As time and technology march on, occupations, professions, and major market players adapt or fade away. I can recall as a freshman in college being told that newspapers had already had their heyday decades ago.
News isn’t going away, but paper is being replaced by screens the size of your hand and much, much larger, with speed (but not really depth) that travels around the world in split seconds.
* Post-Nuptial Money Management
The only time money is an issue is when there isn’t enough money. Nowhere in life is this more true than within the confines of a marriage. As Winter melts into Spring and your June wedding draws near, now is a good time to do some planning; before all the planning begins!
Love is many splendored thing, the old song tells us. What it doesn’t give us a clue about, is that it is also a business.
A concept that is likely as old as civilization itself is income – which can be defined simply as one individual’s money earned for a service that has been provided to another individual or entity. But did you know that there are actually two forms of income one can earn?
The way most people understand income to be is known as active income. This is when an individual is trading their time, work or skill to earn a lump sum of money or paycheck. In contrast, passive income is when an individual provides their time and or skill for money only once to create multiple returns on the work/time they’ve used to create the stream – for example, using time or money to create a product, service or investment one time that will yield profits many times over, without any additional work.
We live in a youth-oriented society, as evidenced by the media’s rare profile of older entrepreneurs; Mark Zuckerberg is far more interesting according to the media. Americans aged 35 or older enter the ranks of the entrepreneur far more frequently than the successful youth plastered across prime media outlets, despite the average age of the beginning entrepreneur hovering around the 39 year mark.
The trendy business incubators who attract the media’s stereotypical “entrepreneur” appear to miss the backbone of America’s entrepreneurship – the mid-career professional. The general inability to see the potential of the mid-career professional leaves companies with unrealized potential (translation lost innovation and profit) right in front of them.
TORONTO — It was all about to come crashing down.
That’s the conclusion one would draw from reading the Canadian business press in the spring of 2017, which, after giddily cheering the housing boom, now heralded an inevitable bust.
A favourite theme: Canadians appeared to have lost their minds over houses the same way their American cousins had ahead of the financial crisis of 2008. Nondescript detached homes in hard-luck Hamilton, Ontario, were selling for $1 million. In Vancouver, prices had climbed 50 per cent in only three years heading into 2016 — great if you happened to own property, not so great if you didn’t. Institutions such as the Bank of Canada had started talking in more detail about the perils of debt. To keep up with those surging house prices, Canadians had mortgaged their futures like never before, prompting the central bank to worry about financial stability.
There was another particularly bad omen. Home Capital, a smallish mortgage lender, had cast a dark shadow over the real estate market. A couple of years earlier, the firm realized that a few dozen brokers it worked with had been filing false mortgage applications. Home Capital insisted the issue was minor, but its executives couldn’t make the problem go away. If you saw The Big Short, you know that rampant fraud was at the heart of the U.S. housing collapse in 2006 and 2007, and alarm bells were sounding.
* Op-Ed
Everyone calm down.
WASHINGTON — From an economic perspective, the shutdown of 2013 led to a GDP decrease of 0.25%. It’s true that hundreds of thousands of federal employees received no pay, or late pay as a result of the previous shutdown, that inconvenience merely impacted their discretionary spending. While contracted employees may not be impacted, the ability of the government to enter into new contracts, the execution of existing contracts may be impacted, and could lead to increased costs for follow-on research and development type efforts.
Tourism related industries are affected by the shutdown, as national parks closed, museums gift shops sat empty, and there were additional costs labeled as “lost productivity.”
But for the most part, a short shutdown would have minimal impact for most Americans, at least in the immediate term.
