Questions about salary requirements are one of the very few questions guaranteed to come up during a job interview or screening process, as well as almost always cause some severe awkwardness on both sides. Once you’ve found a great job, how do you demand what you’re worth without sounding arrogant? What if you toss out a low number and lock yourself in at a loss, or shoot too high and scale yourself out of the running?
(more…)

By ELISABETH LEAMY

As Americans, we’ve been flogging ourselves plenty lately for our addiction to credit, and how it gives us the ability to get things now that we wouldn’t be able to afford until later. There’s another version of that, and it’s the world of “rent to own.”

(more…)

Another Washington Mutual insider has stepped forward with a slew of tips to help save your ass from overdraft fees, check deposit holds, and talking to Filipino bankers. Details, inside…

(more…)

By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

Taking. Something. Always.

That’s what TSA means to airline passengers like Edward Fleiss, a sales manager from Huntington, N.Y. When screeners inspected his wife’s carry-on bag at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport recently, he claims her designer eyeglasses were swiped.

“Great sleight of hand,” he says. “We didn’t even know they were gone until we got to Los Angeles.”

(more…)

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

NANCY CHEMTOB, a divorce lawyer in Manhattan, has found that her days have become crammed seeing clients, all worried about how an economic downturn will affect their marriages.

(more…)

Probably almost everyone is familiar with the hyperinflationary episode that engulfed Germany after the First World War. That nation’s economy was crippled by monetary problems that resulted in dreadful personal hardships, even though up to that time Germany had achieved one of the highest living standards in the world.

The newly formed German government, named for the city where their constitution was drafted after the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918, kept pumping up the money supply. The process started relatively slowly, but quickly the pace of money creation accelerated.

(more…)