Context and perspective!   Those are two concepts that are more and more important by the day as we now live in a time when it’s so incredibly easy to take things out of context and see them solely through someone else’s perspective.   Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all political on you – I’ll leave that up to the unbiased press and media who don’t like competition.   Recently, I came across a photo on the internet that showed a gentleman sitting at a table in what looked to be a quad or campus common for a high school or college.   Because the photo is taken from a distance, and the poster attached to the front of his table was designed in a particularly confusing way, it looked like all the poster really said was “Free HIV”.   My first thought was (and it’s quite possible yours would be the same), “Are there hordes of people lining up to PAY for HIV?   I would think the ‘free’ part was sort of implied.”   Then I thought, “Free or not, that’s not really the best way to p

We have a man who works in our office – we’ll call him Rex – who lived in New York City in the late 1980s.   This was a time before Times Square was populated by the Lego and M&M stores and taking the subway to The Bronx to watch a Yankees game was a bit like walking through the woods with nothing on but underwear made of meat (and not in a Lady-Gaga-performance kind of way).   Oddly enough, he loved that time!   He’s told us a few stories of his New York days, and I’ll share two of them with you here. One winter afternoon in Astoria (Queens), Rex was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street and catch his bus to his apartment in Bushwick (Brooklyn).   The light was red, so as he was waiting for it to turn green, he noticed a large truck idling at the light beside him, and it sounded like it was on its last leg.   As the light turned green and he proceeded to cross the street, the truck entered the intersection and left Rex in a dense cloud of black fog from it

Even though I’ve sort of borrowed the title from a 19 th -century classic of literature as my own title, I’d like to tell you about another book I recently read.   I’ll sum up the basic premise of the book with a quote from the author in an interview he gave to The Huffington Post :   “If your emotions are constantly being pushed this way or that way, and you feel like you’re never in control, it’s probably because you’re valuing a lot of the wrong things.”   As part and parcel to that thought, in the book he talks about the choices we make and our willingness to accept the “pain” that those choices carry with them – ironically, that pain is the key to our happiness.   Let’s look at a choice of options: renting a really nice apartment versus buying a very modest house.   The apartment in question is two bedrooms and two baths, 1,200 square feet, and the monthly rent with a 12-month lease is $1,450.   The appliances are brand new, you have a really nice pool, a sand volleyball

Which headline is better for grabbing your attention and prompting you to read the article to which it’s attached: “Credit Reports to Exclude Certain Negative Information, But Read on to See if This Even Applies to You” or “ Credit Reports to Exclude Certain Negative Information, Boosting FICO Scores”?   Obviously, the former is less than tantalizing while the latter makes you say, “Tell me more!”   I was in the “tell me more” camp, and the folks at The Wall Street Journal sucked me into their vortex. The development, set to go into practice on July 1 st , is certainly a departure from how the Big Three (Experian, TransUnion , and Equifax) have done things in the past, but it’s not going to wave a magic wand and make bankruptcies, foreclosures, short sales, etc., go away.   It’s sort of a bittersweet development.   Let me explain: Many tax liens and civil judgments will be removed from people’s credit reports if they don’t include a complete list of at least three data