Lifestyle

According to the tax law, you can give $12,000 a year to each person on your gift list without incurring a gift tax. With the market featuring fire-sale prices, that could add up to a lot of shares in someone’s stocking if you choose to give them stocks.

We were driving north on the interstate about an hour from the city in the new Suzuki SX4 Sport sedan. I noticed we were going quite fast. We sailed past the BMW 650i, a Dodge Viper, a Maserati Quattroporte and even the new, beautiful Bentley Continental GT Speed with a fabulous W12 twin turbo engine.

As hard times get harder, job losses mount, and banks get stingier with loans, chances are getting better are that a family member may ask you for financial help. Experts often warn about the dangers of lending money to family members and usually recommend treating any money given as a loan.As hard times get harder, job losses mount, and banks get stingier with loans, chances are getting better are that a family member may ask you for financial help. Experts often warn about the dangers of lending money to family members and usually recommend treating any money given as a loan.

Want to make sure your holiday gift arrives by Christmas Eve? If you’re shopping on the Internet instead of at the mall, make sure you check the vendor’s shipping deadlines.

When so-called 529 college-savings plans first appeared on the scene, most were the kind of plan where depositors put in after-tax money, invested it in mutual funds or other investments, then took the money out tax-free to pay for college.

When banks stopped lending money to anyone with a pulse, they stopped lending money to anyone at all, even those with gilt-edged credit ratings. Now that federal government has moved in to unlock the mortgage vaults, loans are easier to come by, but many of those who are self-employed are still out in the cold.

In a free-market economy, everything is connected to everything else. Just like higher gas prices affect your wallet in ways large and small, the current credit crisis has far-reaching implications for your life and your investment strategy, whether or not you’re in the market for a new home or a new car.

Charles Schwab Corp. is rolling out a new credit card with some nifty features that the financial services company hopes will help it capture a chunk of the country’s multibillion-dollar credit-card business.

Just as charts can reflect the activity of a stock—its volatility and price movements—they are also useful tools for tracking the effects of economic instability on the stock market. The major indexes, the Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ, reflect activity in various market sectors and segments of our economy. When there is turmoil, it is evident in the daily index charts.

If you’re the parent of a high school senior, you and your college-bound child have probably spent a lot of time lately sifting through college catalogs, stressing over SATs, and perhaps actually visiting come colleges.

Surveys that reveal a crisis in the healthcare system may not be news, but a recent poll by the Physicians' Foundation underscores just how bad the future of primary care medicine could be.

Several years ago, you ordered a holiday gift for your Aunt Martha from a catalog, and you’re still getting that catalog, even though you’ve never ordered from it again and probably never will.

We are excited to tell you about the refined 2009 Mitsubishi Outlander. Everyone could use a vehicle of this size and type. Yes, even you. It’s chock-full of luxuries. Our excitement is genuine; this sport utility vehicle (SUV) is a deep thrill.

Chicken Little keeps waiting for the sky to fall. In this pessimistic frame of mind, he never thinks about taking opportunities that arise while he is waiting for the sky to fall. (Maybe the sky won’t fall.)

You may not be willing to take a ride on the stock market roller coaster, but the current market turmoil gives you an excellent chance to buy some holiday gifts at a steep discount, especially for the youngsters on your gift list.

For convenient gift giving, it’s hard to beat a gift card. No worries about finding just the right gift, the right fit, or the right color. Some critics say, however, that gift cards are actually free money for the retail stores, since many of them are never used.

On the day 12 years ago when Alan Greenspan made his famous "irrational exuberance" remark, the stock market averages were surprisingly close to where they are today: the Dow was just under 6,500, and the S&P was at 744. While today’s markets are certainly irrational, though, some Wall Street analysts are calling it irrational despair.

Faced with soaring costs for imaging scans like MRIs, health insurance companies are turning to radiology benefits managers, or RBMs, to try to get a handle on these expenses.

With the election now behind us and a new administration taking office in a few short weeks, now is the time to look at what the political and economic landscape might look like under President Obama and a substantial Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.