Posts by Mary Kane

With a sprawling, multi-million dollar mansion in Sandy Springs, Ga., sitting empty for two years, some enterprising folks nearby had an idea: Fill it with a big party.
According to USA Today, the Halloween bash at the six-bedroom mansion was a huge success, drawing 1,000 people. It ended only when traffic gridlock got so bad police [...]

As the foreclosure crisis worsens, renters increasingly have become caught as innocent bystanders, evicted often without notice when their landlord faces foreclosure.

As lawmakers start to shift their attention to job creation, a Brandeis University study finds that four in 10 families don’t have enough savings or assets on hand to pay for essential expenses during a period of unemployment. The report also notes that the poor economy is hitting minority households particularly hard, erasing their economic [...]

The subprime crisis certainly highlighted the need for American consumers to become more financially literate. But who defines financial literacy? And what makes someone an expert? Mike Konczal at Rortybomb asks these and other questions regarding financial literacy education — a subject TWI has also been looking into lately.
Did you know that since 2003, when [...]

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff  videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click [...]

During the summer, when swine flu was not yet a widespread reality in the United States, giant retailer Wal-Mart made the news for being in talks with the government about possibly distributing the swine flu vaccine through its extensive network of stores.
But now the swine flu has Wal-Mart under scrutiny for a very different reason: [...]

Just as we wrote about the pressing need for financial literacy among consumers as credit tightens, The New York Times reports on the government’s efforts to combat those “free” credit report firms, which charge people for a service they are entitled to get for free.
On television it’s hard to miss the wildly popular band of [...]

In response to a recent TWI report, the nation’s leading financial literacy group has launched an investigation into its conflict-of-interest policies.

The foreclosure crisis has taken a turn in California’s wealthy Marin County, according to Miriam Alex-Lute at Rooflines. Marin residents waged a legal fight a few years back to keep out Habitat for Humanity, the charitable group that builds houses for low-income buyers. But now that abandoned, foreclosed houses are showing up in Marin, Lute [...]

Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported.
The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the minimum [...]