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Showing posts with the label Retirement

My AC Has Been Running for 11 Days Straight. I'm Scared to Open My Electric Bill.

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AI Image   By Gemma I haven't turned my air conditioner off since June 23rd. Not once. Not even at night when it cools down slightly. Because it doesn't cool down. Not this summer. Not on the East Coast in July 2026, where temperatures have been sitting above 95°F for nearly two weeks and the forecast shows no meaningful relief until next week at the earliest. My AC runs. My bill climbs. And somewhere in my mailbox, an envelope is waiting that I'm genuinely not ready to open. Here's what's actually happening to the US power grid right now. PJM — the largest power grid operator in the US, serving 13 states and Washington DC — declared an emergency this week. Spot wholesale electricity prices in the region surged beyond $2,500 per megawatt hour. For context, the normal price when the grid isn't in distress is about $40 per megawatt hour. That's not a typo. Prices jumped from $40 to $2,500. In a week. Power prices from New York to Virginia are surging a...
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I Failed a Basic Money Quiz Last Week. I'm 34. Here's What It Actually Taught Me.

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  AI Image By Gemma I want to tell you something embarrassing. Last Tuesday I sat down with a coffee, opened a 28-question financial literacy quiz developed by Stanford University and TIAA, and told myself it would take fifteen minutes. It took forty. And I got 47% right. Exactly the national average. Which sounds fine until you realize the national average just hit a 10-year low. I didn't beat the curve. I was the curve. I sat there for a minute staring at the results screen. Then I closed the laptop. Then I opened it again because I needed to understand what just happened. Here's what the quiz actually tests. Eight areas: earning, spending, saving, investing, borrowing, insuring, understanding risk, and finding reliable information. Stanford and TIAA have run this same test every year for a decade. The highest Americans ever scored was 52%, back in 2020. This year: 47%. The lowest ever. One in four Americans now falls into the "very low financial literacy...
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Location: United States
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