Most high school students gear up for college with the anticipation that they will graduate in 4 years and find a job after college graduation, right? Not anymore. Finding a job has been extremely difficult for college students and especially stressful for those students and families who are unable to afford the cost of higher education without student loans. I recently read an MSNBC article that said “student loan debt in the U.S. now totals more than $1 trillion. That’s more than all the outstanding credit card debt in the country.”  Recent reports state that college seniors in 2012 owed an average of $25,250, up five percent from the previous year. Aside from that, parents of college students had an average of $34,000 in student loans for their children. The more staggering statistic indicated that the number of the parental loans jumped 75 percent since 2005-2006. And what about the fact that more than 2 in every 25 students who graduated college in the last five years and will need to get a master’s degree?  Is higher education “worth it” after all?

I read a great article on msnbc.com about while America has a diminishing appetite for high gas consumption without relinquishing its penchant for large, gas guzzling cars.   While tiny compacts are common on the streets of Europe, it’s rare to see a Smart Car zipping around on America’s roadways.  

Why is that?  Well, based on comments by George Peterson, an automotive analyst with AutoPacific, Americans don’t want to drive small, extremely fuel efficient cars but “drive bigger, more fuel-efficient cars.”   I took a survey of my parking lot to see how this weighed out.  I cant deny that I personally drive a very large, inefficient car, however I was pleasantly surprised to see that my staff members were pretty evenly divided between mid-sized compacts and small SUVs....

I just read an article on msnbc.com about how Americans view home ownership.  Despite an excruciatingly hard few years for the housing market, an unsurprising amount of Americans still believe that owning their own home is the best long term investment they can make.

We’re all familiar with the housing boom of the 90’s and early 2000’s, after which the mortgage crisis pulled home prices down almost 30% nationwide, with hundreds of thousands of owners losing their homes. However, according to the survey results generated by the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends project, 81 percent of adults believe "buying a home is the best long-term investment a person can make."  The results were typical of the US housing market; nearly half of all homeowners stated that their home is worse less now than before the recession, with the overwhelming majority saying it will take at least three years for values to regain enough ground to make back their losses, while nearly half say it will take at least six years to recover....