Gatekeepers of various sorts could help reduce the prevalence of these uncompensated positions, if they were willing. There appears to be no groundswell of college or university career counseling offices refusing to post unpaid internship listings and barring employers that don’t pay their interns.

“Higher education has been complicit,” said Carlos Mark Vera, co-founder and executive director of Pay Our Interns, an advocacy organization that lobbied the White House to make its change.

Then there’s the glaring issue of schools that offer course credit for internships.

Schools benefit from this arrangement in two ways, said David C. Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston and an expert on the rules around internships. First, intern-for-credit programs can allow institutions to collect tuition for that credit, even as students are working out in the world and don’t need classroom space or an instructor standing in front of it for four months.

Then, it allows a school to say it’s providing valuable career preparation. “If I hear another university invoke the phrase ‘Hit the ground running,’ I think I’m going to scream,” he said.

The gatekeeper with the most power here might be Handshake, a company you may have never heard of. In the nine years since its founding, more than 650,000 employers have used it to reach students for both internships and entry-level jobs, often via their career counseling offices. Unpaid internships would decrease pretty sharply if the company refused to post openings for them, thus cutting off the supply of ready labor to employers that wish to hire students without compensation. I challenged Handshake to throw down this gauntlet, and it declined to do so.

It is saying many of the right things, though, and doing at least some of them. “We believe unpaid internships shouldn’t be the norm, and we actively discourage them on Handshake because they often exacerbate inequities in early careers,” its chief operating officer, Jonathan Stull, told me in an emailed statement.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/your-money/unpaid-internships.html

“For a borrower who wants to buy right now, they can realize significant savings” by choosing an ARM, he said. The average starting rate on adjustable-rate loans with an initial fixed-rate period of five years was 4.04 percent, compared with 5.09 percent for a fixed-rate loan, as of Thursday, according to Freddie Mac. That difference represents savings of more than $200 a month on a $350,000 loan — at least to start.

“That’s real money,” Dr. Fratantoni said.

Some borrowers use the savings to pay down the principal on their loan during the initial, lower-rate period, saving money over the life of the loan, Mr. Rugg said. “If you can afford it, I recommend putting the savings away or applying it to principal,” he said.

The catch, of course, is that the rate can rise after the fixed-rate period expires. Compared with ARMs available before the financial crisis, which offered low “teaser” rates and allowed rates to be reset quickly, today’s adjustable-rate loans are safer, mortgage experts say. They typically have a fixed-rate period of at least three years and limits on how often, and how much, the rate can rise after that — such as one change per year of no more than two percentage points. And the risky ARMs that let borrowers pay just the interest on the loan or choose their own payment amount are no longer widely available.

Still, borrowers may see their rates increase after the initial repayment period. So they need to plan ahead to be sure they can afford bigger payments if they can’t sell their house or refinance the loan. No one can say for sure what rates will be in five to seven years, but right now, they are rising.

“There’s not much room to go down, and there’s a lot of room to go up,” said Martin Seay, associate professor of personal financial planning at Kansas State University.

It’s wise to calculate what your payment would be if the rate rose to the loan’s cap. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offers a guide to adjustable-rate mortgages that can help you evaluate your loan. You can also calculate the higher payment yourself using online tools like one offered by Freddie Mac.

ARMs are more complex than traditional mortgages, with more terms to understand and potential changes to keep track of, so borrowers need to take time to truly understand the terms of the loan.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/your-money/adjustable-rate-mortgage.html

“I had really good professors who were for the most part really understanding, but it was too much,” she said. “It was a tumultuous time.”

Ms. Summers-Polite withdrew from her classes in spring 2012 with a medical note that prevented her from receiving failing grades, but the debt had already begun to accumulate.

She said she had deferred her payments as long as she could, which meant the unpaid interest was tacked on to her balance. Then she borrowed more in the summer of 2013, when she returned to take a few more classes. After that, she took a two-year break to work, which provided much-needed health insurance after she was no longer eligible for her parents’ plan.

Ms. Summers-Polite, who lives in Miami, gave schooling another try in 2016, but once an attractive job opportunity arose — communications director for the activist group — she took it, and hasn’t returned. She said she was making good money now, but her loans had already fallen into default, and getting out isn’t as simple as starting to send monthly payments again.

Ms. Summers-Polite was married in November, and her husband, a spa coordinator at a large gym, has $27,000 in debt of his own. He just went back to school after a 10-year break, and is taking out more loans to pay for it.

She would like to finish her degree, too, but isn’t in a position to pay out of pocket for classes, particularly with the pandemic pause on payments set to end later this year and her enormous debt looming.

“In the past few years, it has been this glaring thing in my periphery,” she said, “getting bigger and bigger.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/your-money/student-loan-debt-degree.html

The sprawl of strip malls that comprises Houston’s Chinatown, for example, is the only tip-off that you’re still in Texas. These days restaurants serving Chinese, Hong Kong, Vietnamese, Thai and other Asian cultures fill these shopping plazas.

If you’re looking to channel France, go no farther than the cafes and green markets of Montreal, including Jean Talon Market and the Atwater Market.

Toronto has a virtual United Nations of dining districts, from Little India to Little Jamaica. Suresh Doss, a Toronto-based food writer who focuses on the city’s multicultural pockets, grew up in suburban Scarborough, where he takes small groups to Sri Lankan restaurants, among other food tours throughout the greater Toronto area (250 Canadian dollars, or about $195).

“There’s an ephemeral quality to the food, because you don’t know it if will be around in 10 or 12 years,” Mr. Doss said, referencing successive waves of immigrants over the past 80 years who have established Greek, Hungarian and Italian enclaves, followed by Vietnamese, Chinese and Sri Lankan and, most recently, Syrian.

For do-it-yourselfers, he recommends a progressive feast along Danforth Avenue in Toronto, home to Trinidadian, Venezuelan, Japanese and Ethiopian restaurants, among others. “It’s not fully gentrified yet, and has an inviting feel,” he said.

Among affordable accommodations in Toronto, try the Hotel Ocho near Chinatown where a recent search found rooms from 209 Canadian dollars.

The safest way to explore Ukraine right now might be to eat in Cleveland, which has strong Eastern European roots and a concentration of Ukrainian shops and restaurants in suburban Parma.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/travel/affordable-vacation-alternatives.html

Instead of leaving it to customers to decide how much to tip, restaurants are increasingly adding standard “service charges” to diners’ bills, so servers can depend on making more money, Mr. Hamilton said. Eighteen percent is common, he said, with the option for customers to increase the amount — but it can’t go lower. Other establishments are offering free meals during or after the worker’s shift, or even dispensing gas cards to help workers cover the cost of commuting to the job.

“It’s a very hot market,” Mr. Hamilton said, adding that job applicants should be prepared to be hired the day they are interviewed.

“We’re definitely seeing strong demand from employers,” said Vivian Russell, executive director at the True North Youth Program in Telluride, Colo., a nonprofit group serving teenagers in the rural southwestern part of the state. Known for skiing, the area also has a busy summer festival season that draws tourists as well a seasonal ranch work. Some ranch and farm jobs pay $18 to $20 an hour, while service jobs can pay $25 to $30 an hour, including tips. True North helps students with résumé development, interview training, workplace etiquette and other job-seeking skills.

Brenda Gutierrez Ruiz, 20, a junior at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, said she had been hired for the summer as a youth-services specialist at the public library in Telluride. She said she had worked as a librarian’s assistant while in high school, earning $12 per hour, but would now make $21 per hour. “I’ve risen in the ranks,” she said.

Summer camps, which were often closed during 2020 and began reopening last year, are hiring counselors, said Tom Rosenberg, president and chief executive of the American Camp Association. Many camps are paying contract bonuses for counselors who remain the entire summer, he said.

The camp group is promoting summer camp employment as a welcome antidote to remote class work, which many students endured during pandemic lockdowns, as well as a way to gain management skills. Mr. Rosenberg noted that he had worked as a camp counselor as a teenager and that by age 19 he was overseeing a staff of 16 employees and “72 energetic seventh graders.” Counselors gain experience, he said, but they also “have so much fun.”

Students from low-income families tend to have lower rates of summer work than those from more affluent backgrounds, in part because there are often fewer opportunities where they live and because their parents may lack access to social networks that can help their children find jobs, Ms. Modestino said. They may have difficulty getting transportation to work if the job involves lengthy commutes.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/your-money/summer-jobs-students.html

The glitch means that families end up paying higher and less affordable premiums for the job-based health insurance — or skipping coverage altogether.

About 90 percent of people affected by the glitch are buying coverage deemed unaffordable, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis. In other words, while most people affected by the glitch enroll in coverage rather than going uninsured, “they’re paying through the nose,” Ms. Keith said.

If the glitch is fixed, the cost of job-based coverage would need to be considered affordable for the entire family. If the coverage wasn’t affordable, the rest of the family — other than the covered employee — would then qualify to shop on the exchanges, using tax credits to reduce their premiums.

The fix isn’t perfect, says Cynthia Cox, director of Kaiser’s Program on the Affordable Care Act. If the workplace plan is affordable for the employee — say, the mother in the family — she would need to enroll in that plan, while her spouse and children sought lower-cost marketplace coverage. That would mean paying two separate premiums and meeting two deductibles, which might not be more affordable, and perhaps navigating two provider networks.

That’s partly why, although an estimated five million people are affected by the glitch, far fewer would probably take advantage of the newly available tax credits. The Urban Institute estimated that 710,000 more people would enroll in marketplace coverage with tax credits. Another 90,000 — mainly children — would enroll in coverage through government plans like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program because the Obamacare marketplace automatically checks eligibility for those options.

The Biden administration estimates that 200,000 uninsured people will gain health coverage, and nearly one million will have more affordable coverage under its proposed fix.

The proposal comes as expanded health insurance subsidies, offered to Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic, are set to expire. The pandemic relief, which made it temporarily easier for people to get affordable coverage on the government marketplaces, was approved through 2022. To extend the help or make it permanent, Congress must act. If the extra help is continued, fixing the family glitch would result in even greater savings for families, according to an analysis by Third Way.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/your-money/federal-health-insurance-glitch.html

Though the stampede to open new brokerage accounts has abated, retail trading activity remains well above prepandemic levels — a testament to the sheer number of people who took up stock trading as the coronavirus upended normal life. Retail brokerages saw two to three times as many account openings in 2020 compared with the year before — a pace that accelerated through the first half of 2021, according to estimates by JMP Securities.

Thomas Mason, a senior research analyst at SP Global Market Intelligence, said that despite the market’s recent tumbles, retail traders aren’t necessarily panicking. “They seem to be reallocating, shifting out of high-risk growth stocks into less risky investments,” he said.

Even if their tastes have changed, they are a slice of the trading population that’s still showing an appetite: As of the end of April, TD Ameritrade, part of Charles Schwab, said its retail customers were still buying more stocks than they were selling, according to its Investor Movement Index, which measures retail investors’ behavior and sentiment, based on a sample of accounts that completed trades in the past month. Their interests have been shifting toward less volatile names and more stable holdings like shorter-term bonds, the firm said.

Ms. Hellmann, who started actively trading in the early days of the pandemic, said she was sticking with it, learning more and refining her approach as she goes along.

She often rises at 3 a.m. and turns on CNBC to begin plotting her strategy for the day, which involves studying stocks’ price movements, a process she compared to learning to catch a softball — watching its arc, then trying to figure out the physics of where it will land. “That is what I’m doing with price and volume,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/your-money/stock-market-crash-trading-retail.html

Still not convinced that the nation should ask debtors for absolution, and not the other way around? Consider the facts.

First, there’s the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which for decades has yoked millions of students and families each year to its cumbersome form, confusing questions and confounding — and infuriating — “expected family contribution.” New legislation brings the number of questions down to a maximum of 36 from 108, but it, too, is so complex that it’s taking years to fully carry out the changes. And that does nothing to address the chasm that exists between what the federal system (and a second one, the CSS Profile, that many private colleges use) “expects” and what feels realistic to many families.

So what about Pell Grants?

They were named for Senator Claiborne Pell in 1980, though earlier versions existed for years because it had long been clear that the lowest-income teenagers couldn’t afford many colleges. But the help those grants offer has dwindled because legislators did not set the annual amount per person to track any index of college costs.

Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics professor and the author of a new book called “A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of Pricing Hurts Students — and Universities,” has calculated just how far short this can leave low-income students.

Take teenagers from households with about $37,000 in income, which is about the 25th percentile of income and assets. By his calculations, the public schools he examined will ask the students who live on campus to pay around $14,000 each year, after accounting for Pell Grants and other scholarships. Even if these students max out their federal loans — $5,500 for most of those freshmen — and take a job via the federal work-study program, there will still be thousands of dollars each year left to cover. No one is minding that gap.

As we ask these teenagers to borrow tens of thousands of dollars that we’d never lend them for anything else, the government provides a menu of loan options. With some of this debt, interest starts ticking right away, years before you can even have a legal beer.

There wouldn’t be so much of a debt problem if, as a nation, we made a priority of subsidizing public higher education. But we don’t. Among the 26 nations that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development surveys, only Britain has higher average tuition for public universities than the United States.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/your-money/student-loan-forgiveness.html

Factors like customer service should also be considered, Mr. Kantrowitz said. Is there a help line if you need to reach someone on the weekend? Can you update your address or contact information online?

Private lenders include Sallie Mae, which originated loans to more than 397,000 families in 2021 (“more than any other private loan lender,” according to its regulatory filings), and Citizens Bank, as well as online lenders like College Ave and SoFi.

At least a dozen states offer student loans through special programs as well, typically to state residents attending college in state. Borrowers shouldn’t assume that rates and terms from state agencies are better than those from private for-profit lenders, Ms. Streeter said. Be sure to check the details.

Here are some questions and answers about student loans:

What is a reasonable amount to borrow for college?

Mr. Kantrowitz recommends that your total student debt should be less than your expected first-year salary. If your debt is less than your annual income, you should be able to repay your student loans in 10 years or less, he said. If you anticipate earning $55,000 — the average starting salary for a four-year college graduate in 2021 — the total of your loans should fall below that amount. A similar rule applies to parents, he said. They should borrow no more, for all of their children combined, than their annual income.

What are current interest rates on student loans?

Interest rates on federal student loans are set annually and apply to all new loans made during a given academic year. The rate is fixed for the life of the loan. Rates for undergraduate direct loans are currently 3.73 percent. But they are expected to jump to 4.99 percent for loans made starting July 1 through June 2023. (Rates on federal loans are set each spring and are tied to the 10-year Treasury note, using a formula set by law. The Education Department hasn’t officially announced the new rates, but Mr. Kantrowitz and others are projecting them based on the 10-year Treasury bond auction that took place on Wednesday.)

While that sounds like a big jump, the effect on a borrower’s monthly payment is only about $3 more for a student borrowing the first-year maximum of $5,500 and repaying the debt over a standard 10-year term, according to Bankrate.com’s loan estimator.

Rates on private loans vary by lender. Many are currently advertising fixed rates ranging from 3.2 percent to more than 14 percent, and variable rate loans starting around 1 percent. But rates on both fixed and variable rate private loans are expected to rise as the Federal Reserve continues raising its benchmark interest rate, said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate. “Private student loans are on the way up as well.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/your-money/private-student-loan.html

Here are some questions and answers about cremation and funeral services:

How can I avoid being taken advantage of when choosing a cremation provider?

Mr. Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance recommends contacting several providers — in advance if possible, so you can consider the options without pressure. Ask for the location of the cremation center and request a visit.

Be aware, he said, that cremation sites in the United States are often not in the same location as the funeral home, and may not be designed for consumer tours. But if a provider refuses to offer even an address, he said, consider it a red flag: “That’s a deal breaker.”

There are “susceptible moments” when people are at higher risk of becoming a victim of fraud, a study by AARP found. Having a recent stressful life event — like the loss of a loved one — can increase that risk, said Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention programs at AARP.

“If your life situation already has you ‘under the ether,’” she said, then “it’s a good day for the criminal or the dishonest salesperson.”

Must funeral and cremation providers post their prices online?

The F.T.C.’s Funeral Rule predates the internet and doesn’t require online price disclosure, nor do most states. The F.T.C. has been reviewing the rule for possible updates, including changes to make it more relevant for the digital age. Public comments on the rule closed in June 2020, but the agency has not announced further steps.

Are funeral benefits for Covid-related deaths still available?

Yes. As part of the government’s pandemic relief effort, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying up to $9,000 in funeral expenses per Covid-related death for those that occurred after Jan. 20, 2020. As of early May, the agency says, it has paid $2.3 billion toward the funerals of more than 369,000 people who died from Covid-19. Applicants can call 844-684-6333. There is no application fee.

Last year, the government issued a warning about fraud related to the funeral benefits, noting that FEMA had reports of people receiving calls from strangers offering to help them “register” for benefits. “It’s unfortunate but you have to be on your guard,” Ms. Stokes said.

FEMA won’t contact anyone until the person has called and applied for help, the warning said: “Anyone who contacts you out of the blue and claims to be a federal employee or from FEMA is a scammer.” Don’t give personal information about yourself or the deceased person to unknown callers, the agency advised. You can file complaints at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/your-money/funeral-cremation-fraud.html