Author: Money Mechanics

(Image credit: Getty Images)If you spend enough time sitting in local diners or answering the phones at a wealth management firm, you start to notice a rhythm to human anxiety.The headlines change, the names of the politicians rotate, and the specific economic “boogeyman” of the month evolves, but the underlying sentiment remains remarkably consistent.Right now, the air is thick with a familiar brand of apprehension. You hear it in the booth next to you over breakfast, and you see it in every notification on your phone: From just $107.88 $24.99 for Kiplinger Personal Finance Become a smarter, better informed investor.…

(Image credit: Getty Images)Claiming your Social Security benefits is one of the most important decisions you can make in retirement. It’s a decision that lasts the rest of your life, with little room for do-overs.It’s not just the regret of making a poor choice with your hard-earned Social Security that could cost you, but it’s real dollars at stake.A 2022 study by Larry Kotlikoff estimates the average couple misses out on $182,370 over their lifetimes because of poor Social Security decisions. From just $107.88 $24.99 for Kiplinger Personal Finance Become a smarter, better informed investor. Subscribe from just $107.88 $24.99,…

Welcome to Kiplinger’s My First $1 Million series, in which we hear from people who have made $1 million. They’re sharing how they did it and what they’re doing with it. This time, we hear from a single, 50-year-old, newly retired fiber optic splicer in Columbus, Ohio. He reports that he had a starting salary of $16,000 and ended at $101,000 over 30 years with small annual increases.See our earlier profiles, including a writer in New England, a literacy interventionist in Colorado, a semiretired entrepreneur in Nashville and an events industry CEO in Northern New Jersey. (See all of the…

(Image credit: Getty Images)Drew Carrington and his wife thought they had purchased their forever home nearly six years ago during the height of the pandemic. Carrington, a managing director at iCapital, and his wife had lived all over the country before deciding their final destination would be the mountains of Georgia.They purchased a home in a massive, 8,000-acre golf course community that boasts 35 miles of hiking trails, a fitness center and a cadre of amenities retirees dream about. With the kitchen and primary suite on the first floor, the Carringtons thought they had found the perfect setup.But now, at…

(Image credit: Getty Images)Oil markets are reacting quickly to the Iran conflict, but consumers tend to feel the impact more gradually. According to the International Energy Agency, the conflict has created a significant disruption in global oil supply.After recent remarks from President Donald Trump suggesting the disruption could extend for weeks, concerns about supply have intensified. The Strait of Hormuz — a key global shipping route for oil — has seen limited access, pushing crude prices higher and lifting costs for fuel-related goods.Because pricing moves through multiple stages before reaching consumers, there’s often a delay before higher oil prices fully…

As a homeowner, you may be somewhat aware of the frustration, especially among today’s hopeful first-time buyers, about where purchase mortgage rates are these days. You probably have a sweet rate you’re unwilling to let go of. Good for you that HELOC and home equity loan rates aren’t priced like first-lien mortgage rates. Home equity rates are tied to the prime rate, which remains close to a three-year low. The average HELOC rate is 7.20%, according to real estate analytics firm Curinos. The 52-week HELOC low was 7.19% in mid-January. The national average rate on a home equity loan is…

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Rising RAM prices have made upgrading your PC more expensive.Virtual RAM is a less expensive way of boosting an older computer’s performance.Virtual RAM has limited use cases because it can’t match the speed of physical RAM.It’s been a rough seven months or so for shoppers. Prices for RAM and PCs have surged to record levels, fueled in part by the rise of generative AI and broader economic turmoil. Because of the price shifts, upgrading your old computer — or buying a new system — is now more expensive than…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Shrunken chocolate eggs are hogging headlines this Easter. Their manufacturers, no strangers to shrinkage themselves, are seeing share price lifts as investors reckon on a revival of fortunes. Sweeter times ahead are presaged by cocoa prices. The commodity has swung wildly in recent years, with Toblerone-style twin peaks breaching £8,000 a tonne. But prices have been in decline since the end of last year and now hover around £2,500 a tonne. That’s because, despite inefficiencies in the way cocoa is farmed and…

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is in the market to issue its first catastrophe bonds with two offerings totalling $150 million of notes, that are designed to provide $75 million of multi-year parametric earthquake and extreme precipitation disaster risk transfer to each of the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, Artemis can report.We understand these first two catastrophe bonds from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) were marketed to the cat bond investor base this week. This article is just an initial summary of the offering, given the Easter break over the coming days. We will bring you more details after the holiday…

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands. As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses solely on private securities markets and facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly large moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. The upshot: the storyline is more…