Tag: money

On letting go of potential and other myths of greatness.

After leaving fundamentalism, Eve Ettinger grapples with the loaded theological heritage of evangelical personal finance teachings.

“With great abundance comes great discipline.”

When Ijeoma Oluo offers to buy her aging white mother a home, her mother worries she’s become a burden.

Two self-proclaimed “Amazon coaches” say they can train you in their business models so you can make thousands of dollars reselling cheap Chinese products on the world’s largest ecommerce store.

In this economy, what’s a fair share?

Vanessa Golenia contemplates the ins-and-outs of merging finances as the higher earner — and bigger spender — in her (heterosexual) relationship.

It’s a recognition that comes in the aisle of a grocery store.

A decade later, some homeowners still haven’t recovered from the mortgage crisis of 2008.

When Alexander Chee’s father died at 43, he left behind a trust that would set the course of his son’s life.

The cryptocurrency gold rush has made millionaires out of those obsessed with changing the world order.

How job insecurity, student debt, health care, zoning and the housing market have compounded over decades to create a life few millennials can afford.

How the world’s worst investor fleeced clients who couldn’t complain.

He was was a self-made, blue-collar millionaire in Reagan’s America. But when Percy Ross decided to give away his fortune, he made things simple: all you had to do was ask for it.

Canada’s new middle class lives paycheck to paycheck, unwilling to give up certain lifestyle choices.

Over six seasons, Girls has not been even remotely realistic about the earnings of a freelance writer.

In Roads & Kingdoms, Milan Gagnon tells the stories of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, and Konstanz, Germany — one city full of empty storefronts, and the other full of empty souls.

Ubiquitous digital payments: harbinger of a glorious future, or smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

Why would a tenure-track professor find himself selling his plasma to make rent? A story about debt in the academic world.

Lit Hub has a compelling essay by “The Last Illusion” author Porochista Khakpour about her struggle to survive early in her career as a novelist.

The thin margins of the IRL economy.

Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.

If there are two things Americans are good at, it’s mishandling our finances, and using Twitter to judge those who are in worse shape than us. Thus we have the perfect Atlantic cover story this week—a refreshingly honest and desparingly relatable personal essay by writer Neal Gabler about his many financial mistakes, as well as […]

 America’s best investment ever, in the whole history of our country, was to invest in the public high school and secondary school at the beginning of the 20th century. It dramatically raised the growth rate of America because it was a huge investment in human capital. The best economic analyses now say that investment in the […]

How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.

During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out […]

Laurie Woolever, in The Billfold, on how she ended up becoming Anthony Bourdain’s assistant: With my dad’s help, I took out a loan and did a 6-month professional course at the French Culinary Institute, while continuing to work part-time for the family for a few months. I soon learned that I was poorly equipped to […]

As poetry readings go, the setting was unique. The Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi boasted light-up floors, backdrop projections and a light show of a kind that would be familiar to fans of Pop Idol, X Factor or America’s Got Talent. Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in […]

When administrators, parents, and professors discuss money in the context of higher ed, they mean student loans and tuition. But when students talk money, it’s much more about who’s got it and who doesn’t. For students of modest means at America’s elite colleges, money acts as a barrier to extracurricular or social activities, or even […]

“In America, the economic fortunes of ordinary people like those in Ramsey’s audience are stagnating, while the fruits of increased productivity and profits are accruing to the wealthiest among us, including Ramsey himself, at an accelerating rate. But Ramsey seems to think that concern over inequality just comes down to bitterness. ‘This idea that it […]