Older worker unemployment has increased dramatically since the recession. The unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older increased from 3.1 percent in December 2007 to a high of 7.6 percent in February ...

House hunters sure are an enigma. While most Americans in the market for a new place say they want the benefits of city living--public transportation, shorter commutes, nearby restaurants and shops--what ...

Some debt-laden consumers go to extremes to let their credit cards cool off. Quite literally. Some exile their cards in an icy "lock box" in their freezer. It's believed that in the time it takes ...

Social Security and Medicare have improved their online tools to make it easier for people to understand and check their benefits. Here are three steps you should take, at least annually--if not more often--to ...

The key to a building a business without losing your life savings is to make sure you choose the right type of business to start. Many people want to run their own business, but most never take the leap ...

Your mindset is very important with respect to saving for practically anything, but it's especially important for retirement, because saving for a successful retirement is a "liability." "Hold ...

Get ready for the Facebook feeding frenzy. On Thursday afternoon, the company priced its initial public offering at $38 a share, giving it a market value of $104 billion. The stock begins trading Friday ...

Retirement has a ring of finality to it, but this doesn't need to be so. There are many careers in which retirement only means a transition out of that particular career and into something else. For example, ...

On a recent business trip to Pittsburgh, PA, I had the pleasure of hanging out with one of the best advisers in the country, Michael Reese from Michigan. But it wasn't his financial prowess that impressed ...

Many investors believe they are deprived of high returns generated by venture capital funds. They read about the success of Groupon, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others with envy because most individual investors ...

Do you feel like you are missing out on something? Sudden wealth can be exhilarating for those who attain it, but demoralizing for those sitting on the sidelines. This was a common sensation during the ...

Hanging out with the wrong crowd can ruin your rep. Or sometimes it elevates your status. The same can be said of certain stocks whose affiliation with a downtrodden sector might lead investors to snub ...

The questions you ask have a major affect on how successful you become. This is especially true when it comes to investing success . Here are the five questions successful investors ask before, during, ...

Kids are expensive--it's a fact of life. If you're like many parents, you may just grin and bear it while forking over a hundred or more dollars for the latest, greatest toys. After all, you could argue ...

You've got this killer idea for a new business but just can't seem to take the leap. What's stopping you? Perhaps you're already secure in your current job and are afraid to rock the career boat. Or maybe ...

Many of us have had periods in our work history when we were not employed . That might be due to going back to school, raising children, illness or job loss. While it might not seem like an issue from ...

Forget "the prairie fire of debt" and "Taxmaggedon." By one measure, American households are in the best financial shape since the start of the Great Recession. U.S. households' financial ...

GM's withdrawal isn't the start of a stampede of big advertisers away from Facebook. For many companies--especially those targeting young consumers--Facebook remains an appealing place to advertise. But ...

In today's story on why older Americans are so happy at work , we focus on the results of a new Charles Schwab study that suggests about one-third of 60-something workers are so content at their jobs that ...

With so much attention focused on the need for a gigantic nest egg for retirement, it's natural to feel jittery about leaving your job. Add in the warnings about Social Security's projected deficit, and ...

During the Great Recession, a pervasive feeling of doom settled over the American public. Jobs were disappearing, incomes were shrinking, markets were down, and prospects for growth were slim. Each day ...

At 65, W. Andrew "Andy" Achenbaum, a professor of history and social work at the University of Houston, doesn't plan on retiring anytime soon. "At this point, I'm sort of an elder of the ...

Some 2 to 5 percent of Americans struggle with shopping addiction , a dark illness that can destroy families as it wreaks havoc on bank accounts. People who compulsively shop--dubbed "shopaholics"--often ...

The B Word. We know what it is but don't like to say it, and we hope we never have to go through it. The mere thought of bankruptcy sends shivers down our spines and makes our bank accounts quiver in fear. ...

Stubbornly high unemployment rates persist three years after the end of the recession. The problem is acute for younger workers, many of whom carry staggering student-loan debt. During this same period, ...

Addicted to your cell phone? Tired of paying a fat bill for it each month? Join the club. Approximately 87 percent of the U.S. population has a mobile phone , according to a recent survey by the Federal ...

Having trouble getting job offers ? You might be committing one of these seven deadly interview sins: 1. Being late . While occasional lateness may be excused in other situations, it's often a deal-breaker ...

According to a survey by The Hartford, the younger the worker, the greater the attraction to having the ability to take at least a portion of a retirement account as guaranteed income. A high percentage ...

Job-seekers and employees acknowledged as being unique and distinct have better chances of landing jobs and are more likely to excel in the workplace. This is an idea touched on in Mike Junge 's first ...

Facebook may or may not juice the market for promising young companies hoping to go public. But it has already set a strong example for entrepreneurs who want to build their companies into influential ...

One corner of France is so tucked away that even the French find it hard to place on a map. The Béarn region has a long and colorful history, from Roman times to the Renaissance to the days of Belle Époque ...

Anthony Sanders is a senior scholar at the Mercatus Center and the distinguished professor of Real Estate Finance at George Mason University. Last week Fannie Mae, one of the two mortgage giants in conservatorship ...

Several years ago Carnegie Mellon psychologist Sheldon Cohen performed an experiment to try to predict people's susceptibility to disease. First, he asked his subjects one question about their childhood. ...

Here's more good news for the class of 2012 : Almost nine in 10 employers say they will hire more graduates this year than last year, according to a survey of 225 employers by Millennial Branding, a generation ...

Technology disrupts. No major industry in America is immune to the need to adapt to today's more "connected" world. The winners will be those companies that can harness evolving relationships ...

Starbucks makes it easy for customers to buy coffee. So easy, in fact, that they don't even need cash or a credit card. A smartphone will work just fine. To capitalize on the growing popularity of these ...

In a world that's swiftly being reshaped by technology, even well-established brands have to play by new digital rules. Pepsi, selected by U.S. News as one of America's Most Connected Companies for its ...

A few signs of the times: The newest soda products are being promoted heavily through social media, online storefronts are being launched in the cloud, and a caramel macchiato can be purchased with the ...

Cloud computing emerged as disruptive technologies often do--in an entrepreneurial spirit of collaboration in which resources and costs are shared. But so is data, inadvertently or not. When Citigroup ...

At General Mills, a new sales experiment is made possible with new technologies. In 2008, executives of the food giant began to notice that people with sensitivity to gluten were finding it difficult to ...

Forecasting is central to the insurance industry and predictive data analytics, models that use complex data to predict future events, has become a key tool for how insurers decide what a policy will cost. ...

The 2009 merger between Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney would have been challenging in the best of times; between the two companies, more than 17,000 financial advisers had to be brought under one roof, ...

However you envision retirement--seashores and tennis, trips to visit grandkids, continued work, or all of the above--you won't get there without some serious thought and effort. Retirement is not an event, ...

Cloud computing, social media, and other trends come to the fore The New York Stock Exchange--now known as NYSE Euronext--is a quieter place today than it was 10 years ago, now that trading goes on inside ...

Think Lowe's, and two words come to mind: home improvement. But if the nation's second-largest home renovation chain succeeds with plans to harness mobile technology to improve store sales, another word ...

At Nordstrom, innovation is never out of style. The upscale fashion apparel chain founded in 1901 wins plaudits for using cutting-edge 21st century technology to offer shoppers convenience--and to stay ...

Amazon, Cisco, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec are among the high-tech icons synonymous with Silicon Valley. Here's another company vying to be on the list: Walmart. In recent years, the ...

For decades, retailers looked to the Big Apple, the international capital of fashion and advertising, for inspiration. How times have changed. Nowadays, the industry's axis is shifting west, to Silicon ...