Many of us are saying “Good Riddance” to 2011 – but it’s not at all clear what 2012 has in store for us.

Predictions are all over the map. Sometimes it seems as though analysts are determined to make the future better by predicting it will be so, even if the odds are slim. On the other end of the spectrum are those who predict that economics won’t matter, since the world is going to end in 2012. In the end, it’s up to you…

Beef prices rose more than 10 percent over last year and the Department of Agriculture reports at least another 5 percent increase in 2012. In spite of official White House news that inflation stands at under 2 percent, that isn’t the reality consumers are seeing in the supermarket or at the gas pump. A major
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Do you want real financial security? Would you like to go to bed at night knowing that when you wake up in the morning, your job hasn’t been packed up and shipped overseas to some call center in India or to some factory floor in China? While there is a place for a saving program
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Small and independent business owners all over the country have a serious problem.  They need loans, but they can’t get them from the banks.  At the same time, the federal government is flooding the airwaves with promotions for easy money programs and bragging about how much capital is available.  Clearly, there’s a disconnect, and it’s
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Interest in alternative financing methods is accelerating all over America.  This is no accident.  It is a direct reaction to the way banks seem to have shut their doors for good.  If you’re not trying to borrow a million bucks, they don’t want to talk to you.  Even if they do “open a dialogue” with
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Debt is a problem that haunts many of us for our entire lives. We rack it up when we are young and spend an eternity trying to pay it off. For those of us who bought homes or tried to finance our own businesses, the burden of debt can be especially high. The one grim
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American debt woes have most of us focused on the drama within our own borders, but it pays to look overseas. Europe’s debt crisis is turning into a grand game of posturing leaders and symbolic gestures by central bankers. However, underneath all the showmanship are some nasty, nasty numbers that just won’t go away. There’s
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Money, money, money … until we figure out a way to live without it, we have to figure out how to manage it. The statistics are not good when it comes to American finances. Most of us don’t have diddly-squat in our retirement accounts or our savings accounts either. Yet you don’t have to keep
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A little extra income is always welcome, and it might be no further away than the ends of your fingers. Most of us are using the Internet already to find information, but you can also leverage the power of the Internet to get some extra income. This is not an article about online surveys, filling
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The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse. I say “the numbers tell us” because I’ve become very sensitive to the impact this kind of statement has on people. When I warned about the impending bankruptcy of General Motors in 2006 and 2007, readers actually blamed me for the company’s problems
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