v.20 n. 1 – Released January 6, 2016
They are home to the nation’s credit elite, and they have another thing in common: the tech industry. Certain neighborhoods on the West Coast boast residents with some of the best credit, according to a new report by free credit score site Credit Sesame. Those zip codes include the main stomping grounds of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google.
Between the coasts, and certainly away from the tech plutocracy, the story is different. The average score for all U.S. states combined is a lowly 604, considered subprime by many lenders, said Stew Langille, Credit Sesame’s chief strategy officer.
German car maker Volkswagen has posted its first drop in VW brand sales in 11 years as the company continues to cope with its emissions scandal.
Sales of VW brand cars fell 4.8% in 2015 to 5.82 million cars from 6.12 million a year earlier.
Falling demand in China and US added to the losses as orders fell in December.
VW has promised it will have a fix in the coming weeks for the millions of US cars with defeat devices that disguised emission levels in diesel cars.
Memo to marketers: When it comes to moms, get real. Stop focusing on motherhood as a job, and start talking to moms like the multifaceted, multidimensional human beings they are.
That’s the key takeaway from Saatchi & Saatchi’s global study on “Moms and Marketing: IRL (In Real Life),” which queried nearly 8,000 mothers with children ranging from newborns to 17-year-olds in China, Germany, Italy, India, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S. (including U.S. Hispanics).
According to Healthcare.gov, self-insurance is a “type of plan … where the employer itself collects premiums from enrollees and takes on the responsibility of paying employees’ and dependents’ medical claims.” Insurance services such as enrollment, claims processing and provider networks can be handled in-house, but are more frequently managed by a third-party administrator (TPA) or an insurance company.
When I found this video of someone driving their Lamborghini through floodwaters in San Diego, I assumed it would go poorly. Even as the video began to play, I was already saying aloud to myself, “You’re doing it wrong.”
Turns out, though, I was the one who was wrong. That’s because that Lamborghini Huracan drove through the water like a boss (or like a Jeep — you choose).
General Motors Wednesday introduced the Chevrolet Bolt, the first long-range, plug-in electric car that real people can afford to drive.
Priced around $30,000 (after government rebates), the five-passenger Bolt has an electric range of around 200 miles, more than enough for families to use as their daily driver without fear of running out of juice. Most people would never need to recharge anywhere but home. But if you do, you can refill the battery to 80 percent of capacity in about 30 minutes.
U.S. movie streaming giant Netflix just dropped the hammer and opened its service in 130 new countries, including India and Russia — but crucially not China. These new markets take Netflix, which claims 70 million customers, to more than 190 countries worldwide.
The surprise reveal came at CES 2016, where the company had expected to announce its long-awaited entry into India. Well, it did that, and then some. The move was unexpected since Netflix had slowly been building its coverage up over recent years, foraying into Asia Pacific for the first time in 2015.
That’s the weird thing about getting older. There’s no magic eight ball. There’s no manual. There’s no great big cheat sheet. You don’t generally know that you’ve gotten it right until you’ve made it through to the other side. That’s especially true when it comes to money.
The whole thing got me thinking: wouldn’t it be great if there really was a cheat sheet for getting older? One targeted to finance? What if there was a list of what you absolutely needed to know about money written by folks who have already been forced to make those tough calls?
In 2008, Regent University law professor James Duane gave a lecture. The lecture gained traction online over the years (one version of the lecture video is up to five million YouTube views), but now it’s being rediscovered by fans of the hit Netflix show “Making A Murderer” on Reddit.
Much of Duane’s lecture feels particularly relevant given the relationship between the police and the suspects (innocent and otherwise) on the show.
Dispatches From The Front 