Darwin's Finance — Financial Evolution: Education, Adaptation, Achievement

2011 Average Raise – Will Raises Stink Like Last Year?

With equities markets amazingly breaching prior highs already and unemployment slowing dropping to 9% with projections of 8% by year-end, the data is indicating we are firmly in a recovery now. But it still just doesn’t “feel” like that. The mood is somber, employees are still feeling like they’re on the verge of a pink […]

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Best Places to Work 2011

The Best Places to Work is out from Fortune for the year 2011 (source). Given the time of year when many college seniors are thinking about future employers and looking to land their first job, while college freshmen and sophomores are looking to finalize their major specialization (see this list of the Best College Majors […]

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FICA Tax Rates 2011 – How They Work and Why They Matter

FICA Tax – What is it and why’s it matter? Anyone that has inspected their paychecks for the myriad taxes and deductions from their paychecks has surely noticed the FICA Tax line on there. The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax is a federal tax on both employees and employers to fund Social Security and […]

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Interesting Retirement Savings Hypothesis – Only the Last Few Year Matter?

This weekend, CNBC linked to a rather lengthy article summarizing an opinion that’s a bit interesting to contemplate, yet flawed in my opinion. Here’s the source article, but I’ll summarize. The premise of the article is that it’s really the last few years of returns in your retirement savings that dictate your nest egg upon […]

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Saving Money at the Risk of Personal Safety – Balance?

When is taking on risk to the personal safety of yourself or others worth saving money? This weekend, somewhat on a whim, my wife suggested we go skiing. We already had a trip planned in a couple weeks and would need to be doing a seasonal rental anyway, so she suggested we go pick up […]

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Winning the Lottery Brings Misery, Loss, and Death – Why Bother?

We often wish for things that we probably shouldn’t. I remember in middle school we were studying the middle ages and our teacher went off on a tangent about how little girls all say they want to be a Princess but what a horrible life it was. After all, Disney has about a dozen movies […]

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Jobless Rate Drops to 9.4% – But What’s the REAL Deal?

I don’t mean to be a perpetual party-pooper here, but the headline number for unemployment looks good today – better, at 9.4%. So, why didn’t stocks rally on the news? Why aren’t people exuberantly rejoicing in the streets? The reason is the way the unemployment number is calculated. What actually helps this number is when […]

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Companies are Hiring Overseas – So What Are You Gonna Do About It?

With the typical opening line one can expect from Huffington Post, the author questions why American companies aren’t hiring: “Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn’t anyone hiring? Actually, many American companies are – just maybe not in your town.” They basically write the same article once a week, criticizing US […]

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Hedge Funds Using Twitter Traffic – Can You Exploit This?

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about sophisticated software that uses Twitter and other social networking chatter about particular stocks to predict future moves. This takes the Efficient Market Theory to a whole new level since usually news becomes public during the course of a press release, a posting to a website or a […]

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