The Sun's Financial Diary

One big story over the weekend is that an Associated Press investigation found that more than 41 million Americans are drinking water contaminated by antibiotic, anti-depression medicine, and sex hormones for areas from Southern California to Northern New Jersey. It really sounds scary when thinking of all the stuff coming out of my tap. However, [...]

Part of our efforts to save on heating oil and reduce the overall energy bill in the winter is use radiators in the evening so the temperature in the house can be kept low. While we may have lowered heating oil consumption so far this winter, the spending on electricity certainly went up, a lot, [...]

Morgan Quitno Press recently published its annual City Crime Ranking which ranks 384 cities with 75,000 population or more across the country based on per-capita crime rates reported by the FBI. Serious crimes considered in the study include murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. According to the publisher, each crime is [...]

Last year, when I got our first heating oil bill after the summer, I was pleasantly surprised that from May to October, we only used 27 gallons of oil! Sure, the usage of heating oil probably dropped to the minimum in the summer (not the electricity bill though ), but still 27-gallon was just a [...]

An article on Time a couple of days ago offered three pieces of advice from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on happiness. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-Sent-Me-High-ee) is a leading researcher on life well-being and director of Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. He recently established what he called the world’s first Ph.D. [...]

just cost me $220 yesterday, but didn’t buy me anything to enjoy because it was a speeding ticket! Two months ago I was pulled over on my way to work after dropping off my daughter at day care. The officer asked if I had any idea how fast I was traveling and I said no. [...]

Last night on my way home from work, I heard WCBS radio mentioned that the best way to kill bacteria in kitchen sponge isn’t wash it in dishwasher, but put in microwave oven for 2 minute at full power. That sounded a fine and simple idea to me as we only use hot water and [...]

So much have we heard what money can buy and can’t buy and top the list of can’ts is happiness. Yesterday an article on USAToday, however, offered the opposite: Money can indeed buy happiness, though only to some limited extent. The conclusion (only one among many) is supported by findings from a research conducted by [...]