Disability and sickness benefits – check your entitlements

If you’ve recently become sick or disabled you may be trying to get to grips with the benefits system for the first time. Read our guide to the benefits and entitlements you might be able to claim.

How Holiday Shopping Mania Led to Giving Tuesday

If you end up with a massive money hangover after the five-day holiday shopping mania that stretches from Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday to Cyber Monday, the antidote is Giving Tuesday.

The one-day charitable giving promotion -- hashtag #givingtuesday on social media -- was launched in 2012 to galvanize people around a less gluttonous pursuit.

Since most charities generate the vast majority of their contributions at the end of the year, Giving Tuesday opened the door to a more organized effort on a specific day that any organization could step into. And it worked.

While still in its early stages compared to its retail counterparts, Giving Tuesday has already produced spectacular results for many non-profits. That has led more than 30,000 organizations in 68 countries, from non-profits to corporations to governments, to participate. And the hashtag was mentioned more than 750,000 times on Twitter in 2014.

Driving record

Driving record. A recent speeding ticket or moving violation -— especially within the past three or five years -- can make a big difference in your car insurance premiums, and the insurer is going to check your motor vehicle record before offering you its official rate. Check your files (canceled checks or payment receipts, for example) to find out how long ago you got a ticket. Most state departments of motor vehicles let you look up your motor vehicle record online

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Victoria College

It is to Victoria College that I can attribute the fact that Bell Canada, Oxford University Press and McClelland and Stewart all failed to hire me in the summer of ‘63, on the grounds that I was a) overqualified and b) couldn’t type, thus producing in me that state of joblessness, angst and cosmic depression which everyone knows is indispensable for novelists and poets, although nobody has ever claimed the same for geologists, dentists or chartered accountants. It is also due to Victoria College, incarnated in the person of Northrop Frye, that I didn’t run away to England to become a waitress, live in a garret, write masterpieces and get tuberculosis. He thought I might have more spare time for creation if I ran away to Boston, lived in a stupor, wrote footnotes and got anxiety attacks, that is, if I went to Graduate School, and he was right. So, for all the benefits conferred upon me by my Alma Mater, where they taught me that the truth would make me free but failed to warn me of the kind of trouble I’d get into by trying to tell it - I remain duly grateful.

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The subject, though interesting, can feel stretched over the book’s 250 pages. The historical records are sadly thin, which means Mr Wilson-Lee often resorts to what feels like speculative filler. Some of the links he makes are beyond tenuous—at one point he compares African elephants to the storm in “King Lear” on the grounds that both are “sublime grey objects”. The book sometimes strays far from both Shakespeare and Swahililand. But it has successfully told a lesser-known story of Africa, and it is a story worth knowing.

Hey Millennials! You Can Now Calculate How Much Less Money You're Making Than Your Parents

While it might sound counterintuitive, it turns out that young single people—as compared to individuals with dependent children—are less well off financially. According to an article depressingly titled “Young Single People Bear the Brunt of Generation Y’s Economic Woes,” which was featured as a part of a larger spread in The Guardian, 25 to 29 year-old Millennials “have become poorer over the last 20 years compared with the average population.”

These adults, keen on building their careers above all else, struggle with a high cost of living and stagnating disposable income. What’s interesting is the fact that single Millennials who choose to live alone, and are therefore relegated to shouldering the full burden of rent, the electric bill, and a Netflix subscription, also make less money compared to people their age 20 to 30 years ago. This is true in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, and Spain.

In fact, you can find out how your income compares to other generations, from other countries. (Spoiler alert: You won’t be thrilled with your results.)

You can do two things upon seeing these numbers. One: Whine and moan about how unfair this all is. Or two, continue building a career you care about. You can’t control the economy, but you can, at least to some extent, control your happiness at work. If you like your job and the direction you’re headed in, perhaps the trade-off of living alone and occasionally eating cereal for dinner isn’t such a major one after all. Sure, the generations before might’ve had more disposable income, but on the whole, they were more likely to be working solely for the weekends.

And if you don’t like your career parth now? Well, no amount of looking at the numbers is going to change your circumstances or the global economy. So, your best bet is to continue to find your way on the potentially winding career path. That might mean figuring out how to make extra money every single month (a.k.a., a side gig), or it might mean budgeting that enables you to pay for the online classes you need to make a career move. If anything, this proves that being fulfilled at work’s more important than ever.

Plus, while every industry is different, and certain job titles and positions will always command a higher salary than others, there’s no reason to believe that if you carve out goals for yourself and set your sights on success you won’t one day be in a better position financially than you are now. As we’ve pointed out before, often job hopping, or, as we like to call it, career building can mean big things when it comes to your bottom line.