick up a pair of sneakers from the sales rack because that tends to be my biggest expense after clothing.

As for clothes, I have also shopped between sales. Comparison-shopping has taught me that just because an item is on sale doesn’t mean that’s the best price. Also, I look for websites with deals on multipack shirts or shorts so I’m paying less per item.

I also pay attention to the clothing brands and materials I bought last year that held up and bought more of those items this time around. Having clothes that can withstand school activities that include slime, soil and Play-Doh has definitely saved me money over the past year.

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Vice President Kamala Harris is now the leading contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to face off against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.

On July 21, President Joe Biden succumbed to Democratic Party pressure and bowed out of his reelection bid. He then swiftly endorsed Harris for the top of the ticket. However, the Democratic National Committee must formally nominate Harris — or another candidate. That could be done via virtual vote or in-person — open convention style — at the DNC’s gathering in Chicago from Aug. 19-22.

While technically it’s not guaranteed that Harris will be the nominee, the vice president has already received backing from many Democrats in Congress, Democratic Party chairs, state delegations and several Democratic governors. At this time, the more uncertain question is who Harris may choose for her running mate.

With the convention mere weeks away, the Harris campaign must scramble to organize and communicate her policy vision. From the debate last month between Biden and Trump, it was clear that a major focus of the election will be on the economy and how the candidates’ proposals could impact Americans’ personal finances.

What would a Harris economy look like?

Biden has a clear track record with his economic policies — the shorthand of which is “Bidenomics” — that Harris has supported over the past four years. That record is what Biden had been campaigning on before dropping out, and it’s likely that Harris will follow suit.

  • “Making smart public investments in America” that attract more private sector investment, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA); the CHIPS and Science Act; as well as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  

  • “Empowering and educating workers to grow the middle class” through moves like forgiving student debt for qualifying borrowers; supporting unionization and collective bargaining and investing in registered apprenticeships. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. has seen some of the lowest unemployment in decades and strong wage gains that have outpaced inflation growth. 

  • “Promoting competition to lower costs and help entrepreneurs and small businesses to thrive.” This includes actions to lower costs by combatting junk fees, lowering prescription drug costs for seniors and enforcing antitrust law. 

However, Harris, like Biden will still have to contend with inflation as a messaging obstacle. Persistent elevated prices are still dragging down public perception of the administration’s handling of the economy.

In the spring, Harris launched a nationwide Economic Opportunity Tour that may serve as a blueprint for the vice president’s talking points in the campaign including:

  • Forgiving student loans.

  • Forgiving medical debt.

  • Investing in infrastructure.

  • Investing in small businesses.

  • Creating jobs. 

  • Increasing access to capital for underserved communities. 

  • Cutting costs for insulin and other prescription drugs. 

  • Expanding access to health care. 

  • Making housing and home buying more affordable. 

  • Lowering child care costs. 

  • Expanding access to government contracts for minority-owned small businesses.

During a tour stop on May 6 in Detroit, Harris said, “I believe every person in our country must have access to the opportunity to compete, to succeed, and to thrive; the ability to achieve what I call financial freedom, which means having enough not just to get by but to get ahead, to be able to build a business, to own a home, to start a family, and to create intergenerational wealth.”

As the first female vice president of the U.S., Harris has also been the administration’s face on issues that most impact women: abortion access and child care. Harris is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights and, in December, launched a nationwide “reproductive freedoms” tour. And in February, Harris announced rule changes designed to lower copayments for more than 100,000 families who receive federal child care assistance.

In Harris’ earlier roles as California attorney general and later as a U.S. senator, she proposed:

  • Refundable tax credits for renters with qualified earnings.

  • A $3,000 per person refundable tax credit for middle- and working-class people through the LIFT (Livable Incomes for Families Today) the Middle Class Act.

  • A “Medicare for All” health care plan that retains private insurance. 

  • A $20,000 student debt forgiveness plan for Pell Grant recipients who create and run small businesses in disadvantaged areas.

  • Increasing public school teacher pay, funded by estate taxes on the wealthy.

Before becoming vice president, Harris served as a U.S. senator from California, attorney general of California and as the district attorney for the city of San Francisco. In early campaign appearances, she has drawn a sharp distinction between her work as a prosecutor and Trump’s ongoing legal issues, including his recent conviction on 34 felony counts.

(Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images News via Getty Images)

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

To its conservative authors and backers, Project 2025 is a detailed road map for a complete remaking of the federal government — a next step in a “second American revolution,” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be,” in the words of one of the project’s principal architects.

Those on the opposite end of the political spectrum have denounced the plan with words like “chilling,” “terrifying” and “extreme,” and are calling attention to its proposals as part of the Democratic Party’s campaign to defeat former President Donald Trump in his bid to retake the White House.

For those somewhere in the middle, Project 2025 may be simply too long to read — roughly 900 pages — so here’s the gist: The controversial document was created by the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank. More than 400 like-minded contributors penned the project as a blueprint for the next Republican presidency and published it in April 2023. It’s hefty wish list and, like all proposals, isn’t guaranteed even if Republicans retake the White House in the upcoming election.

Among its many proposals, it calls for dismantling or reshaping numerous federal agencies, rolling back policies designed to mitigate climate change, investing more power in the presidency, replacing government employees with political appointees, outlawing the abortion pill and gutting LGBTQ+ protections.

What is Project 2025 about?

There are four pillars in Project 2025:

  • Policy: The hefty agenda, known as “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

  • Personnel: The creation of a database of vetted and trained personnel to be considered for positions in a presidential administration in order to implement the project’s policy recommendations.  

  • Training: An online training program known as the “Presidential administration academy” to prepare future political appointees to work on day one of the next Republican presidency. 

  • Playbook: A plan for the first 180 days of the next Republican presidency.

What economic proposals are in Project 2025?

Most of Project 2025 would have economic implications if implemented and many proposals would affect Americans on a personal finance level. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are some key proposals:

  • Broad tax cuts to corporate and income taxes. 

  • Eliminate or reshape the Federal Reserve. One proposal within Project 2025 suggests eliminating the Fed and replacing it with “free banking.” Other proposals seek to diminish the Federal Reserve’s powers in other ways. 

  • Increase energy production and energy security largely by expanding oil and natural gas production. 

  • Overhauls to Medicare and Medicaid. Converting the current funding for Medicaid into a block grant program in which each state receives a fixed amount as opposed to funding specific needs; instituting time limits or lifetime caps on benefits; and adding a work requirement. Medicare Advantage, administered by private insurers, would become the default choice for new Medicare enrollees. 

  • Weaken child labor protections. It would permit teens to work in “inherently dangerous jobs” as long as they have training and parental consent.

  • Change overtime laws. Allow employees to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off. It also calls for requiring time-and-a-half payment for hours worked on “the Sabbath,” or Sunday.

  • Reform additional labor laws. Exempt small-business owners from “first-time, non-willful” violations of certain health and safety precautions that are enforced by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. It would also make cuts to retirement benefits for federal workers. And it would allow state and local governments to get waivers from federal labor laws.

  • Unionization limits. Consider banning public employee unions and more union transparency in the private sector.

  • Unemployment limits. Make it more difficult to receive unemployment benefits.

  • Get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

  • Potentially eliminate the Federal Trade Commission and increase standards for antitrust violation suits. 

  • Child care. Incentivize on-site child care. 

  • Decrease government spending. 

  • Consider returning to a gold-backed currency. 

  • Abortion. Removing mifepristone, the abortion pill, from the market, including banning distribution by mail. It emphasizes that Congress must “enact the most robust protections for the unborn” and other pro-life policy measures. It also calls for more federal and state support for adoptions.

  • Big Pharma. Reform Food and Drug Administration rules to ban pharmaceutical companies from purposely preventing generic versions of their drugs from entering the market. 

  • Overhaul government employment. Fire certain government employees who are not “ideologically aligned” with the “majority of the American People”  and replace them with political appointees. 

  • Sweeping immigration changes. Increasing funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall; altering how agencies address immigration; restricting visa access; instituting additional immigrant worker limitations; and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security. 

  • Higher education. Promote trade schools, apprenticeship programs and alternatives to student loans “that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.”

  • Contradicting tariff proposals: Boosting free trade and fair trade.  

What else is in the Project 2025 playbook?

The Project 2025 playbook, again, is lengthy — too long to include every proposal here. But some other significant policy changes the document calls for include:

  • Expanding the power of the president to have complete control over the entire federal bureaucracy.  

  • Getting rid of many existing climate-related protection policies. 

  • Eliminating the Department of Education, as well as expanding both school choice and parental control in education. It would also end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from governmental and public entities, including schools.

  • Changing terms used in schools and regulations. Eliminating “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from school curriculum. It also would rid many terms from law and federal regulations such as “sexual orientation” and “reproductive rights”. 

  • Overhauling federal agencies including the FBI and the Department of Justice; dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; consolidating the Bureau of Economic Analysis with the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics; privatizing the Transportation Security Administration. 

  • A ban on pornography and closing telecommunications and tech firms that help to spread it. 

What has Trump said about Project 2025?

Trump, who is now running against Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, has tried to distance himself from the controversial policy plans. In a July 5 post on Truth Social, the conservative social media platform launched by Trump in 2022, the former president said, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Multiple outlets have pointed out that many former officials and advisors under the Trump administration are involved with Project 2025. The director of the project is Paul Dans and the associate director is Spencer Chretien, both of whom were officials under the Trump administration. CNN estimates about 140 people involved with the Trump Administration contributed to the playbook.

What has Harris said about Project 2025?

One of the first things Harris said after receiving Biden’s endorsement pointed to Project 2025. On July 21, she posted on X: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation— to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”

Before Biden exited the race, he condemned Project 2025. During a rally in Detroit on July 12, Biden called it “the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that has ever been proposed in the history of this country.” He also accused Trump of lying about his relationship to the project saying, “It was a project built for Trump.”

Biden said, “We’ve never seen anything like this. And it’s not a joke. It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”

On June 11, a group of Democrats launched a Stop Project 2025 Task Force. In a press release, U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, called Project 2025 “a radical, extreme, pro-authoritarianism plan pushed by conservatives who are desperate to take our country backwards.”

 (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images News via Getty Images.)

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Friend of the blog Matt sent in a great question this week:

Hi Jesse – do you have any recommendations when it comes to life insurance? I know Term is the way to go, but that’s about all I got…

I scanned your blog posts and didn’t see anything too specific with it but if you have any guidelines for pricing or coverage recommendations, please let me know!

Matt

Matt’s Right. We Want Term!

Matt’s right. Term life insurance is the best option in 99.99% of cases.

Other types of life insurance (Whole, Variable, Universal, etc.) are bloated products that are “pushed” and “sold” far more often than they’re genuinely sought after. These products try to combine investing with insurance and end up being overpriced versions of each.

Some things aren’t worth combining!

The smarter option is to buy insurance that only acts as insurance and then use your remaining money to invest in pure investments. Term life insurance is just that life insurance product. All it does is provide money to your beneficiaries if you die. If you don’t die, it doesn’t pay. It’s simple.

But Do We Need Life Insurance?

How do we determine if someone needs life insurance?

I use the same framework I would use for any insurance question (home, boat, pet llama insurance, etc.).

Are you exposed to a financial risk that you could not comfortably recover from using your current asset base?

Let’s say your house burns down. Does that present a financial risk you could recover from using your current assets (cash, investments, etc)? If you answer no, then you need home insurance. (If you have a mortgage, your lender likely mandates you have insurance so they’re covered should the house burn down).

If your wedding ring got stolen, does it present a financial risk you could recover from? Personally, I wear a ~$200 tungsten carbide wedding ring. If my finger got stuck in a tragic 3-ring binder accident while compiling someone’s financial plan, I could replace that $200 ring without issue. I do not need ring insurance. Granted, the cosmetic costs of finger reconstruction might make me wish I had better health insurance…

Back to the point: that’s the framework to use! Does the downside risk present an insurmountable financial burden to you (or your beneficiaries?)

The answer for many younger readers with dependents (spouses, children) is a screaming YES. As in, “If I died and the family lost my income, it would be very financially uncomfortable for many years!”

But how much coverage do you need?

My Preferred Methods: Income Replacement and “DIME”

The two methods I prefer (and suggested to reader Matt) are the Income Replacement method and the DIME method.

Income replacement suggests you replace your income for a certain number of years, typically until your children reach a particular age or until your spouse reaches retirement age.

In my personal case, I wanted to replace my income until my youngest child (who is still technically hypothetical) is out of the house. I chose a 30-year term policy equivalent to ~20 years of my income (with a small discount rate for future years). No matter when I get hit by that proverbial bus, 20 years of income should cover my youngest child until they’re out of the house.

The DIME method adds up any outstanding debts, add in your income for a certain number of years, then adds your remaining mortgage, and finally adds on future expected education costs. Debts, income, mortgage, education.

The DIME method double-counts a few things. For example, I’m using my income to pay my debts and mortgage. I shouldn’t need to double-count them. Nevertheless, I like the idea of itemizing the biggest future expenses (college costs, mortgage payoff, etc.) and ensuring your life insurance policy can cover them.

The Best of the Rest

Other strategies I’ve seen for sizing life insurance policies include:

The Human Life Value (HLV) method. It asks an individual to consider their annual income for each year until their retirement, add in other benefits and bonuses, subtract the income used for their personal consumption, and then discount future income to today’s value.

Done correctly, this method should provide the beneficiaries with a lump sum of the resources you would have expected to provide to them over the remainder of your working life. It’s just a bit too complicated and mathematical for most people to get right.

The Budget-Based method simply multiplies your household’s monthly expenses by the number of months you expect those expenses to be maintained. It’s similar to Income Replacement, but looks at expenses rather than income.

Lastly, the “Rule of Thumb” (which I think is a poor name!) suggests you multiply your income by 10. Very much “one size fits all,” which is why I don’t like it.

Granted, one detail to note is that most life insurance sizing strategies are intentionally conservative, leading to policy sizes that are large enough during the highest-risk years but end up being too large as time goes on.

For example: a young family might need a $2M, 25-year policy on each parents. But by the time the kids are in college, that $4M of total coverage is surely too much.

Thanks for the question, Matt!

And to all of you: term life insurance is a smart financial planning move. But I hope none of you ever need to collect!

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article, join 8500+ subscribers who read my 2-minute weekly email, where I send you links to the smartest financial content I find online every week. You can read past newsletters before signing up.

-Jesse

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Source: bestinterest.blog

Apache is functioning normally

Aura, like other identity theft protection services, pledges to keep your personal and financial information safe with capabilities like credit report monitoring — for a price.

While there are things you can do yourself to protect your credit and identity, often for free, the Aura app may be valuable if you prefer a hands-off approach or are looking for additional features like antivirus software.

Here’s what to know about Aura and how much the service costs.

What does Aura do?

Aura’s long list of features covers basics like credit monitoring, data breach alerts and identity theft insurance. The app — available for mobile and desktop devices — also scans the web for uses of your financial and personal information and includes other security features like a U.S.-based virtual private network, or VPN, an Experian credit lock and access to an expert fraud resolution team.

The credit lock doesn’t block others from accessing your credit files at the other two major credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion.

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How much does Aura cost?

Aura currently offers three plans with identity and fraud protection, starting at $15 per month or $144 per year (you choose whether to be billed monthly or annually). Aura offers a free 14-day trial for all plans and a 60-day money back guarantee on annual plans.

Here’s how the cost breaks down for Aura’s plans:

Individual

  • $144 annually ($12 per month).

  • $15 monthly. 

  • $264 annually ($22 per month).

  • $29 monthly. 

  • $384 annually ($32 per month).

  • $50 monthly. 

Is Aura worth the price?

As with other services, Aura’s approach to identity theft is more reactive than proactive. You may consider paying for an Aura plan if you’ve already been the victim of identity theft and want to monitor how your information is being used. It can also be helpful if you want to step up online protection for a large number of family members. The family plan supports an unlimited number of children and devices, something many competitors don’t match.

Aura’s individual plans are less expensive than similar plans from competitors like LifeLock and IdentityForce. And if you were already considering paying for a credit lock with Experian’s CreditLock service, which costs $24.99 a month, Aura’s individual plan would save you money.

But freezing your credit and monitoring your reports on your own is free. You may also have identity theft protection or restoration services available through your bank or insurance company, or as a result of a previous data breach. See if you’re already entitled to cheaper or free resources before purchasing a separate service like Aura.

Aura pros

Aura offers insurance up to $1 million per adult to cover losses and expenses related to identity theft. Highlights also include:

  • Monitors credit data at all three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and offers an Experian credit lock. 

  • Provides VPN, antivirus software, safe web browsing and a password manager for multiple devices. 

  • Monitors your financial accounts, home and auto titles, and the dark web. 

  • The family plan allows up to five adults, plus an unlimited number of kids and devices. Competitor plans typically have more restrictions. 

Aura’s family plan also adds benefits like online parental controls, video game monitoring and local sex offender alerts.

Aura cons

Aura’s insurance coverage doesn’t apply to preexisting identity theft. Other potential drawbacks:

  • Does not monitor social media accounts. 

  • Some features aren’t compatible with all devices.

  • Some users have reported difficulties using the app or staying connected to the VPN. 

  • If you decide to cancel an annual plan after 60 days, you’ll still have to pay for the rest of the year.

Weigh the pros and cons carefully. Signing up for a free 14-day trial is a good way to test whether Aura is right for you.

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Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Companies around the globe — from airlines and hospitals to banks and even courthouses — had operations grounded or disrupted by what was supposed to be an uneventful software update pushed out early Friday by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by some of the largest corporate and government agencies in the world.

“This was not a cyberattack,” CrowdStrike said in a statement. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

The CrowdStrike issue came on the heels of a widespread outage involving Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, on Thursday night. Microsoft said the issues were unrelated. The CrowdStrike update affected customers running a version of the Windows operating system.

NBC News called the outage “arguably the largest global information technology outage in history.” At least five U.S. airlines — American Airlines, Allegiant Air, Delta, Spirit and United — issued ground stops on Friday, leaving airports around the world with crowded terminals and endless customer service lines. (Some flights have resumed.) Hospitals that experienced issues with their computer systems had to cancel non-urgent surgeries. In several states, 911 emergency lines were down.

Downdetector, a website that employs user reports and online indicators to report technical outages, detected user issues at dozens of U.S. companies. NerdWallet was not directly affected by the outage.

As of 1 p.m. ET, Downdetector was still reporting spikes in potential user issues at these companies:

Banks and financial services

  • Bank of America.

  • Chase Bank.

  • Charles Schwab.

  • Wells Fargo.

  • Capital One.

Telecommunications, cable and wireless

Other consumer services

  • Starbucks.

  • Ancestry.com.

  • Salesforce.

(Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)

Source: nerdwallet.com

Apache is functioning normally

Despite the prevalence of TikTok videos and recent articles detailing stories of individual college graduates struggling to find good jobs, the data tells a different story.

After all, the overall labor market is stronger than it’s been in decades. And Zoomers who recently graduated from college are certainly better off, in most respects, than previous generations of new grads.

“If you’re a recent college grad, right now things aren’t booming with opportunities like they were a couple years ago,” says Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at Indeed Hiring Lab. “But it’s still really a relatively solid labor market. And hopefully, fingers crossed, the market stays strong for a couple years. And that gives you more opportunity to find a job as opposed to hanging your hat for the first six months after you graduate.”

When you compare the labor markets faced by Zoomers with previous generations, recent college grads now are better off than their older counterparts: Zoomer grads are earning much higher salaries today than Gen X did in the mid-1990s. Inflation may eat away at Gen Z’s high wages, but it doesn’t touch the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s that baby boomer college graduates encountered.

The short recession that Gen Z experienced at the start of the pandemic is certainly no Great Recession, which technically lasted less than two years, but was followed by several years of tepid economic growth. That period stymied recent millennial graduates during crucial early employment years and is likely to negatively impact their lifetime earnings.

“It’s not just the year that you graduate,” says Bunker. “Your first years out probably make the most difference because that’s when you’re getting your foot on the career ladder.”

Gen Z bounced back fast

Despite the fact that the oldest cohort of Zoomers — 2020 grads — entered a job market with the highest unemployment rate in the modern era, that recession lasted just two months. And what followed was one of the strongest economic bounce backs ever.

The nation’s unemployment rate has hovered between 3.4% and 4% since December 2021. The current rate, 4.1%, remains among the lowest in 50 years, which means Zoomer college graduates have strong prospects for getting jobs right out of school and moving up the career ladder.

Bunker says the job market has cooled compared with two years ago. There is far less competition among employers than in 2022, which means fewer opportunities, according to Bunker. But it’s not all that dramatic in the broader context.

“If we wind the clock a little bit more and compare to what we saw pre-pandemic, it’s around those levels,” Bunker says. He adds that when compared with previous cohorts of graduates, job opportunities are roughly in line with those enjoyed by millennials who completed college in the early 2000s.

Gen Z’s unemployment outlier

Even with all of the positive aspects of the current labor market, there’s still a unique trend among recent Gen Z graduates that earlier generations haven’t faced: an unemployment rate that’s higher than overall unemployment.

It’s a particular quirk seen when you parse unemployment data among recent graduates over the past 30 years. The unemployment rate as of March 2024 for recent graduates was 4.7% — a full percentage point higher than the overall unemployment rate at that time, 3.7%.

This is an unusual development. Before 2018, the unemployment rate among recent grads was almost always lower than overall unemployment, due to strong employer demand for highly educated workers.

The reversal is likely because there’s been a surge in demand for non-college-educated service workers since the pandemic.

Underemployment is still high among recent grads

Labor data shows that underemployment — the rate of those with college degrees who are working jobs that don’t require degrees — has always been higher among recent graduates compared with all bachelor’s degree holders.

“They go ahead and get that college degree and then they can’t get on a career track that uses that education,” says Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank.

It doesn’t help that certain job sectors have become more crowded. Majoring in computer science, for example, doesn’t guarantee a job anymore as tech companies pull back from hiring.

Underemployment among computer science majors is higher than those who study health-related programs, education or engineering, according to a February 2024 report by The Burning Glass Institute, a labor market analytics firm, and Strada Education Foundation. But fewer computer science majors are underemployed when compared with those who study social sciences, psychology, humanities and business management.

As of March 2024, some 40% of recent graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree versus 33% of all college graduates, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Salaries for recent grads have spiked

Gen Z college graduates can expect higher-than-ever salaries when they enter the job market: The typical recent college graduate with a four-year degree can anticipate a salary of around $62,609, according to an analysis of employer job postings and third-party data sources by ZipRecruiter, a job posting site. That roughly matches the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s finding of $60,000 as the median annual wage for a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

As the chart below shows, current median salaries are above those held by earlier generations of newly minted graduates when adjusted for inflation.

Even though salaries are at a peak for recent grads, the latest cohort might not be earning what they expect: A survey released by Real Estate Witch, a housing market research and review site, found 2023 graduates expected to make around $85,000 at their first job and the minimum salary they said they would accept is around $73,000. However, Real Estate Witch found that the average starting salary for a recent grad is about $56,000.

“If you’re a young person graduating now, maybe the differential between what you expected and what reality is, is quite large,” says Bunker.

It’s also possible that wage growth for young new hires may have plateaued as the momentum in the overall labor market that was pushing wages higher has now slowed, says Liv Wang, senior data scientist at ADP Research Institute, which measures workforce data. “If we look at ages from 23 to 26 — that includes a lot of recent grads — and the median hourly base pay for them is like $17, and that per-hour has been little changed since June 2022,” says Wang, citing recent ADP data.

Still, as Gould points out, young workers are disproportionately lower-wage workers — even if they have a college degree.

Jobs for New Grads: How Does Gen Z Stack Up Against X and Y?

Find out what the overall labor market was like when cohorts from Generation X and Generation Y (aka millennials) entered the workforce after college compared with today’s graduates. Read more.

Gen Z grads do face economic and employment uncertainty

Today’s college graduates heading into the workforce aren’t free from economic challenges. They’re dealing with elevated inflation that eats away at their wages. And when you earn less — as most young workers do — higher costs take a bigger bite. In recent years, the cost of housing has skyrocketed, especially for renters, while health insurance and car ownership have both grown more expensive. And, Gould says, like generations before, young workers fresh out of college who have student loan debt will carry an additional burden.

Salaries, overall, may be higher than ever, but it varies based on your degree. And there are still persistent gender and racial inequities to earnings, Gould points out.

But once again, the data shows it is still a pretty good time to be a college graduate and, in general, to have a degree.

It still pays to get a college degree

Those with college degrees remain more likely to be employed than workers in the same age group, ages 22 to 27, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Even an associate degree or professional certificate can give young workers a leg up, as many areas of the country are facing a shortage of middle-skills labor.

In March 2024 the unemployment rate for recent college grads — those ages 22 to 27 — was 4.7% compared with 6.2% for all young workers in the same age group.

(Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images News via Getty Images)

Source: nerdwallet.com