By William Khury
Staff Writer

With today’s increasingly difficult job market, more and more people are finding themselves out of work and out of options. Adults with years of experience and loyalty in their field and company are losing their jobs. Now you have hundreds of thousands of newly graduated college students, eager to work and start their lives looking at the same unemployed and job ads.

“Go to school so you can get a good job” – this is what we’ve heard since childhood, but does it still apply these days? Is a Bachelor’s really just B.S.?

Well, think about this: Every year, hundreds of thousands of eager, motivated, newly educated college students are unleashed into the job market hoping and expecting to work. With today’s job market being so bad, where are all these grads going to find work?

Modern day grads find themselves in a difficult position. They’ve been raised in an “instant gratification” society, where whatever they could possibly imagine or desire is readily available within reach. Food, jobs, fun, travel, education – it’s all right at their fingertips. Furthermore, they’ve seen some of the most Read the full story

Courtesy of The Associated Press

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — The federal government wrongly froze the assets of an Ohio-based charity it suspected of having ties to the militant Islamic group Hamas because it acted without giving the organization any warning, a federal judge ruled.

U.S. District Judge James Carr said Tuesday the government has an obligation to tell an organization why it is freezing its assets and to give it a chance to respond.

Attorneys for KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development sued the government after it refused to say why the charity was essentially shut down three years ago.

The U.S. Treasury Department in 2006 ordered U.S. banks to freeze the Toledo charity’s assets, saying it was funneling money to a terrorist organization. KindHearts officials have denied being Read the full story

By Philip Brewer of Wisebread

Courtesy of DivineCaroline

It used to be that spotting a “good” counterfeit bill was impossible for ordinary people. If it was good enough to pass the “look and feel” test, then it was going to take an ultra-violet light or a magnetic ink detector. But for the past ten years, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has been making bills that are easy to check.

The amount of counterfeit money in the US is low enough that most people feel safe taking money with barely a minimal check for counterfeits. Does it look and feel like money? Then it probably is. But have you ever gotten a bill where something-either the bank note or the person giving it to you-seemed a little off? Ever wished you could quickly check to see if it was good? Well, here’s how.

Step 1) Look and Feel

This is as far as most people go, and it’s good enough most of the time. US bank notes are printed on special paper that’s 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen. The linen gives it an extra stiffness that’s distinctive. There are also red and blue fibers imbedded in the paper. Bank notes are printed with a Read the full story

By Frank Scott

Staff Writer

“Things seem to be getting worse more slowly. There’s some reason to think we’re stabilizing.” Paul Krugman said.

Economists say the recession is getting better, was never all that bad, will end soon, or is already over. Yes, and the corpse is only slightly dead. Our economy seems like an organism nearing the end of life, with medical salesmen insisting youthful health will return with just one more exorbitantly expensive injection of an imaginary drug.

As consumer shopping becomes less a spending spree on useless waste and more a serious search for the needs of survival, that’s good for humanity, but it’s bad for this economy.  The malls look lonely with only bargain stores and thrift shops showing signs of life in a downward trend still relatively slight here, by comparison to the suffering being experienced elsewhere. But even if we are truly nearing an end of one in a series of recessions, it will still be a time of great hardship for millions without credit, jobs or savings. And many members of the upscale class are likely to see a serious downscale in their buying power and life styles.

The collapse of our financial market casino and its forced rescue by taxpayers was a result Read the full story

By Carl Gutierrez

Courtesy of Forbes.com

May 28, 2009

There’s a long and treacherous road ahead for the U.S. real estate market and financials.

On Wednesday, the National Associ-ation of Realtors reported sales of existing homes rose 2.9% in April, to an annual rate of 4.7 million, compared with a downwardly revised pace of 4.6 million in March.

The report comes a day after the S&P Case-Shiller 20-city Home Price Index fell 18.7% in March over the last 12 months, slightly wider than the 18.4% decline economists expected and larger than the 18.6% drop in the year ended February. The 10-city HPI was down 18.6% over the last year.

Continuing declines in the first three months of 2009 led to a 19.1% decline in the first quarter compared with last year’s corresponding period, which is the largest quarterly decline in the 21-year history of the series. Average home prices in March 2009 are the same as they were in fourth Read the full story

By Sarah Morgan

Courtesy of SmartMoney.com

Home buyers looking for a bottom in the real estate market may have been encouraged by housing data released earlier this week. Sales of existing homes rose 2.4% in May, according to the National Association of Realtors. The increase was a little less than most analysts had expected, but it represented the second straight month of improvement. Meanwhile, sales of new homes dipped 0.6% in May, continuing a trend of fairly flat months so far this year, according to data released by the Commerce Department.

Don’t get too excited – it’s still too early to say the housing market bottomed out, analysts and economists say. Distressed properties still account for about a third of all sales, and 29% of sales were to first-time home buyers, who are currently benefiting from an $8,000 tax credit.

The sales trends are telling. “You’re not really seeing a lot of move-up buying,” says Richard F. Moody, chief economist and director of research at Forward Capital, LLC. “There are so many vacant homes and so many foreclosures that [there's] not the normal trade-up pattern that you would have traditionally seen,” Moody says.

Housing prices fell nationwide during the first quarter, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Index. The decline appears to be slowing: in February and March, the annual rate of decline did not set a new record, but home owners should take little solace in those numbers. “Based on the March data… we see no Read the full story

By Victoria R.

Courtesy of www.ehow.com

Introduction

Do you ever find yourself wondering where you spent all your paycheck? You are not alone. For so many of us it seems that no matter how much we make we still don’t have enough money left at the end of the month to put away towards our retirement, emergency savings or even a well deserved vacation! This article will teach you how to finally break that viscous cycle, budget your money and save.

Things You’ll Need

Three sheets of paper, a calculator, last three months of bills and bank statements, open mind, creativity

Step One: Using the information from your monthly bills and bank statements, make a list of all of your monthly fixed expenses. Fixed expenses include your utility costs, rent or mortgage payment and food costs. These should be items that you need-not those items that you can do without like your cable television bill.

Step Two: On a second piece of paper, make a list of your debts including how much Read the full story

By Liz Ryan

Courtesy of Yahoo Hot Jobs

The 2009 job market is very different from job markets of the past. If you haven’t job-hunted in a while, the changes in the landscape can throw you for a loop.

One of the biggest changes is the shift in what constitutes a strong resume. Years ago, we could dig into the Resume Boilerplate grab-bag and pull out a phrase to fill out a sentence or bullet point on our resume. Everybody used the same boilerplate phrases, so we knew we couldn’t go wrong choosing one of them — or many — to throw into your resume.

Things have changed. Stodgy boilerplate phrases in your resume today mark you as uncreative and “vocabulary challenged.” You can make your resume more compelling and human-sounding by rooting out and replacing the boring corporate-speak phrases that litter it, and replacing them with human language — things that people like you or me would actually say.

Here are the worst 10 boilerplate phrases — the ones to seek out and destroy Read the full story

By Reuel Amdur

Staff Writer

 OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA — Prior to the Canadian convention of the Islamic Society of North America, there was a two-day conference on Islamic banking, finance and insurance. The underlying principle was the Qur’anic prohibition of interest, called usury in the Qur’an: “Allah had permitted trade and forbidden usury.” However, during the convention it became clear that it is necessary to parse interest into component parts to see what is permitted. Read the full story

By William Khury

Staff Writer

Yes, that’s right, mind your OWN business.  Don’t get offended… really what I’m saying is to Pay attention to your own business. Do you know who your customers are? Do you know how much it costs you to get them as a customer? Do you know how much it costs you when they leave you? Read the full story