The phrase 'Pig in a Poke' was coined in Britain as a means of saying that a buyer should be careful to see and know what they are buying. The French word for bag or sack is poque. That has been changed in our language to poke. A dishonest seller [...]
I’ll admit it; I love politics. I enjoy the open debate between people with diverse points of view, the strategic art of persuasion, and yes, even the soap opera that elections often become. Of particular interest to me recently has been the meteoric rise of Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist [...]
Budgeting is more than spreadsheets and numbers; it’s the art of aligning your goals with your financial reality. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of helping many individuals and organizations create budgets that don’t just look good on paper, but actually work in practice. What I’ve learned is this: [...]
Recently while visiting my parents, my oldest son Ethan uncovered large amounts of the baseball cards I collected as a kid. While not a huge baseball fan himself, he does like money and recognized some of these cards might be valuable and began sifting through them to find cards he [...]
Have you ever gone to an expensive restaurant that appeared on the outside to be quite sophisticated and refined only to find after dining there that the food itself was less than impressive? I think sometimes the financial services industry can have a similar strategy of dazzling people with their [...]
Happy 2024! It is proverbial to end one year and begin a new one with a certain sense of optimism. However, since there seem to be so many diverse matters of our world about which to worry, I would like to address this condition. In President Jimmy Carter’s words from [...]
Last week I read a statistic in the Ney York Post that blew mind. As soon as I heard it, I knew I had to opine on the subject. Believe it or not 36% of New York City public school students are chronically absent from class which means they are [...]
My wife, Karen, and I just returned from our longest trip of 49 plus years together. We flew to Amsterdam and traveled by small cruise ship the Rhine, Main, and Danube rivers and the interconnecting canals of Europe. We visited Germany, Austria, and Hungary, ending in Budapest, over 1250 [...]
For regular readers of my column, you may be aware that two weeks ago I paid tribute to the workers of America in a special Labor Day article. In it I expressed a need to further lift up the working class and reduce the widening gap between the middle and [...]
