By Kevin M
The following is a reprint of my Christmas message from last year. I had thought to do a brand new one for this year, but could find no way to improve on the first effort.
I have a theory—I call it my “December theory”—and it goes something like this: every year, beginning about a week before Thanksgiving, and carrying through the entire month of December, the population triples. How else can we explain why the stores are so crowded, why we have to fight for parking spaces in places we usually don’t, why the lines at restaurants are so long and why the highways and airports are so crowded? Where are all these people the rest of the year?
The only logical explanation is that two-thirds of the world lives in some sort of seclusion all year, and only comes out as December approaches.
Every year it seems, Christmas gets more hectic. There’s more going on, more people to buy gifts for, more places to be, more things to do. We rush from place to place to compete with others for suddenly scarce resources and somewhere in that mess attitudes get a little lousy. Admit it–January feels SO good, doesn’t it?
Why to we do put up with all that stress, with all that busyness? And what do we get out of it anyway?
The gifts, the toys, the kids, the family, the food, the music, the decorations, the travel—the TV specials! Is that what Christmas is about? It’s all those things, but there’s something more.
So what IS the real meaning of Christmas? I’ll take a stab. You might recognize this one from the cartoon Christmas classic, Charlie Brown’s Christmas, which was created in 1965 when people weren’t offended by such utterances in public places…
Have you ever noticed that some people who have little money seem to live very well—they almost seem to be…rich? Have you also noticed that many people who are rich in terms of money seem to struggle? There are definite reasons for that, and it’s mostly a matter of personal choice. It’s not that money isn’t important; it’s more that we should never measure wealth solely in terms of money. 
Earlier this month, the announcement came that American’s triple A credit rating was being downgraded to double A plus status. The Federal Reserve announced that it was making no plans to raise the near zero interest rates that have been set in place for some time now. This announcement came on the heels of the worst drop in market shares since the market collapse that happened back in 2008.
Have you ever wondered which is better for couples, joint or separate checking accounts? I’ve written a post over at LendingTree.com on just that topic, pointing out the advantages of each. Weigh in at 
We are headed into the second great depression.
Last week in 
I don’t normally write much on economics, largely because I think its one step above fortune telling—maybe. You look into the tea leaves (“economic data”), sift it around a bit and make predictions about what you think is happening and more particularly, about what you think WILL happen.. Hence the fortune telling analogy.
Income Security VS Job Security – Does it Matter?
By Kevin M
Back then it seemed that all of humanity would eventually be going to space—to find resources, to conquer new worlds or at least to alleviate overpopulation here on earth—and astronauts would lead us there. High minded and exciting, yes, except that it never happened!
If a career as cutting edge as astronauts is no longer secure, what can we say about the far more ordinary fields most of us regular folks work in?
You’ve heard it and read it before, and perhaps you’ve even been a casualty of one of the biggest phenomena of our time–the end of job security.
We have to do something about that, but what? Individually, there’s little any of us can do to create job security, but we can gravitate toward it’s close cousin, income security. If we have income security we might not even notice or care that we no longer have job security.
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