If you wait long enough, all of your favorite old-fashioned habits come back in style.  After decades of nothing but dark denim on store shelves, faded jeans are making their first appearance since a time so early in the 90s that no one in Florida had heard grunge rock.  Now that the babies who... Read More ..read more

Perhaps you heard that, after much media hype, Florida abolished permanent alimony.  Pursuant to the new law, all alimony awards have an automatic end date, and alimony obligations cannot last longer than the marriage did.  Therefore, if you got married at 25 and divorced at 50, the court can only order you to pay alimony until you are 75, which is a long time, but it isn’t forever.  Furthermore, the new law requires the courts to review alimony orders and modify the amount if appropriate when the paying spouse retires or becomes eligible for retirement.  This new law could ..read more

Loneliness is an essential feature of the American experience and has been such at least since the days of the Beat Generation.  One of the most obvious signs of this loneliness is that the only correspondence you get, whether in the form of email or postal mail, is from people who want to make money off of you.  You have no friends from whom to receive birthday greetings, and your family cannot be bothered to wish you a happy birthday, but your hairstylist and dentist would never forget to acknowledge your special day.  These days, now that no one has money to spend, friendly c ..read more

The best thing about buy now pay later (BNPL) is that it is so easy to make purchases on credit, and, in theory, they are interest free.  The worst thing is that it is so easy to buy things that you cannot afford, and therefore to fall behind on payments.  Optimists might say that BNPL offers truly equitable access to credit, while pessimists might say that it is a nearly invisible debt epidemic.  Depending on who you ask, BNPL is either like a credit card without the interest payments or the subprime lending world’s answer to the credit card.  This month, the Consumer Fina ..read more

For decades, Florida has been an attractive destination for retirees, but it has changed a lot since today’s old geezers were young.  In the 1980s, tiny anole lizards scurried across the sidewalk everywhere you went, but iguanas were only in zoos, but today, the sight of enormous green lizards lounging in the trees or staring menacingly at you from a neighbor’s lawn is an everyday occurrence.  There weren’t nearly as many young people in South Florida when your parents were young; Florida increasingly became a place where people moved for work opportunities and not just for retiremen ..read more

The signs of financial catastrophe are all around us.  Grocery prices have not decreased much since the worst days of the pandemic.  Well-paying jobs are beyond anyone’s hopes.  Today, you are lucky if you can get a low-paying job and supplement it with gigs; most of us have no choice but to cobble together as many gigs as we can, pay as much of the bills as we can afford to, and then pay off our buy now pay later (BNPL) purchases and our astronomical 1099 taxes in installments.  Forget homeownership; no one can afford to buy a house unless they are buying it with the proce ..read more

The good news is that everyone has the right to discharge unpayable debts in bankruptcy, but the bad news is that not all debts are eligible for discharge.  In general, it is easy to discharge debts that you owe to private lenders, such as credit card companies and hospitals, but if the creditor is a government entity, you will probably still be responsible for paying it even after your bankruptcy case is complete.  Therefore, some people file for bankruptcy so that they can discharge their credit card debts, medical bills, and business debts in order to free up funds for tax debt, o ..read more

In the Netherlands, the interest rates of home mortgage loans gradually decrease over the term of the loan, such that the mortgage refinances itself.  If American consumers had that option, they would likely choose it whenever it was available, but we are unlikely to see Dutch style mortgages here anytime soon, because the mortgage refinance market is so lucrative for lenders.  More than 20 percent of mortgage loans in the United States are refinances of existing mortgages, as opposed to new home purchases.  In a mortgage refinance, everyone wins.  The buyer gets lower mont ..read more

You may have seen personal finance vloggers field questions from consumers who are stressed out about how their low credit score is stopping them from getting car loans and is making their credit cards more expensive.  To you, this sounds like high class worries.  These people who are worrying about what they can and cannot do given their current credit score all have bank accounts, which is more than you can say for yourself.  The fact that it is expensive to be poor, and that it costs money to use your own money hits home with the unbanked even more than it does with everyone ..read more

Is it better to owe money to just one creditor or many?  Should you take on more debt because it is good debt?  Paying off your debts is hard enough, but trying to rationalize why certain debts are good or bad is downright confusing.  It makes sense to take out a home mortgage, because with every installment payment, you build equity in your house, instead of enriching your landlord while your credit score doesn’t budge, but when you get into questions about the ideal amount of bad debt, the chorus of voices starts to sound like an economists’ happy hour, all heated debate over ..read more