Most artificial trees are imported and so are affected by slower shipping times and higher costs because of the pandemic, he said. “Supply is flat, but demand is up.”

The average price of an artificial tree last year was $104, according to Mr. Harman’s association. Fancier models, however, can cost more than $1,000. Typically, he said, retailers sell artificial trees at a discount to the price listed on the box, but shoppers can expect fewer reductions this year.

“You’re seeing a significant price increase, or a lesser discount,” Mr. Harman said. While you may pay more initially, an artificial tree can last for decades, he said.

Here are some questions and answers about Christmas trees:

How can I find a live tree seller near me?

The Christmas Tree Promotion Board offers an online retail search tool, as does the National Christmas Tree Association.

If I buy my cut tree early, how can I preserve it?

If you want to buy a tree early but don’t want to decorate it right away, take a few steps to store it properly, said Mr. Hundley of the National Christmas Tree Association. Have the seller cut off about an inch of the trunk and stand the tree in a bucket of water. The tree will draw the water into its trunk, preventing it from drying out. You can store the tree in a cool place, like an unheated garage or even outdoors — just avoid direct sunlight, which can dry out the tree.

When you’re ready to set up and decorate the tree, avoid locations near heat vents or fireplaces to keep the tree fresher and reduce fire hazards. And keep the base filled with water.

When the season is over, many communities offer recycling programs that turn Christmas trees into mulch. Or you can get creative. One idea: Set it up outside, decorated with peanut-butter-coated pine cones to feed backyard birds.

What tree lights are easiest on my electric bill?

LED lights are the most energy efficient, cost-effective option for holiday lighting, according to the Edison Electric Institute. The Wirecutter, The New York Times’s product-rating affiliate, offers recommendations for the best brands.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/your-money/christmas-trees-cost.html

Julien and Kiersten Saunders, creators of the blog Rich Regular, go so far as to call “retirement” the “R word.” Gaining that independence is crucial now, they say, not just after 65. And they encourage their audience, which they reach on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, to look at out-of-the-box ways of doing so.

“Minority communities are obsessed and focused on earning more income through their jobs,” said Mr. Saunders, 41, who with his wife started giving personal finance advice in 2017. “We’re pointing them toward passive income that doesn’t require the middleman, permission or promotion.” Passive income could come from renting property or, for digital creators like themselves, through sponsored content, he said.

Debt relief is a huge topic within the online personal finance community. Debt, including student loans, credit cards and medical bills, disproportionately affects people of color in the United States. The typical debt load of Black and Hispanic Americans was 46 percent of their assets in 2019, versus 29 percent for whites. And about 21 percent of African American borrowers were behind on their student loan payments, compared with 6 percent of white borrowers, according to a 2020 study by the Aspen Institute.

Leo Jean-Louis, known as the Millennial Debt Freedom Coach on Instagram, advises his 50,000-plus followers to get their debt balances to zero by incorporating the lessons he and his wife, Faith, learned after paying off more than $200,000 in less than three years. An occupational therapist by training, he picked up weekend and holiday shifts, and the couple cut back on expenses by canceling cable, cooking their meals, car-pooling and more. He said the pandemic recession had brought engagement and more questions from his followers.

“I also saw an increase from other platforms wanting to give out information,” Mr. Jean-Louis said. “Other Instagram influencers reached out for collaborations.”

For female influencers, the gender pay gap is a major issue. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women typically earned about 18 percent less than their male counterparts in 2020, and the gap was far bigger for Black and Hispanic women. Black women in professional occupations earned only 68 percent of what white male colleagues earned.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/business/personal-finance-influencers-retirement.html

The company is also something of a regulatory guinea pig: Upstart was the first business to receive a no-action letter from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The letter essentially said the bureau had no plans to take any regulatory action against the company in return for detailed information about its loans and operations.

Though the bureau didn’t recreate Upstart’s results on its own, it said the company had approved 27 percent more applicants than the traditional model, while the average interest rates they paid were 16 percent lower. For example, “near prime” customers with FICO scores from 620 to 660 were approved about twice as frequently, according to company data. Younger and lower-income applicants also fared better.

Upstart, which also agreed to be monitored by two advocacy groups and an independent auditor, takes into account more than 1,000 data points inside and outside a consumer’s credit report. It has tweaked its modeling at times — it no longer uses the average incoming SAT and ACT scores of a borrower’s college — but includes the person’s college, area of study and employment history. (Nurses rank well, for example, because they’re rarely unemployed, Mr. Girouard said.) The amount that borrowers are asking for may also be a factor: If they are seeking more than Upstart’s algorithms believe is appropriate, that may work against them.

Other companies work in a similar way, although the methods and data they use vary.

TomoCredit, for example, will issue a Mastercard credit card to applicants — even those with no credit score — after receiving permission to peer at their financial accounts; it analyzes more than 50,000 data points, such as monthly income and spending patterns, savings accounts and stock portfolios. Within two minutes, consumers are approved for anywhere from $100 to $10,000 in credit, to be paid off weekly. On-time payments help build users’ traditional credit files and scores.

Zest AI, a Los Angeles company that already works with banks, auto lenders and credit unions, is also working with Freddie Mac, which recently began using the company’s tools to evaluate people who may not fit squarely inside traditional scoring models.

Jay Budzik, Zest AI’s chief technology officer, said the company went deep into applicants’ credit reports, and might incorporate information from a loan application, such as the mileage or potential resale value of a used car. It can also look at consumers’ checking accounts.

“How frequently are they getting close to zero?” Mr. Budzik said. “Those things are helpful in creating an additional data point on a consumer that is not in the credit report.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/your-money/credit-score-alternatives.html

So maybe this holiday season is the time to forcibly upgrade the family Luddite. Or maybe it’s time to give in and buy a first phone for a child. (If so, consult our Wirecutter guide to the category, and do consider a dumbphone in lieu of a smart one.)

If someone in your circle loves to travel and is sick of being stuck at home, there is welcome news here, too. The C.P.I. includes an airline fares category, and prices have fallen 23.7 percent in the past two years.

Where might you might send (or take) someone? Consider the research firm STR’s data. I asked about a selection of popular destinations where average daily room rates are down a double-digit percentage in the past two years. It’s a decent-size list of appealing cities that includes New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

The travel app Hopper offers promising airfare intelligence. Highlights include a 16 percent drop in prices to and from the New York and Newark airports in two years. Flights in and out of the three Washington-area airports are down 10 percent.

If you’re thinking about flights, though, it’s worth pointing out that there was a spike in prices in the spring, which has since receded. You may want to act fast, now that booster shots of confidence are available to all.

Gifts That Appreciate Will Be Much Appreciated

Some gifts have the potential to rise in value — and not just pristine Barbies that must stay in the box or trading cards whose worth falls with every wrinkle.

Over the long term, the stock market tends to rise. Money in an index fund is almost foolproof, as long as you leave it there for a few decades. Investing in individual companies is more risky, but even if the share you give falls, a younger recipient may learn valuable lessons anyway.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/your-money/inflation-holiday-gifts.html

In an effort to provide for the long-term financial stability of her children, my grandmother bought a large amount of stock in a fossil-fuel company, which she left to my father. I find it heartbreaking that the investment she made and that my father has maintained to provide safety and security is one of the things that is actively moving the planet toward terrible destruction. My father is elderly and would not consider divesting from this company. This stock will be a majority of his bequest to my siblings and me. I hope my father will live for many more years, but when that stock — and the associated wealth — come to me, what is the ethical thing for me to do with the money? I feel guilt and disgust at the prospect of profiting off the suffering of so many. Name Withheld

The case for divesting from fossil-fuel companies is that such divestment, on a large scale, would stigmatize their activities, exert a downward pressure on their share prices and (through an indirect mechanism of action) reduce the amount of capital available to them. We want to restrain investment in the exploitation of fossil fuels; we want to encourage investment in alternatives. But some people are motivated less by considerations of capital flows and more by a desire to have clean hands — to feel unsullied by the fossil-fuel industry and its grievous legacy.

There are a few complications here. One is that most oil reserves are state-owned and aren’t directly affected by divestment campaigns, so the strategy is quite limited in its effects. Another is that the world currently relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy needs, including most of its electricity, and though we should decarbonize as fast as we can (which is much faster than oil-and-gas companies would like), there’s no switch we can throw that would obviate a period of transition: Oil companies can’t yet be wished out of existence.

Then there’s the question of how to think about socially responsible shareholder activists. The hedge fund Engine No. 1, by becoming an Exxon Mobil shareholder and corralling the support of much larger investors, succeeded in installing three directors committed to getting the company to spend more on carbon reduction. Can investors who are devoted to E.S.G. (environment, social and governance) issues play a positive role in reforming the energy sector?

If you’re simply concerned with keeping your hands clean, you won’t be able to explore these matters. The great economic and political theorist Albert O. Hirschman explored “exit” and “voice” as among the ways we can respond to dysfunctional organizations. Exit, in this case, means withdrawing from these entities; voice means speaking up and trying to redirect them. Some combination of exit and voice might be optimal here.

And when the stock passes into your possession? I would recommend a forward-looking approach: The question is what you can do that would contribute to solving one of the great problems facing humanity. That might mean liquidating your holdings and adding to the social pressure on the company. It might also mean donating some of the money to a nonprofit group that works for a greener world; it might mean putting resources into the alternative-energy sector.

Your father, out of sentimentality, won’t consider divesting from this company. He’s caught up, it seems, in the fact that his mother made the investment — a backward-looking consideration. Don’t get caught up in backward-looking considerations, too. To dwell on the fact that this wealth came from an investment made by someone else a few generations ago is another form of sentimentality. Almost any inheritance entails profiting from the sins of the past. An awareness of historical mistakes is salutary, but the task is to help put things right in the future.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cosmopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.” To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/magazine/inheritance-ethics.html

This is a path that many experts recommend against. “The first thing we tell people is absolutely not to tap into their retirement account,” said Elizabeth Isele, the founder and chief executive of the Global Institute for Experienced Entrepreneurship. Though Ms. Edwards is younger than the entrepreneurs over age 50 the institute is devoted to, Ms. Isele is wary of any risk to a secure retirement.

“One of the sad statistics out there is that so few people have any retirement savings,” she said. According to the New School’s Retirement Equity Lab, 36 percent of 35- to 54-year-old Americans have no retirement savings. At the time of her launch, Ms. Edwards fell into the category of the 43 percent who had less than $10,000 saved. “They’re vulnerable,” Ms. Isele added. “Women especially are in a deplorable position.”

Instead of tapping retirement funds, the institute advises crowdfunding to get a business off the ground. “If you put your idea out there on Kickstarter and no one is willing to invest even a dollar, you know before you put in a huge amount of time that it might not work,” Ms. Isele said. But if the idea proves popular, raising a few thousand dollars on a crowdfunding platform may be doable.

Noah Damsky, a principal at Marina Wealth Advisors in California who has worked with several would-be entrepreneurs considering drawing down their I.R.A.s, has not set a policy of outright discouragement. “I don’t tell anybody what to do,” he said. Instead, he helps them see blind spots. “I’ll work out projections so they understand their risk profile.”

Marianne Nolte didn’t need that kind of help when she started Imagine Financial Services in Fallbrook, Calif., in 2020.

Ms. Nolte, 55, was already an entrepreneur when she decided she wanted to become a certified financial planner. For more than two decades, she had run a video production company. “I thrive as a small-business owner,” she said. “That’s my happy place.” Acting as her parents’ informal financial adviser helped her discover an aptitude for money management. In 2014, she earned her license as a certified financial planner. Five years later, after working at an advisory firm to learn the ropes, she was putting together a business plan that involved tapping her I.R.A.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/business/401k-starting-a-business.html

It’s not clear when, exactly, the Peace Corps started to inform volunteers about the program. By 2014, the Peace Corps had documents about it on its site, but many volunteers of that era said they had never seen them or had simply followed the cues about deferment that were still coming up during orientation.

The problem was compounded by one of the P.S.L.F. program’s endemic dysfunctions: unhelpful loan servicers. With just one exception among my interviewees, former volunteers of that period said their servicers’ near-automatic advice had also been to defer payments. Clearly, the messaging about forgiveness and the Peace Corps was muddled from the start, though the 2007 P.S.L.F. legislation specifically included volunteers as eligible borrowers.

The law also includes a convoluted passage that allows volunteers to hand over all or part of the lump-sum award they get at the end of their service in exchange for a maximum of 12 months of credited payments. Few volunteers ever found out about this option, either, although it’s doubtful many would have tried it; those I talked to almost immediately put the lump-sum award toward basic expenses, like a place to live.

“I remember buying a van,” said Ms. Rico, who served in Albania. “Not because I needed a big van but because it was my homeless backup plan.”

Another former Peace Corps volunteer who also worked at its headquarters, Katie McSheffrey, thinks the Education Department eventually figured out that the volunteers could take Mr. Alvarez’s approach with the income-driven repayment plan, but failed to communicate the message.

If the fixes announced last month had applied to her, Ms. McSheffrey’s loan debt would have been wiped away immediately. Although she was thrilled for the military personnel whose deferred loans were covered by the changes, she said it was frustrating to be left out.

“I’m assuming they waived things for the military because they were not given adequate information,” she said. “Well, Peace Corps members weren’t, either.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/your-money/public-service-loan-forgiveness-peace-corps.html

Apartments with radiators can consider heat “reflectors,” foil or metal sheets that fit behind the radiator and direct heat away from the wall and into the room.

When should I consider replacing my heating system?

Heating systems typically last about 12 to 20 years, depending on the type. But people often wait until the systems fail before replacing them, Mr. Anderson said. If yours is past its prime, you may want to seek quotes on a replacement now. The cost will probably be greater if the unit fails during the winter and has to be replaced on an emergency basis. Upgrading to a more efficient heating system can save up to 20 percent on energy costs, according to Energy Star.

Replacing a furnace costs roughly $2,700 to $6,400 — more if you choose a high-efficiency model or if your ductwork needs repair, according to HomeAdvisor, a contractor-matching service.

“You’ll have to spend money upfront, but you’ll save money for a long time to come,” said David Nemtzow, director of the Energy Department’s building technologies office.

You may be able to pay for the upgrade via an “energy efficient mortgage” by wrapping the cost into a refinancing of your home, said Steve Baden, executive director of the Residential Energy Services Network, or RESNET, which sets the standards for and promotes the benefits of home energy efficiency, focusing on new construction. Borrowers can often get more favorable financing terms because lenders take into account the value of the utility savings. Details are available from Energy Star and Fannie Mae.

Tax credits are also available if you upgrade to a more efficient heating system or water heater.

At the very least, have your heating system inspected to be sure it’s functioning well before cold weather arrives. A professional will check electrical connections, oil any moving parts and maybe change the filter (which you should do at least every four months, professionals say). “It’s worth it to get a tuneup,” Mr. Anderson said.

What other steps can I take?

Remember the advice your father offered when you were young? “Put on a sweater!” Or, as a video from the Energy Department advises: “Grab a blanket. Invest in a new set of slippers. Make yourself a cup of tea.” It may take a while for your body to adapt, the department says, but you’ll appreciate the savings on your heating bill.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/your-money/heating-bills-winter-tips.html

“Covid was definitely harder on some households, especially single women with children,” said Jun Zhu, a co-author of the Urban Institute report and a clinical assistant professor with the finance department at Indiana University. “It is possible the pandemic can undo that progress.”

Homeownership is often viewed as a sign of financial stability, with good reason: It ensures that housing costs remain predictable even as rents and inflation rise. And though homeownership is not risk-free, it generally provides a growing store of wealth that can be tapped later or passed on to the next generation.

“Homeownership is an extremely important part of people’s savings and wealth accumulation, especially for middle-income or median households,” said Kelly Shue, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management.

Ms. Shue analyzed government survey data from 1989 through 2016 and found that, among households with median savings, homes accounted for 70 percent of single women’s wealth near retirement, compared with 50 percent for single men and roughly 60 percent for married couples.

“It’s important for all groups, but especially for single women,” she said.

The pandemic, combined with the challenging market landscape, has eroded women’s confidence about their likelihood of becoming homeowners: Nearly 60 percent of single female heads of households who rent — those who never married, those who are separated or divorced, and widows — said they could not afford to buy and didn’t know if they ever would, according to a September study by Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/your-money/single-mothers-home-buyer-pandemic.html

Most states are served by HealthCare.gov, where premiums for a “benchmark” silver plan for 2022 will be about 3 percent lower, on average, than this year, according to a report from the federal government. (Plans are designated by metal levels. Bronze plans generally have the lowest monthly premiums, and the premiums get progressively higher with silver, gold and platinum plans.) Tax credits that reduce the cost of premiums are calculated based on the cost of the benchmark silver plan, which can change from year to year.

In some state-based marketplaces, premiums may increase “modestly” on average, Kaiser said. Seventeen states — including Kentucky, Maine and New Mexico, which added their own exchanges this year — and the District of Columbia run their own marketplaces.

On average, the government said, people in HealthCare.gov states will have a choice of more than 80 health plans, up from an average of 46 plans this year.

Most significant, however, is that under the American Rescue Plan Act, financial help for health coverage has been expanded for this year and next for both lower- and middle-income people.

The dollar amount of premium tax credits has risen, and they now cover the full cost of enrolling in a benchmark plan for people with incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level — about $19,000 for a single person, and $33,000 for a family of three, according to a Kaiser analysis. That means families at that income level can get premium-free silver plans. Before, they had to pay more than 4 percent of household income for a benchmark plan.

In the past, plans with low premiums often had significant deductibles — the amount paid out of pocket, before insurance started paying — which discouraged some people from enrolling, Ms. Pollitz said. “Now, there are zero-premium plans with low deductibles, and that really is significant,” she said.

The pandemic aid law also expanded eligibility for premium help to people with higher incomes — over 400 percent of the poverty level ($51,520 for a single person, and about $88,000 for a family of three). Now, those families won’t have to contribute more than 8.5 percent of their income. Previously, such plans could easily cost more than 20 percent of income for older people because premiums are based on a person’s age, Ms. Pollitz said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/your-money/open-enrollment-federal-health-insurance.html