Posts filed as “byline=Helaine Olen”
Should You Buy Royal Baby Memorabilia?
Buy this memorabilia if you want a physical memory of the royal baby’s birth. But don’t purchase any of it thinking you will make a mint....Read more.The McDonald’s Worker Budget And The Tyranny Of Personal Finance
A quick note about that McDonald’s budget for its employees published earlier this week by the website Think Progress …. There is a genre of personal finance writing I like to call “when rich people tell poor people how to live.” This is when, as I’ve reported in the past, you see men and women in ...Read more.Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling May Get Out Of Jail Sooner Than Expected
While you were distracted by sequestration, increasing unemployment numbers, plans to cut Social or ’s ever-growing baby bump, the U.S. Department of Justice announced last week they were contemplating reducing former Enron CEO Jeffry Skilling’s 24-year sentence in the slammer for his role in the failure of his firm. Enron? Remember Enron? It seems so ...Read more.Groupon’s Fired CEO Andrew Mason Sends Memorable Goodbye Letter To Staff
I want to take a moment to salute Andrew Mason, the co-founder and now former CEO of . Whatever else one thinks of his tenure, Mason set a new standard for exiting a job with grace, humor and a commendable lack of finger pointing. In a note Mason sent to employees announcing that he’d been ...Read more.Wal-Mart Emails Reveal Customers Under Financial Stress
One wonders if executives at Wal-Mart Stores ever studied the business wisdom of Henry Ford....Read more.Student Loan Debt And The Wedding Bell Blues
According to recent research, women with student loan debt might be said to have a case of the wedding bell blues....Read more.How Much is that Hip Replacement in the Hospital?
Here’s a fun fact for the week of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show: you are much more likely to get an answer to the question “How much is a hip for that doggy in the window?” than to “How much is that hip in the human hospital?” Or at least that’s one conclusion you ...Read more.Can We Really Delay Retirement?
A study released late last week by The Conference Board reveals that more and more Americans are apparently adopting a retirement planning strategy that could best be described as being lifted from a Beatles song: They are assuming their employers will indeed still need them and feed them when they’re are 64. According the Board, ...Read more.Hair Color and Money Habits
Here’s an idea to cure the savings crisis: just direct everyone to dye his or her hair grey or white. That’s the impression you might get from a survey released today by couponcabin.com, a provider of coupons for online sites, which teamed up with Interactive to determine if hair color has any influence on our ...Read more.Casey Anthony Can Declare Bankruptcy And Expect Relief But Student Loan Debtors Receive No Such Protection
In today’s filing from tabloid scandals you can never, ever escape, comes news that Casey Anthony, who was found not guilty of the murdering her two-year-old daughter Caylee in a 2011 trial, declared bankruptcy last week. Anthony, who is unsurpringly unemployed (would you hire this woman?), claims debts of just under $800,000 on assets of ...Read more.About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
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