Michelle Curtis has rated Google searches professionally for eight years — training, testing and evaluating the algorithms for the company’s dominant search engine — while making $13.50 an hour. On Jan. 1, Curtis received a raise to $14.50 an hour, which is still lower than the $15 minimum hourly wage that Alphabet Inc. GOOGLE, +7.28% … Read more
If you owned US stocks over the past decade, you’ve been richly rewarded. It’s payback time. Over the next decade or two, investors will experience bull and bear markets, but at the end of the journey they will not be far from where they started. When you own a stock, your returns come from two … Read more
Do you want the good news about the Federal Reserve and its chairman Jerome Powell, the other good news…or the bad news? Let’s start with the first bit of good news. Powell and his fellow Fed committee members just hiked short-term interest rates another 0.25 percentage points to 4.75%, which means retirees and other savers … Read more
Dear MarketWatch, I’m from New Jersey. My daughter and I are looking to invest in a multi-family unit for our family. I’m retired and live in a luxury apartment paying $2,000 a month for rent, soon to increase to $2,200. My daughter is a homeowner and her property currently has $75,000 to $100,000 in equity. … Read more
Home builders are playing hardball by offering mortgage rates as low as 3% on new homes to boost buyer demand. So how and why are they doing that? For starters, home builders are feeling a lot less gloomy these days, as mortgage rates dip and buyer demand picks up. Mortgage demand surged on Wednesday, with … Read more
The real-estate sector is still red hot, as one recent listing proves. A recent listing on Zillow Z, +3.23% went viral recently after users spotted the highly unusual photos of a property that was ablaze. Despite its burnt status, which is likely to require extensive repair work, it went under contract within the week. The … Read more
We’ve had the great resignation, quiet quitting, resistance to going back to the office — and now? It turns out people are looking for happiness, stability, flexibility and a good salary. In 2023, in the wake of the worst days of the pandemic, most US job switchers and others seeking employment want to land a … Read more
Dear Quentin, My boyfriend and I come from completely different backgrounds. I am in my mid-30s and he is 40. We both own our own homes, and had a life built prior to meeting. We have now been together for five years and we have lived only at my house for the last 2.5 years. … Read more
My wife and I have been married for 12 years and have not started a family yet, with the exception of our two Labradors. We are both in finance, and have several years of technical experience in our professions. We have a $1.3 million dollar real-estate portfolio that has positive cash flow, and have a … Read more
General inflation is easing, but the prices of some food items are not going down anytime soon. And the reasons are largely out of the Federal Reserve’s control. In December, the rate of inflation fell to an annualized 6.5% from the 7.1% rate recorded in November, according to government data. But the annualized food-price inflation … Read more
