Alex Silady

Investing can be intimidating, especially when you’re doing it for the very first time. It’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed when trying to understand financial terminology and many new… Read more

Sometimes paying in cash is inconvenient, difficult or impossible – that’s where credit card issuers come in. According to payment systems research firm the Nilson Report, $4.765 trillion in payments… Read more

A feeling of safety where we live and work is an essential part of quality of life. After all, it’s hard to enjoy our situation when we’re constantly worrying whether we’ll come to harm. So where is… Read more

The United States has the highest percentage of its population in prison in the world, ahead even of countries like China and North Korea that are notorious for locking away political dissenters. All… Read more

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, individuals with bachelor’s degrees alone make twice as much and are half as likely to be unemployed on average as those with only a high school education… Read more

A college education is increasingly important in order to get and keep a job in the current information-oriented world. However, even as it becomes more and more of a necessity, college costs are… Read more

Mortgage lenders are integral to the housing industry. Across the country, they help people become homeowners with various types of loans, which may have any number of different repayment periods… Read more

Not everyone has the time or qualifications to pick individual stocks and bonds to invest their hard-earned money in. That’s why mutual funds exist, so that many investors can pool their money in… Read more

The tech industry is booming across the country. From big cities to small ones, successful startups are taking root, and job prospects for tech workers are rising precipitously and show no signs of… Read more

The consolidation of banks in the U.S. has been a trend over the past 35 years. In fact, in 1985, there were 14,427  banks that were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).… Read more

Across the country, real estate markets are much healthier than they were a few short years ago, when a housing bubble precipitated a much larger economic crisis. But some places have recovered… Read more

There are many reasons to choose a city to live in, but most of them revolve around our basic needs: employment, cultural stimulation and education. But sooner or later, we all need healthcare,… Read more

Once upon a time, chocolate was unheard of across most of the world. From the 1800s BCE to the 16th century CE or so, it was exclusively consumed by a small group of people – Aztec nobles in what is… Read more

As the last traces of the long and brutal winter disappear across the country and the weekends start to get warmer and sunnier, people of a certain mindset – let’s call them history nerds – start to… Read more

SmartAsset wanted to know who in the country is getting the best deal for their property taxes. To find that out we answered 3 questions: how good are the schools, how safe is the area and how much… Read more

When you get delivery or takeout from your favorite restaurant on the job, chances are you’ll get, along with your plastic cutlery, a handful of tiny paper packets of salt. If food needs it, we… Read more

They’re as much of a holiday obligation as a card, a fancy dinner, or a phone call, de rigeur for certain people in our lives, as well as the go-to gesture for congratulations or apologies. And they… Read more

A computer is only as good as the information that’s fed into it. That’s one of the truisms of programming that has held for as long as computers have existed, and ever since Charles Babbage and Ada… Read more

Ilse Blansert rearranges her stick-straight brown hair so that it’s out of her face and puts on a couple dabs of makeup to even out her pale complexion. Satisfied after checking her appearance in her… Read more

Thousands of fans attending in person, as well as millions more watching at home, strike up a cheer as the teams make their entrances for the playoff match. There’s been a bitter rivalry between the… Read more

Wall Street bigwig Bernie Madoff became infamous several years ago when a fraudulent securities operation he was running collapsed and cost his investors, including hospitals and charities, $17.3… Read more

A well-known real estate truism is that housing prices in America’s biggest cities are much higher than the national average. New Yorkers, for example, often complain that thousands of dollars a… Read more