Don't Quit Your Day Job…

Admit it – when you woke up today you asked yourself this very question – “is it better to go to college or to become a truck driver?“. Well, so did we here at DQYDJ. Inspired by a Twitter conversation from our friends JT at MoneyMamba and Matt Allen at Rambling Fever, we had to ask… how much do recently minted college graduates make when compared to their truck driving contemporaries? I think we can fairly classify this as an ‘epic post’ – make sure you fully understand my methodology before complaining… then complain all you want in my comments section!

Wikipedia, substituting for a dictionary, defines a longitudinal study as “a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time”. Contrast that with a cross-sectional study, which everyone’s favorite encyclopedia terms “a class of research method that involve observation of all of a population, or a representative subset, at one specific point in time.”

Ahh, another week, another Weekender! How many of you are getting sick of turkey leftovers already (our spread, with half of the turkey carved is show above!)? Fight through it, read some articles, and react to my stupid musings.

If you read this web site the odds that you are also living under a rock are pretty small. That probably means you already know that over the weekend the so-called Deficit Reduction Supercommittee failed to reach an agreement (and had to admit its failings on Monday). A little back-story: the Debt Panel was trying to find deficit savings in excess of $1.2 Trillion over the next 10 years. A little more back-story: the entire concept and execution of the debt panel was a disgusting farce. The entire $1.2 Trillion was to be cuts from ‘baseline spending’, also know to the rest of us as ‘planned future spending increases’.

Lost in all of the discussion about the $1 Trillion in student loan debt, there being more student loan debt than credit card debt, Occupiers asking for student loan forgiveness, and even whether certain concentrations should receive loans with higher interest rates is an important question: Is college worth it?

Why not go for the gold?  I already asked you if lower salaried majors should pay higher rates on student loans and if higher salaried majors should pay higher tuition.  Inspired by a recent post on the Freakonomics blog, I present to you another controversial (yet interesting) question for you to ponder.  Should the less attractive receive benefits commensurate with their disadvantages due to their looks?

Welcome to the first edition of the weekender – DQYDJ’s weekly update. Previously I had tossed these things out like flyers in Vegas, but this format should allow me to make things a little more interesting for your reading pleasure. Truth is… blogs don’t update as much on weekends. Well, we like to refer to DQYDJ as a web site (Aristocrats!). What’s the difference? There is none, really. Call us whatever you want. Just remember we update on weekends.

A municipal bond, known as a “muni”, is a fixed-income instrument that is issued by a local government, city, township or agency. Municipal bonds are debt securities; meaning that a municipality (i.e. the city or city agency that issues the bonds) is effectively taking a loan for a specified purpose such as an infrastructure project, long-term investments or for general financial and cash flow management purposes. Municipal bonds have various maturities ranging from short-term, less than 1-year, and long-term issues that can be 30-years or longer.

If you’ve been reading our stuff for a while, you know that we here at DQYDJ are one of the more cynical feeds in your RSS reader. Well, today we’d like to share with you one more piece of evidence on why our cynicism is justified.

A recently released survey from lab42 went where you only dared to dream: Lab42 asked 550 social media users about their digital life and how it related to their personal lives. One sign of the times: 33% of social media users had broken up with someone by Text, Email or Facebook. Slightly more depressingly, 40% of users would consider using that method to ditch their significant other.

Credit cards get a bad rap – one that is not entirely deserved. I’ve got this working theory that it has to do with their name – the term ‘credit’ may mean ‘ability to obtain resources based on a future payoff’, but the card is named entirely wrong: If the only purpose of your credit cards is to purchase things on credit you are doing things completely wrong. The true beauty of credit cards is that they are a liquidity tool; credit cards allow you constant access to funding… whenever you need it.  So, let’s look at the perfect strategy for turning your credit cards into liquidity cards!