NEWS
By JEAN MARBELLA | July 12, 2009
It was a time warp, for sure, but I couldn't decide if I was hurtling back to the past or off into the future. I was wandering through the Louis Vuitton store that opened last week at Towson Town Center, a jewel box of a shop in the mall's "luxury wing" that was quiet as a museum on this particular weekday morning. Museum, indeed. During what seems like the permafrost of this recession, I wonder if someday we'll go to museums to see the kinds of luxuries we used to buy, or at least imagined buying.
NEWS
By SUSAN REIMER | March 30, 2009
My friend Betsy says it's official: It is now hip to be broke, and I think she is right. It is cool to talk about what a bath your 401(k) has taken and how your job is hanging by a thread. The topics that our parents would never discuss - how much money we make and how much we spend - are now standard cocktail party chatter. I never thought there would be a subject that would push our children out of the center of all conversation, but I was wrong. This recession - they are calling it the Great Recession now - has done it. We used to complain that we couldn't get our kids on the phone.
NEWS
By JAY HANCOCK | October 15, 2008
The selling of Washington's new, improved rescue package contains more hype than a Billy Mays Mighty Putty infomercial, but the plan just may save the country. At least this week. "The measures are not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it," President Bush said in the White House Rose Garden yesterday. A more Orwellian piece of doublespeak hasn't been heard since aviators talked about saving Vietnamese towns by destroying them. The Treasury Department's "voluntary" capital-infusion program was forced on Citigroup, Bank of America and the rest at the end of a howitzer.
NEWS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins | September 27, 2008
Maryland communities will get more than $46 million to buy and fix foreclosed homes, a signal that the federal government sees risks of abandonment and blight even in the nation's highest-income state. The funds, announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, were part of $3.9 billion set aside for "neighborhood stabilization" by the housing rescue law passed in July. Congress wanted each state to get about $20 million at minimum, with more going to areas with higher shares of foreclosures, mortgage delinquencies and risky loans.
NEWS
By KATE SHATZKIN | September 15, 2008
This week, Momof2 is looking for advice on how to keep grandparents "from going completely overboard with expensive, elaborate, space-consuming gifts that don't reflect our parenting values." She writes that even though she has given her kids' grandparents specific suggestions for modest gifts, they've ended up giving costly presents that don't fit in her house. This is a tough one, but Jan Faull, a Seattle parent educator and author of several parenting books, addressed it well in an article published on Healthykids.
NEWS
By Gregory Karp | June 1, 2008
Buying a home is generally considered a good way to spend money, but is a declining real estate market the right time to buy? How about markets where long-term prices have risen slower than average? What if prices had a big run-up and haven't fallen much? Those are the wrong questions because they focus on changes in prices, say Gary Smith and Margaret Smith, authors of a new book, Houseonomics: Why Owning a Home is Still a Great Investment. Buying a home can be a smart move, even if prices stay flat over a long period, say the husband-and-wife team who, respectively, are an economics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
NEWS
By Sandra M. Jones | May 18, 2008
The economic downturn is putting a new twist on spring cleaning. Tamme Wisinski discovered how much unnecessary stuff she had amassed after losing her job in January. Looking to raise some money, the 36-year-old Chicagoan began going through her closets, discovering clothes and books and jewelry that she says she "went nuts purchasing" before she found out that her company was shutting down. She is selling the goods online at Craigslist, marking her first foray into the secondhand marketplace.
NEWS
By Andrew Leckey | May 18, 2008
Warren E. Buffett has urged investors to lower their expectations during this queasy economic year. That's not exactly what they want to hear from Buffett, whose $62 billion net worth and excellent long-term track record tend to infect his admirers with overwrought expectations. They'd prefer to learn more about his success buying shares of Chinese oil company PetroChina in 2002 and 2003 for $488 million and selling them last fall for $4 billion. "A lot of people think Warren Buffett simply buys and holds, but he doesn't necessarily," said Peter Bruno, editor and publisher of The Warren Buffett Holdings Newsletter in Boca Raton, Fla. "The fact that he sold his shares in PetroChina last October at such a high price shows he does get out of stocks."
NEWS
By Carolyn Bigda | April 13, 2008
Today, buying a home might feel a lot like buying stocks: You'd prefer to wait until the market finally bottoms out. The only problem is getting the timing right. The price of existing single-family homes in 20 major metropolitan areas has declined every month since September, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index. Nationally, home prices were down 8.9 percent last year. That would seem to argue in favor of a wait-and-see strategy. But even in a buyer's market, real estate is a case-specific transaction.
NEWS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins | December 23, 2007
There's nothing like a housing slump to challenge the notion that buying a house is smarter than renting. Even in a rising market, there are times when shelling out monthly rent can make more sense than a mortgage payment. Add the anxiety generated by a down market, and all bets are off. "When you live in a house whose value goes down over the short term and you have a small down payment, then you can get stuck," noted Holden Lewis, who follows mortgage issues for Bankrate.com. At the very least, you could end up paying more to own than you would to rent.