Having a solid credit score has been important for quite a while now, but it’s actually becoming more important these days as lending tightens up. There’s a reason that the Fair Isaac Corporation — the organization that calculates the credit score that most major lenders rely on — ha...

MARCH 12, 2009 Sign up to get the morning briefing by email here. ———————————————————————- FIFTY DAYS INTO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Consider one little factoid: H...

Going over real estate advice on the Internet, it seems the majority says it’s a good time to buy a home these days with the market prices down and all. Not to mention the tax incentives for new home buyers. But if you were buying a new home, you’d have to know all the details so you can...

Here's a bit of corrective to some of the recent hoopla over the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, for example, here. Link No mere spiritual leader, he was the head of Tibet's government when he went into exile in 1959. It was a state apparatus run by aristocratic, nepotistic monks t...

Editor's note: This article will appear in Wired magazine's April issue, on sale March 24, 2009. It is being published online now because the subject of the story, Leonardo Notarbartolo, was released from prison in Belgium this week. Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room traili...

I recorded this webinar on March 11, 2009. The AUDIO IS HERE and will open in a new window.  Listen along and click through the links as I discuss them: The zero-down loan limits for California counties How a purchase price, above the VA loan limit, might not require a 20-30% down payment VA downpa...

Remember the wind-powered rotating skyscrapers of Dubai? Well, the building boom in the Emirates is over, thanks to the financial crisis. Most of the huge and expensive construction projects have been cancelled or are on hold. Not only that, foreign laborers are being laid off at an astounding rate ...

I'm starting to believe that everyone in power over the last few decades were all completely incompetent: FDIC collected little in premiums. Do these people have any idea how fucking insurance is suppose to work? You collect premiums to pay out later when you need it, and like most insurance compani...

Today at a conference at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon bemoaned the recent "vilification of corporate America." "I personally don’t understand it,” Dimon said in his speech. “I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because ...

Travis Alber, Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group—a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from...