By Ann Logue on May 18, 2012
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a great article about how college students are being crushed by debt. I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I’ll start by explaining why I feel I have some expertise: I was a private college student who graduated loans, I am a parent who expects to be paying for college some day, I teach at a state-supported university, and I write about different college financial issues for University Business. Recently, friends with college-bound children have started asking me for advice.
Continue reading “Paying for College: On Student Loan Debt”
Posted in College Admissions and Costs, Financial Advice, Political Discourse | Tagged Baumol's disease, college costs, financial aid, paying for college, student loans |
By Ann Logue on May 17, 2012
Fresh from an annals of “dog bites man”, we get the news that the 2012 Super Bowl costs Indianapolis a lot of money.
Of course it cost the city money. These things always do.
The organizations that put these major events on – the NFL, the International Olympic Committee – always promise that the tax and business benefits of these mega special events are so enormous that cities willingly bid – and overbid – in order to get them.
Inevitably, it turns out that, gosh darn it, the planners underestimated the costs and forgot that, gosh darn it, the locals wouldn’t be spending money while the event was in town so the incremental effects weren’t as great as expected. Ooops!
In Chicago, the former mayor’s plan for economic growth and covering up his colossal financial mismanagement was to bring the Olympics here in 2016. I’m glad it didn’t happen. There was more than enough corruption and cost overage in the bid that city taxpayers weren’t feeling warm and fuzzy about the prospects of hosting the games.
One of the many reasons that Greece went into debt was to pay for the 2004 Athens games. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off their Olympic debt.
The NFL is a consortium of for-profit companies. The International Olympic Committee is a consortium of for-profit corporate sponsors. If they want to put on their own events, great. But they should stop expecting the public to pay for them.
City leaders need to get past their starry-eyed images of brushes with celebrity and refuse to sponsor these games. If the city leaders of Indianapolis really wanted to improve the city’s economy, they would have spent the $1.1 million on education instead of the Super Bowl.
Posted in Chicago, Political Discourse | Tagged economic development, Greece, NFL, Olympics, Super Bowl |
By Ann Logue on May 16, 2012
Today’s blogathon assignment is to write about second acts in our lives. Heck, sometimes I feel like my life is one big second act, yes?
Anyway, my second act would be my career change from being a finance analyst to a financial writer. However, the story has already been told, and better, by Adrianna Rodriguez, who interviewed me for Northwestern’s AlumTalks. If you’re interested, please read it!
Posted in Advice for Freelancers, Financial writing, Teaching Finance | Tagged Adrianna Rodriguez, Blogathon, career changes, second acts |
By Ann Logue on May 15, 2012
Today is the launch day for a new PBS Internet project called NextAvenue, designed for people who are too young for AARP but too old for Marie Claire. It’s a big void in the market, because it’s not really a demographic that advertisers love. Hence, it’s perfect project for public television.
I’m one of many contributing writers. Please, click over and check it out!
Posted in Financial writing | Tagged NextAvenue |
By Ann Logue on May 14, 2012
By Jodi Torpey
The old adage, “Time is Money” is especially true when you stop to consider the high cost of a badly written email message.
An unclear email takes time for the reader to read (possibly re-read) and decipher. It also requires time to write a response asking for clarification. Then there’s the time waiting for an equally unclear reply.
That’s a lot of valuable time wasted on just one email message. Multiply that confusing email times the number of poorly written letters, disorganized reports, and disjointed documents that are written every day. Suddenly the price of shoddy writing comes into focus.
Companies can save time—and money—by improving the quality of the everyday business writing in their workplace.
The high cost of inferior writing can even be quantified. For example, when an office in a federal government agency revised the wording of just one letter, calls to the office asking for clarification declined from 1100 a year to 200.
Just think of the savings realized by revising that one letter. Readers didn’t have to waste their time trying to call the office. Staff members didn’t have to waste time answering the phones. That valuable time was spent getting more important work done. Rewriting that letter was an excellent return on investment.
I can’t be certain what the writer changed in that letter to prevent 900 calls each year, but I can make a few assumptions. These seven ideas are based on the most common problems I see in business writing today:
- The writer didn’t think about the letter’s purpose.
- The writer didn’t consider the readers or how they would read the letter.
- The main point was buried somewhere in the middle or at the end.
- Any required action was unspecified or unclear.
- The tone was inappropriate.
- The paragraphs were long and dense, the sentences too wordy.
- It wasn’t formatted for easy reading.
Good business writing isn’t difficult or expensive or time consuming. Good writing simply requires the writer to think before writing, to focus on the readers’ needs, and to write as if another human being will be reading it.
Jodi Torpey is a Denver-based author, trainer, and business writing coach. She’s on a mission to change the way writers think about their business writing—one reader at a time. She offers practical business writing tips on “The Daily Blatt” blog at www.WriteBetterFaster.com. I want to thank her for this great post!
Posted in Financial writing, Guest Post | Tagged financial writing, Jodi Torpey, writing advice |
By Ann Logue on May 13, 2012
Back in my financial analyst days, I logged an alarming amount of frequent flier miles. In 1997, when I was pregnant, my OB cut be off from travel in September, and I still managed to qualify for United’s Mileage Plus Premier Executive level.
I’ve been thinking a lot about packing lately as I prepare to spend six weeks in China this summer. I need to bring clothes for my stay, materials for my classes, and stuff to keep me occupied for 24 hours of flying time each way. Yikes!
Here are my basic packing tips:
- You need to be able to handle your own luggage. The more transfers between planes, trains, and automobiles you’ll be making, the lighter you need to pack. Wheeled luggage is the best invention in the history of travel, followed by the backpack.
- You don’t need to worry about wrinkles if you’ll be in one place for a while, because you can hang out the clothes in a steamy shower. If you’ll be packing and unpacking frequently, like if you will be staying at a different place every night, you do need to worry about them. The best way to avoid wrinkles when packing is to put the clothes in plastic dry-cleaner bags before folding them.
- Continue reading “Packing for Emerging Markets and Other Travels”
Posted in Emerging Markets | Tagged Emerging Markets for Dummies, packing, travel, Uncle Dan's |
By Ann Logue on May 12, 2012
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass
That quote is all over the Internet, and for good reason: Glass tells it like it is. You’re going to suck when you try something new, and I have a manifesto about this. When my kid was playing hockey, I used to tell him that it’s good to fall down because that means you’re trying. I try to remember that myself.
It’s hard, though. I like to think that if I’m meant to do something, I’ll be great from the get-go; if I screw up out of the box, then I should simply move on to something else. And yet, I know that everything is hard. Even things that come easily have a limit. I could read before I went to kindergarten, but darned if I can understand poetry.
So this is my inspiration. It’s all about keeping the butt in the chair and getting to work. Right?
Posted in Advice for Freelancers | Tagged Blogathon |
By Ann Logue on May 11, 2012
McKinsey & Company releases annual studies of women in corporate America, usually with interesting and provocative conclusions. This year’s report is out, and it’s worth a read. It’s clear that women are not advancing in the workplace as much as numbers would suggest they should, but why is that? We’ll ignore the doofuses who say that it’s because women aren’t smart enough or don’t have the “right stuff”; I dare anyone who thinks that to go tell their mother that on Sunday.
Instead, it’s a range of social and institutional factors, intertwined. Some are cultural, some are discriminatory, and some confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about business (e.g., that the most senior executives in a company care more about personal agendas than the enterprises they run, and who wants to be part of that silly game?) They go far beyond tired saws about women quitting to have babies, and that’s nice.
Anyway, give it a read, and let me know what you think.
Posted in Financial Advice, Political Discourse, Teaching Finance | Tagged McKinsey & Company, women in business, women in finance |
By Ann Logue on May 10, 2012
I don’t use a debit card. I have one that I use only at the cash station. I’m suspicious of debit cards, and I can’t fully explain why. It just seems to me that whenever the bank pushes something hard, it’s a better deal for them than for me.
I also think that using cash and checks makes you more mindful about your spending. You have tangible evidence of what you are doing. When you look in your wallet, you know if you have enough money to get you through the rest of the day or not, and you can plan your purchases accordingly.
I used to use checks all the time, but I gave that up when I realized that clerks no longer knew how to deal with them. I often use my credit card – which I pay off in full at the end of the month – but my favorite spending tool is cash.
I once talked to a financial planner who had a great game he used with clients to help them gauge their spending needs. He asked them to figure out how much money they thought they would spend in a week, withdraw it in cash, and then see how long it lasted. Most people found that they spent more than they realized, but they didn’t realize it until they switched to cash.
You know what else I like about using cash? It makes me look vaguely dangerous, because it’s just me and the drug dealers who still use it!
Posted in Financial Advice | Tagged cash, checks, financial advice |
By Ann Logue on May 9, 2012
Pablo Fernandez is a professor at the business school at the Universitad de Navarra, a Spanish institution. One of his area of research is how finance is taught. The idea is that students pick up concepts in class that then carry over to how they interpret finance on the job. For example, he conducts a survey of finance instructors all over the world to see what they use for an equity risk premium in their classes, and how they arrived at it. I’m one of the many, many people surveyed.
And I have a bad tendency to assume that the risk-free rate is 5 percent and the risk premium is 7 percent because, well, that was pretty much what it was in the olden days, when I went to business school. Remember in the olden days, when stocks returned 12 percent a year, on average?
Professor Fernandez has released a new working paper entitled Ten Badly Explained Topics in Most Corporate Finance Books, and I love it. It has some ideas that I can incorporate into my explanations for students, and it helps clarify many of the things that investment professionals understand but textbook authors do not.
If you’re geeky about financial theory, download and read it!
Posted in Financial Advice, Financial writing, Teaching Finance, Uncategorized | Tagged CAPM, corporate finance, corporation finance, investment research, Pablo Fernandez, risk premium |
