The best way to understand earning power—no matter what your age—is to understand the factors that go into it. For example, most people who have careers that are plateauing usually have a learning problem that manifests itself as an earning problem.
And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids [...]

The farmer is separating his farm from his parents' farm. To say this has been a summer full of drama would be a total understatement. I would say that the drama has gone from his larger family, to our little family, and now, to the economics of the farm.
This is probably where the drama should [...]

When people tell me they want to stay home with their kids and they can’t afford it, I want to yell at them about how when I was trying to write freelance and take care of the kids I had a babysitter refuse to come to the house because we had no food in the house. [...]

It’s hard to confess to you that I’m happy on the farm. The Farmer and I are getting along well, and all that research about how if parents are in a happy marriage the kids are happier – well, that seems to be true for us.
So I spend my days writing career advice and reading [...]

I just got waxed. Everything off. Here’s a picture of Stephanie in action:

I love Stephanie because she is fun to talk to if I feel like talking and she leaves me alone if I feel like sending emails on my iPhone while she waxes. Or taking pictures.
I love the feeling of being neat and tidy [...]

I was talking with Leo Babauta a few weeks ago. The topic of the conversation was his new book, focus. But of course I am not good at focus. So here is a picture of a book I just bought that is not Leo's book, but I really like it: The Selby is in Your [...]

Whatever you earn at age 40 is likely to be the top of your earning potential. This is one of a gazillion things I’ve learned from talking with Al Lee, the director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.
Al's data, which is based on the careers of college graduates, is basically that the salary curve for most people [...]

Now that I live on a farm, which, by the way, has been inescapable for three days because of snow, I keep up with the world by watching trending topics on Twitter.
Right now, a trending topic is “Volkswagen commercial” which is about their new Super Bowl commercial. Volkswagen has conveniently released the commercial early so we [...]

We took a trip to NYC because I was worried that we are were not being exposed to enough visually stimulating inputs. I want the kids to see new things, do new things, and I wanted to see the Barney's Christmas windows. The theme was foodies. I was stressed that I was not up on [...]

I have earned a lot of money in my life. But I have never had an extravagant life. I don’t own a house. I’ve never bought a new car. I’ve never bought a new piece of living room furniture, and I do not own a single piece of real jewelry. What I have spent money [...]

I think its safe to say that for the majority of people, Thanksgiving is not about goodness and gratitude, but rather, family drama.
Until now, I have been pretty much on the outside of this American tradition: The tradition of building up Thanksgiving to be a great family moment and then the family not living up [...]

I don't usually write question and answer columns. (Although I have once or twice before.) I do read every single question that people send me. And these are three questions I've been answering a lot lately.
Q: Why do you pay $50,000 a year for a house manager?
A: The short answer is that I am buying [...]

More than 80% of young people say they want to live in New York City, according to Time Out New York. I can understand that. I lived there for seven years. Of course, NYC is amazing. But I have also lived for about ten years each in Chicago, LA, and Boston. And now I live [...]

I have said about ten million times that there is no more glass ceiling, there is no more salary gap between men and women, and there is no reason to keep bitching about sexual harassment because it’s merely a legal issue, not a men-are-evil issue.
Okay. So if the gender gaps are not around these feminist [...]

Three years ago, I made a decision to move from New York City to Madison, WI based purely on research. I put economic development research together with positive psychology research. Then I combed the Internet for city statistics, and I moved. (If you want to read the research I used, I linked to it all [...]

I get questions all the time about how I manage having kids and a startup at the same time. After trying to answer the question a few times, I realized that there's the pretty-much-BS answer about how it's all about being clear on your values. Or there’s the complicated, too-long-for-interviews answer.
To really get tips for [...]

We finally locked up funding for my company. There are some catches, though, and one of them is that we can’t use the funding to pay back debt.
This is a problem because our company has been out of money, pretty much, since November. We have revenue, but not enough to cover operating expenses. So we’ve [...]

As the recession persists, we can watch social shifts and cultural trends. Some are good, some are bad. But in either case, one way to control how the recession affects you is to watch the larger trends and decide where you want to fit.
Here are five trends that are emerging in the face of the [...]

This guest post is part of the Twentysomething series of guest posts that I run periodically.
Today's guest post is an open letter to Obama from a twentysomething investment banker working in a London office of a US bank. The letter is in response to the salary caps Obama is putting on bankers who receive [...]

It is well known in the sex research arena that the more educated a woman is the more often she will receive oral sex.
I have always wondered if this is true for salary as well. For example, if your salary goes up by $50,000, how much more likely are you to receive oral sex?
I cannot [...]