The decision to go to college is, for many, an obvious one: It’s just a thing you do after high school if you have any ambition to make a decent life for yourself. At least, that’s what your parents, teachers, counselors and the colleges themselves would have...
If the modern automobile had a status on Facebook, it would undoubtedly be “It’s complicated.” With their computer-controlled fuel injection systems, continuously variable transmissions and three-phase four-pole AC induction motors, the days when every Tom, Dick or Harry could wrench on their ride seem long gone. So...
Question: Would you pay more to send your kid to preschool or to college? Don’t laugh! Preschool — the land of finger painting, naptime and jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off — really can be more expensive than college. Nationally, it runs from $6,000 to $19,000...
Paid parking lots: Those slabs of asphalt in the middle of cities with narrow spaces and often extortionate rates are pretty much a necessary evil if you own a car and spend any time in the city. But what’s their side of it like? Why even run...
Moving across town sucks — no matter how sweet your new digs are, packing up your belongings, cramming them in a clunky truck and potentially tumbling down a flight of stairs while lugging your couch is a huge pain, sometimes literally. Moving to a new state, however, is a...
It’s coming. Of course it’s coming — it’s bound to, eventually. There have been 13 recessions since the Great Depression 90 years ago, but since the last recession utterly transformed our economy, upended a lot of lives and laid waste to pretty much all of our retirement...
Sit back, relax, kick your feet up. All of those things sound good in theory, but you know in the back of your head that you just might regret it later when you’re all cramped up and your back is a mess. The whole point of lounging...
I have, to my knowledge, made at least two people so upset that I’ve reduced them to tears in the workplace. The first of these occasions was when I was working for a property maintenance organization, and my boss ordered me to tell this guy with whom...
“I often say there’s probably five or six people alive today [that], if I wasn’t born, wouldn’t be here, so at least I did something.” That’s an impressive way to kick off your online bio, but Michael Beagelman isn’t a part-time search-and-rescue pilot, a hostage negotiator or...
A comedy staple like slipping on a banana peel or getting a pie in the face, the old plumber’s crack image is something that seems to have been around forever. Yet, over the past week I’ve been scouring the internet for plumber’s butt cracks — digging deep,...
People are strange, sang a man who went on to die in a Parisian bathtub. He was right, though — for example, many of us enjoy throwing perfectly good (well, kinda) coins into elegantly-designed puddles of water. But what compels us to hurl all our loose change...
There are a whole bunch of ways you could end up contributing to a mortgage beyond the traditional route of joint homeownership with a spouse. Maybe your partner took care of the down payment, but you’re splitting the monthly mortgage payments. Maybe they’re already partway through paying...