Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

Credit card issuance was down significantly in 2009. In hard numbers, through October issuance was down 46%. Simultaneously, debit card usage was up between 10 and 20% worldwide according to Visa and Mastercard’s Results. The trend is evident; consumers are moving away from debt and trying to make purchases out of funds they already have.

“If you have to ask…” is a phrase you may have heard before, once or twice, in conjunction with the price of some luxury item or service (the implication being: “you can’t afford it!”). Perhaps you’ve heard or said it inside a boutique store, where no price tags are present. For a silly example, perhaps you’ve noticed that many restaurants don’t list the price of alcohol on their menus. The internet is supposed to spur open competition and a free market for the retailing of goods. However, minimum price laws force many companies to keep the prices of good and services secret until an item is already in an online shopping cart.

Every once and a while I like to check in on the market’s inflation predictions. This is for my own personal curiosity, and possibly to entertain you, dear reader. You’ll be interested to know that inflation expectations have tempered somewhat over the last few weeks; it all goes to show that throughout all of the howling on raising debt ceilings and mudslinging in politics, the market still believes in the general stability of the United States dollar. My method is the classic “subtract real treasury yields from the yield curve rates”. All information is available at the U.S. Treasury’s web site.

Carnivals and links, presented for your viewing pleasure!

For whatever reason, my articles recently keep coming back to charitable giving and volunteering. Here I am again with another post on the BLS’s recent release of volunteering statistics. Reader Patrick of Cash Money Life wondered if the reason that married parents volunteered in such high numbers was because many have children who open up volunteer activities. On the surface, this is a very good theory; younger kids play baseball, soccer and other sports, become Boy and Girl Scouts, and generally do things which occasionally ask people to volunteer to help (like go to school!). Let’s see if we can tease out the effect this has on overall volunteering rates!

CNN’s Walter Updegrave fielded a question this weekend which, simply, sort of shocked me. A reader wanted to know if he and his wife should temporarily stop paying the full balance on their credit cards in order to build up an emergency fund. Is this really an option that some people are considering?

One of the nice things about the Bureau of Labor Statistics site is the centralized location of employment and labor trends data which inspires interesting articles. Count today as one of those days; the BLS today released figures on the rates of volunteerism in the United States. In the midst of a recession, volunteer rates increased in the United States from September 2008 to September 2009. In fact, the percentage rate of volunteering by citizens in the United States is now .1% higher than it was in September 2006, after a falloff from that point in 2007.

Weekly links and carnivals!

Even though I lifted the moniker from this article on CNN Money, the scare quotes are appropriate. I’ve written about the Credit Card Act of 2009 and its unintended consequences. Lucky for you, the law is starting to bear fruit. We’ve seen issuers who offer cards with 79.9% interest rates, at least this article features a few cards with redeeming qualities. Anyway, you can tell the title is a bit tongue in cheek, but let’s tackle the features in the three cards shown.

A popular topic in the blogosphere, given new life after comments by Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, is the relative success of the United States vs. the states that make up the European Union. The European Union is a loose confederation of 27 countries in Europe, ranging from Spain to Estonia. Krugman goes so far to suggest that “[y]ou should always bear in mind that when the question is which to believe — official economic statistics or your own lying eyes — the eyes have it.”