Paycheck

NEW YORK -- There are two kinds of nonsavers, according to certified financial planner and investment adviser Bill DeShurko: people who don't earn enough money to put anything away and people who think they don't. If you're making a reasonable salary and still find yourself living paycheck to paycheck, the problem almost certainly isn't your income - it's your attitude. So says DeShurko, author of a book scheduled to be published next month, The Naked Truth About Your Money. The undressed truth about saving money is that we simply have to seize every single opportunity to sock it away.

American workers got an unpleasant surprise this month when they received their first paychecks of 2013. The typical full-time worker, who earns about $40,145 a year, found that his two-week paycheck was $30 lighter than his last check of 2012. The lost money is the result of tax increases contained in the Jan. 1 agreement between Congress and the White House to avoid the "fiscal cliff," a package of spending cuts and tax increases intended to reduce the federal budget deficit. Though $30 doesn't sound like much, it's unwelcome for households that continue to struggle in this long-stagnant economy.

MIAMI -- The Florida Marlins could still trade Gary Sheffield to the New York Mets, but it's going to take awhile, and a new formula to get a deal done.A proposed trade Tuesday fell through when the Mets asked Florida to pick up a chunk of Sheffield's six-year, $61 million contract. The Mets were offering outfielder Bernard Gilkey, who is in the second year of a three-year, $15.8 million contract. The Mets wanted the Marlins to pick up as much as $4 million of Sheffield's paycheck ($24 million, six years)

Q: When we voted on our union contract last July, our employer offered us health benefits with stated co-pays for doctors and prescriptions. Apparently, the company that they were dealing with went out of business and we ended up with tripled and quadrupled co-pays. I think the company should be responsible for the differences in out-of-pocket expenses, since they made the deal under contract with us. J.K., Timonium A: When benefits and their terms are set forth in a union collective bargaining contract, as your co-pays are, then the employer cannot change them during the life of that contract unless the union agrees to the change or the contract itself allows the employer to make such changes.

Eragon isn't much, but its baby dragon sure is adorable. A sword-and-sorcery saga that desperately wants to be another Lord of the Rings, Eragon succeeds in being only the palest of imitations. It lacks scope, grandeur, humanity and style. What it does have is a teen-heartthrob hero who somehow manages to keep his hair ever-so-properly tousled, regardless of whom he is fighting, plus some passable special effects and a handful of big-name stars on hand to collect a paycheck. Eragon (Fox 2000 Pictures)

Russia's plunge into price reform begins a shock treatment without anesthesia. The unanswered question is: Will the patient walk again? But President Boris N. Yeltsin showed commendable decisiveness by not just talking about price reform and vacillating as Mikhail S. Gorbachev did for years.If handling finances was so easy, everyone would be a millionaire. Yet many individuals, and even countries, barely survive from paycheck to paycheck. Few universal panaceas exist to complicated monetary problems.

Like traditional pensions and full health care benefits, a steady paycheck is disappearing for many American workers. Instead, millions of people are paid irregular amounts, based on sales commissions, projects finished, seasonal sales or unpredictable overtime pay and bonuses. And last year, according to the Census Bureau, the United States had 9.4 million self-employed people, many of whom didn't receive regular monthly incomes. "We're living in a world where a lot of people don't get the same number on their paycheck every single month," said Sheryl Garrett, founder of the Garrett Planning Network of fee-only financial advisers.

Bosses paying more to keep workers saneEmployers are paying more for mental health insurance as a result of higher stress in the workplace and people's increased willingness to seek professional help for their problems.A survey of 350 employers by the Wyatt Co., a Washington-based management consultant, found that mental health insurance is one of the fastest-growing components of employers' benefits bills.The cost of mental health insurance has more than tripled in five years, reaching $245 per employee per year in 1991, up from $75 in 1986, said John Menefee, a Wyatt spokesman.

Boston. -- On Labor Day Morning, 1991, Blondie Boopadoop Bumstead, 35 years old and holding, had an epiphany over her coffee cup. Worn out from cooking and cleaning lo these many decades, the suburban housewife of comic strip fame suddenly figured a way out of her domesticity. ''I could go out and get a job.''Bing! Light bulbs flash! Cameras roll! Sweetheart, get me ''The Today Show''!Not since Nora left the Doll's House, has one wife's change garnered quite this much attention. But Nora was ahead of her time.

The Q: Do you have a right to collect interest on a paycheck if an employer is late with your wages? Mike McGee of Towson was outraged recently when his two 19-year-old sons waited almost a month to receive their final checks for their summer jobs as lifeguards for a local pool management company. "Both sons turned in their keys on 9/4/07 of this season and did not receive a paycheck for a few weeks," McGee said. "At some point towards the end of September, when they pushed the issue with [the]