Do your friends know how much you make? If you’re in your 20s, they probably do, according to this story in the New York Times that I read over the weekend. Young professionals, it says, don’t think it’s taboo to tell their friends what they bring home, and in some cases comparing salaries with your friends can help you figure out if you’re being underpaid. I can understand that: I’d love to know if the person sitting next to me made, say, $30 grand more for doing the same job, but that might not necessarily account for factors like the higher-earning person being more experienced.

I get the point, but I’m not sure I’m ready to tell everybody I know what I make. A few of my closest friends do know what I’m bringing in, which I know means other people know, too, since black folks run their mouths.

Do you tell your friends what you make? Do they know how much you make? Why or why not?

I was on NPR again today. This time I was interviewed about high fuel costs along with a black trucker. Think $3 a gallon regular is killing you? This guy drives for a living and his truck uses dozens of gallons of $4-per-gallon diesel fuel. Even the cost of his tires have gone up — to about $4,000 a set.

I’ll post the audio link as soon as it’s live. Here’s the audio. One thing we were supposed to talk about but didn’t get to was tips for saving money on gas. My top tip is drive less — walk short distances, or take the subway or bus to and from work. They say if you keep your tires properly inflated it helps your gas mileage as well, although I’m not sure how.

Anyone have other tips for saving money on gas?

Watching the NFL draft, the reaction of the players’ families was a lot more interesting than watching the players themselves. The families are throwing cookouts and house parties with mamas and daddies and cousins smiling in the background while the draftee sits waiting on a phone call.

The excitement is understandable: that call usually makes the player the richest person anyone in their family has ever known; in some cases it means the difference between poverty and wealth. The unfortunate thing is that the wealth doesn’t always last long.

Before the draft on Sunday, ESPN’s Outside the Lines had a show about former pro basketball players going broke. They showed John “Hot Plate” Williams, who played for the LA Clippers in the late 80s and early 90s, and made millions only to go broke. He now makes $10 an hour at a post office in LA and had to sell his house.

They also showed the Houston Rockets’ Tracy McGrady, who said he now tries to live on a budget. He said he gave his aunts and uncles $50,000 apiece when he signed his big contract and “told them not to come to me for nothing else.” With as many broke ballers as there out there– 60 percent of former NBA players are broke within five years of retirement, ESPN reported — can you blame him?

If you had NBA, or NFL or Major League Baseball money, how would you manage it to keep from going broke?

A friend asked me this the other day:

“Say I take a loan with a lower interest and clear out my credit card…does it make sense to do it?”

My answer to him (minus the disclosure that I’m NOT a licensed financial advisor) was this:

In general, I’m against taking out new debt to pay off old debt, unless you can get the new debt at much more favorable terms that reduces the amount of interest you pay and/or helps you pay off the original credit card more quickly than you anticipated. The most common way of doing that is opening a new card with a low balance transfer rate and then rolling the old card balance onto that card. I’ve done this myself, moving a $5,000 or so balance from my old Discover card with a 16% interest rate to a new Visa through a credit union with a 10.25 percent rate.

A couple things to watch out for: always read the fine print. Some cards offer low balance transfer rates as “teasers” only to jack up the APR on the card if you haven’t paid that balance off within a certain period, say, six months to a year. If you can’t pay it off by then, you may end up paying more interest than on your original card. And always look for cards with no annual fee; for anyone with decent credit, there’s not a good reason to pay a fee to a company just to carry a card that you’ll wind up paying interest on anyway.

As always, though, the best advice is to limit your use of credit to emergencies or major purchases that you can afford to pay off before you accrue any interest.

Today I have to post about some cats who look like they’re really trying to change the game. What game? The game of getting your money right, of course. I ran across these guys, Thrasher Capital, randomly on YouTube. Thrasher is one among hundreds of boutique investment firms in New York founded by some guys who had Wall Street experience but got tired of jogging on the corporate treadmill.

But these dudes are a different: their company is structured as much as a lifestyle boutique as it is an investment house: part social networking / media operation (they break down their stock picks on YouTube), part merchandising (selling fashionable apparel promoting investing on their web site with a motto of “Money is Couture), and generally marketing their services with a “gettin’ money — legally — is smart, stupid” attitude. In one episode, they explain how you can get a piece of Jay-Z’s latest multi-million dollar deal by investing in LiveNation, the company he just signed with.

Here’s a clip from one of their YouTube eps.

I like what they’re doing; they’ve flipped the formula of using social media and marketing to convince young people that there are other options besides the streets, basketball or punching a clock to clock money. That said, the bigger question will be whether all the marketing will help, or outshine their core business, which is getting you to invest your money with them.

Sorry for the spotty posting last week; work got busy, but now I’m back. I’ve been promising a post to explain my debt-reduction plan for a while, so here it is:

Since I moved to Cincinnati from Boston in November, I know my living expenses have gone down significantly. But I also noticed that my cash flow seemed to be doing no better than it had been in Boston, which meant one thing… Read more »

We talked about Obama’s bill on CEO pay and whether the government was doing too much to bail out comnpanies. Here’s the link.

I usually wouldn’t jack a post from another blog, but this exchange was just too great to pass up. Single Ma was asking for opinions on the question of whether dating got harder for women the more financially successful they got:

Are successful woman doomed for single-dom?

If you agree, how can a successful woman attract an ‘equal’ partner?

If you disagree, why do you think so many successful women remain single?

Here’s my take, as posted on her comments page:

Being a financially successful woman doesn’t make you any more or less likely to have a good relationship than you would be if you made $20 grand a year. I’d say what really matters is less your success and more your attitude about said success as it pertains to your partners and potentials. I’m 31, male, college educated and enjoy a decent salary; most of my friends are in similar positions. We all know women who make more and those who make less than us.

That said, I know not one guy who says “Man, I really wish I would stop meeting so many smart, accomplished women with good salaries. What I’m really looking for is one of those low-ambition models.”

I do, however, know brothers who lament that so many women wear their success as a badge of honor — something to be held up as a measuring stick against which every man they meet must stand and be evaluated. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your accomplishments, but if you’re playing the mating game perhaps looking at what you have and have done as tools that can enable a decent future with the right partner, as opposed to a blunt object with which to swat away unwanted suitors is a better approach. Remember what they say about honey and flies.

So what do you think? Does success = single for today’s sistagirl, or is that a myth fueled by negative attitudes and stereotypes about dating? And while we’re at it, how’s that play into the issue of merging finances when you’re considering tying the knot?

If you’re you’re too busy, too lazy or just putting off the pain of knowing you’ll owe the government money, time is just about up. Tax forms are due by midnight tomorrow, and if you don’t have yours done by now, you’ve got two options: 1) rush out and get ‘em done now or 2) file for an extension.

Personally I’m going for the latter since in the next two days I won’t have the time or patience to sit down and get it all done. That means I have to file a Form 4868 with the IRS by tomorrow night — it’s a one-pager and much quicker to get done than a full tax return. And since I had to look it up for myself, I did you a favor and linked to it above. Anything to help out my fellow lazy filers.

Quick note: I’m on NPR today, the News & Notes show, discussing the government’s bailouts of businesses and a story about Clinton and Obama’s take on CEO salaries. I’ll post a link to the audio later.

Last week I asked the question “Do troubled homeowners really deserve a bailout?” Still a conversation worth discussing (and I will on NPR this coming Monday), but it looks like the bigger question is who’s really getting the most help.

The Senate finally passed its foreclosure package, but the more I read, the more it seems like there are good questions about who gets relieved. There is $100 million in funding for foreclosure counseling in the bill, but according to this column in the Washington Post, there’s $6 billion in cash for big homebuilders who are losing money. This piece from Slate asks a lot of questions that it seems like some of the Senators needed to ask themselves.

My question is this: Is there anybody out there who’s in danger of losing a home, or knows someone who is, who has gotten any government assistance? If you’ve got a story, please share it.