Congress is tinkering with taxes, America — so watch your wallet.
The House passed its tax overhaul bill last week — and lawmakers are promising to get a bill on President Trump’s desk before the end of the year.
Gulp, this may not end well. Which means there is no better time to review these greenback titles in order to boost your financial IQ.
Not so long ago, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance was more than worth its cover price. Now, under newbie editor Mark Solheim since July, it seems his mandate was to suck every bit of humanity out of the title he has succeeded with the 72-page December issue.
Solheim rightfully boasts of sending a reporter to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey to get a boots-on-the-ground report on how families are dealing with the disaster. He could have saved some money by using the phone book.
Writer Miriam Cross finds neighbors in the Houston suburb of Conroe — one with flood insurance and one without. Cross details how the family with insurance is faring; they expect to have all repairs done professionally by the end of the year with minimal personal expense.
The family without insurance, a much more dramatic tale, is glossed over in three sentences. They spent $90,000 of their own money and have to oversee the work themselves.
The story contains plenty of valuable advice on how to handle the devastating effects of a natural disaster — but in a way as empathetic and passionate as an EKG.
An article on the Equifax data breach also is handled entirely too clinically, which casts only a little blame on company executives and their missteps.
And that’s too bad. The magazine, as usual, contains lots of good personal finance advice but it just doesn’t get very personal.
Time Inc.’s Money has a newbie editor-in-chief as well. Adam Auriemma, who took over in February, delivers a much more engaging issue than its rival — although it’s stuffed with questionable advice.
The cover story, “101 Ways to Make $1,000,” is, at times, a bit short-sighted. For example, the No. 1 tip is cutting the pay-TV cord and replacing it with select streaming services .
But many subscribers get a discounted broadband price because they have pay-TV. Lose the TV and the broadband price will go up, which blows those savings.
Both titles are solid, but Money’s more accessible style will likely lead more people to read and absorb the advice — so reach for that title.
Tech gadgets meet ignored elders
Time magazine had the difficult balancing act of celebrating innovation — in the form of best inventions of 2017 — while also documenting our nation’s deplorable elder care system.
For gadgets, “Jibo,” a $999 pet robot that costs 10 times as much as Amazon’s Echo and aims to be 10 times cuter with its swiveling, “Pixar”-like body, earned a spot on Time’s cover.
But despite its six microphones and facial recognition technology, “Jibo” can do little to help our nation’s elderly in assisted living and hospice care. For that, we have Time’s thorough — though often tough-to-read — reporting.
“At stake are the health, wealth and dignity of a generation,” Haley Sweetland Edwards writes, referring to the 76 million baby boomer generation.
New Yorker editors also prowled around death’s door with a technological angle for this week’s issue — but with dramatically different results.
Apparently, cold cases may soon become hot, thanks to an algorithm that discovers links between unsolved murders, indicating serial killers on the loose.
The liberal weekly tells us homicide archivist Thomas Hargrove has cataloged 751,785 murders in the US since 1976, and with the help of an algorithm he developed in 2010 and a board comprised of former detectives and a forensic psychologist, he hopes to help police in cracking murder cases.