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When jet fuel prices shot up this spring, airlines responded by raising their ticket prices and fees. Now fuel costs are coming back to earth. But don’t expect the airlines to give those price increases back right away.
Americans have been doing European summers forever, obviously. The past few years particularly involved a flurry of think pieces about “euromaxxing” and romanticizing the European way of life. But this summer’s desire to sojourn across the Atlantic is less like a vacation and more like an escape plan.
Prediction markets are platforms that let you trade on the outcome of real-world events, and they can make you rich or broke, or find you watching basketball on mute on your phone and refreshing odds while your family sleeps. You might have ignored prediction markets, but they’re becoming harder to avoid.
The baby boomers and older own nearly 70% of the stocks. They also control half of all the housing market wealth too. They’ve been the biggest buyers of stocks for years now. What happens when they turn into sellers during retirement?
If there’s a consumer good that’s algorithmically amplified, someone is going to spend their precious time on Earth standing and waiting to pay for it. Line culture is, at best, unbelievably annoying, and at worst, a huge economic problem that’s rooted in the loneliness epidemic and convenience culture, and (yes) has fully reshaped how we spend and value money.
No matter what you used to be, retirement asks something hard of nearly everyone. When you step away from the operating room, the classroom, or the corner office, you’re asked to learn how to be a beginner all over again.
Money can give you options. It can buy back time. It can create space, reduce pressure and open doors that would otherwise stay closed. But money cannot tell you what to do with your freedom, or tell you who to become, or tell you what makes you feel alive.
Most personal finance advice skips right past the feeling and jumps to the framework. “Make a budget.” “Build an emergency fund.” “Start a SIP.” These are all good advice. But they do not address why the anxiety is there in the first place, which means the anxiety doesn’t actually go away even after you follow the advice.
Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet.
Ask any marriage counselor what couples fight about most, and money will be at or near the top of the list. Research backs up clinical experience: disagreements over finances are one of the strongest predictors of marital conflict, chronic stress, and divorce. How do you handle a marriage where one of you hates spending money, while the other loves to splurge?
Your partner’s relationship with money will do more to determine when you retire than every other financial decision you make combined. Most physicians have mapped every variable in their FIRE equation except the most important one.
Americans’ already poor money savvy fell even further this year, a worrisome trend, researchers said, because people with weak understanding of basic finances often make poor financial decisions.
If you set a budget in January and haven’t looked at it since, it no longer reflects your life. As the year progresses, your income changes, expenses creep up, and subscriptions accumulate in the background like a mold growing out of sight. It’s a good practice to pull three months of bank and credit card statements and compare what you actually spent against what you planned to spend, category by category.
