Professional Meetings

Office fads come and go, but one thing remains constant: meetings, which can be as much a part of work culture as voicemail and microwaved lunches. Even in this digital age, meetings remain the go to way of handling everything from brainstorming ways to make busy times fun to personnel announcements. The average finance leader reported spending 24% of their time in a meeting. But roughly one fifth of that time was considered unproductive

With the advancements in technology and emergence of remote meetings, there are sometimes more meetings on the calendar than needed. If meetings become stale and unnecessary, they can hurt productivity and impact morale. No one wants that.

Here’s how to make meetings more useful for everyone.

Rethink the event
Think about all the meetings you schedule or attend, are they all necessary? Some weekly check ins may exist because they have always been held and not because … Read More

Student Loan Debt Update

Millions of students will arrive on college campuses soon, and they will share a similar burden: college debt. The typical student borrower will take out $6,600 in a single year, averaging $22,000 in debt by graduation. There are two ways to measure whether borrowers can repay those loans: There’s what the federal government looks at to judge colleges, and then there’s the real story. The latter is coming to light and it’s not pretty.

Of borrowers who started repaying in 2012, just over 10 percent had defaulted three years later. That’s not too bad but it’s not the whole story. Federal data never before released shows that the default rate continued climbing to 16 percent over the next two years, after official tracking ended, meaning more than 841,000 borrowers were in default. Nearly as many were severely delinquent or not repaying their loans. The share of students facing serious struggles rose … Read More

Millennials in debt and most of it is not from student loans

Over 44 million Americans have student loans, with the average debt hovering around $33,000. And yet that’s not the number one source of debt for the average older millennial. Millennials between the ages of 25 and 34 have an average of $42,000 in debt each, the biggest source being credit card debt. Credit card balances make up a full fourth of the average older millennials owe, while student debt accounted for about 16 percent. The findings are based on a survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults, including an oversampling of more than 600 millennials.

As you grow older, your expenses increase. The additional pressures that come onto the pocketbook only grow and your disposable income shrinks in a lot of cases, even if your salary is growing. The pressure to start relying on credit cards makes a lot of sense. Millennials also cope with many other financial burdens that other generations … Read More