Welcome to this week’s edition of our Tuesday Top 5, Econ4U’s weekly tips post to help you manage your money in five easy steps. If you’ve ever uncovered “found money” and decided to save most of it, you’re already acquainted with the idea of consumption smoothing. It’s the economic principle that people avoid abrupt swings in [...]
Housing lottery winners have been announced in the past week from New Orleans to New York, meaning a small number of lucky people are snagging sweet apartments at below-market rates. What’s a housing lottery? In major cities that have large income disparities and limited desirable neighborhoods, the government has set aside a small number of affordable [...]
As a favorite math teacher of mine in high school once told my statistics class, “The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.” But winning the lottery is also a curse on people who are bad at personal finance. Callie Rogers was 16 when she won a jackpot of £1.9 million [...]
A consortium of Michigan credit unions have implemented an interesting scheme to add a bit of excitement to the otherwise boring act of buying a certificate of deposit (CD). From The Wall Street Journal: Members who put $25 or more into a Save to Win one-year CD are entered into a monthly “savings raffle” for prizes up to [...]
Buying an occasional lottery ticket for fun isn’t a terrible idea. At least if being virtually guaranteed to lose is your idea of a good time. After all, it’s pretty much like making a non-tax-deductible donation to the government, and if you only buy one or two every few weeks then you aren’t spending too [...]
