Submit a Mutilated Currency Claim and Get Your Money's Worth

Currency can be damaged in many ways, whether it’s by fire, water, chemicals, animals or simple deterioration. Mutilated currency includes any type of damage that makes its value questionable.

Did you know that the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing examines and redeems mutilated currency at no cost to you?

If you have damaged currency that you inherited or found in your backyard, don’t throw it away - you could be losing money! Learn more about mutilated currency and how to submit a claim. Keep in mind that the standard wait time for processing is 6 to 36 months. 

Is College Worth the Expense?

The cost of attending a four-year college in the United States has increased sharply of late, from around $3,500 in the early 1980’s to around $24,000 for this upcoming academic year.

Since 1980, nothing has increased in price more than college. Not health care. Not gasoline. Not housing.

If college costs had increased with inflation since the early 1980’s, tuition this year would be a little more than $9,000 per year. What accounts for the extra $15,000 in annual expenses?

More from AIER

Find Out if the Government Owes You Money

If the government owes you money and you do not collect it, then it’s unclaimed.

Currently, the government does not have one central website for finding unclaimed money by name, Social Security number, or state. To find unclaimed money from the government, you can check various sources.

A word of caution: government agencies will not call you about unclaimed money or assets. Avoid unclaimed money scams by learning how to recognize government impostors.

Paying your friends through an app? Read this.

Imagine you’re at a restaurant with your friend. She pays the check, and says you can pay her back. Do you:

a) write an IOU on a napkin?

b) pull out a wad of cash and give her exact change?

c) take out your phone and pay her through a mobile payment app?

If you answered c), this post is for you.

Like apps that let you pay at stores with your phone, “peer-to-peer” payment services can be a convenient way to pay friends. But before you use one — or use one again — check the app’s settings for available security features.

More from the Federal Trade Commission.

That website John Oliver told you about: how much money Big Pharma has given your doctor?

On This Week Tonight, watch John Oliver eviscerate the stunningly corrupt practices of Big Pharma. This IS journalism. In the piece, he directs people to Open Payments, which is "a federal program that annually collects and makes information public about financial relationships between the health care industry, physicians, and teaching hospitals.

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) collects information from manufacturers of drugs and devices about payments and other transfers of value they make to physicians and teaching hospitals. These payments and other transfers of value can be for many purposes, like research, consulting, travel, and gifts. CMS will be making this data publicly available each reporting year.

In other words, in the words of Mark Evanier, "you can look up your doctor and see how much loot he's taken and from whom."

From Brazil to Uganda: What it takes to get ahead

The world may be flat these days, but the path to success differs around the globe. In some countries, education and hard work are enough. In others, connections and bribes play a big role. Pew Research surveyed people and asked them which factors are absolutely necessary to get ahead in their nation.

More from CNN.

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, "Who governs? Who really rules?" in this country, is:

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But, ..." and then they go on to say, it's not true, and that, "America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened" by the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject, which shows that there is instead "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled Testing Theories of American Politics. The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich.

More from Common Dreams

See also:

CEO Pay Soars, Workers Toil in Capitalism's New Gilded Age

Krugman: Worried About Oligarchy? You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Who Bought Your Politician?

Ask politicians whether campaign contributions influence their decisions, and they’ll tell you certainly not.

Ask any citizen, and they’ll likely give the opposite answer.

With that in mind, WIRED is re re-introducing a web-based embeddable widget — for anybody to use — that lists the top 10 donors and their contributions to any member of the House and Senate, their opponents, and the presidential candidates. Wired updated the widget in conjunction with Maplight, the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit dedicated to following money and politics.

Simple diagram to explain confusing rule printed on back of new coin to celebrate Olympics

A very cool new set of coins has been released in the UK to celebrate the Olympics.

OpenSecrets.org - looking at dollars flowing thru political campaigns

With the presidential election on the far horizon, political campaigns will be front page news for the next several months, and a big part of the political news will focus on money: who is raising it, who is giving it, who is spending it, and what they are spending it on.

OpenSecrets.org, produced by the Center for Responsive Politics, provides an easy way to look at the dollars flowing through the campaigns, using data from the Federal Election Commission. This comprehensive website covers presidential, house and senate campaign finance, offering detailed fundraising profiles for each candidate, with rankings of donating industries and major contributors. PAC money is accounted for, with data on “outside spending” supporting and opposing the candidate, and head-to-head comparisons of presidential candidates allow you to directly compare, for example, the key industries donating to Santorum with those supporting Obama. For representatives and senators, comparisons to congressional fund-raising averages are provided, along with a listing of bills sponsored and co-sponsored.

OpenSecrets.org offers extensive and well organized information on campaign finance. The data is easily readable, and illustrated by graphs. If you are wondering where all the money comes from, Open Secrets.org will open the books for you.

All Time Top 100 Stars at the Box Office

This chart is not adjusted for inflation. The figures represent the total amount of US revenue generated by all the movies a star has appeared in over their lifetime.

Who's #1? You're probably thinking Tom Cruise (#8) or Harrison Ford (#5) or Tom Hanks (#3). My guess is that you will NEVER guess #1.

Search for Lost Money

What is Lost Money?

For your protection, banks, insurance companies, utilities, investment companies and many other businesses are required by State law to surrender inactive accounts to the State. These accounts are known as “lost,” “abandoned,” or “unclaimed” funds.

The Office of the State Comptroller serves as custodian of this money. If you can prove you are entitled to the money, we will gladly return it to you, at any time, without charge. Until the money is claimed, it is used by the State’s General Funds, serving the citizens and taxpayers of the State of New York.

How We Pay for Things

You have $34 in your wallet right now. That is the median amount of cash carried by the average American.

This paper presents results of the 2009 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), along with revised 2008 SCPC data. In 2009, the average U.S. consumer held 5.0 of the nine payment instruments available, including cash, and used 3.8 of them during a typical month. Between the 2008 and 2009 surveys, a period that includes the trough of the latest recession, consumers significantly increased their use of cash and close substitutes for cash, such as money orders and prepaid cards. At the same time, consumers reduced their use of credit cards and (to a lesser extent) debit cards, as well as payments made using a bank account number. Weaker economic conditions, new government regulations, and bank pricing of payment card services all likely contributed to the shift back toward cash. However, it is difficult to determine how much each of these factors contributed, and whether the shift is transitory or permanent, without more data and research on consumer payment choice. In 2009, one in three consumers had a prepaid card and nearly as many had a nonbank payment account online, while 3 percent made a mobile payment. By focusing on payments by consumers only, the SCPC complements the recent 2010 Federal Reserve Payment Study, which describes the entire noncash payments economy.

It's the Inequality, Stupid

Eight charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.
— By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot in Mother Jones

Box Office Mojo

The movie Titanic, released December 19, 1997, had a production budget of $200 million, and had a domestic total gross of $600,788,188. But what if I wanted to know its gross for every single one of its 287 days in release?

The foreign gross for the film was $1,242,091,767. But when was it released in Bulgaria, and how did it do?

For all things involved with movie box office, I go to Box Office Mojo. "There are currently over 9,000 movies listed and more are on the way."

BTW, Titanic was released in Venezuela on February 18, 1998 and raked in $4,651,253.

College Towns Are Undiscovered, Affordable and Stable Markets For Home Buyers

The annual College HPCI released by Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC provides an apples-to-apples comparison of similarly sized 2,200 square foot, four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom homes in college markets home to the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools. This year, Akron, Ohio (University of Akron) is ranked as the most affordable college town, where a typical four-bedroom home costs $121,885. Muncie, Ind. (Ball State University) took the No. 2 spot at $144,996. Ann Arbor, Mich. (a quintessential college town home to the University of Michigan) came in as the No. 3 most affordable college market, where the sample size home only costs $148,000.

Overall, the 2009 College HPCI revealed that real estate buyers can find a typical four-bedroom home for less than $250,000 in 62 percent of the college markets surveyed (72 total), including iconic American college towns such as:

* Syracuse, N.Y (Syracuse University): $171,711
* South Bend, Ind. (University of Notre Dame) $183,938
* Athens, Ga. (University of Georgia): $205,862
* Oxford, Miss. (University of Mississippi): $212,000
* Knoxville, Tenn. (University of Tennessee): $223,850

Further research indicates that the charm and affordability of college towns is appealing to more than just students. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey; Austin, Texas (University of Texas), Provo, Utah (Brigham Young University), and Raleigh, N.C. (North Carolina State University) were among the metropolitan cities with the greatest population growth in 2008. In all three rising cities, home buyers can find a four-bedroom home for very a reasonable price; only $226,642 in Austin; $231,000 in Provo; and $241,462 in Raleigh.

Income is not income

Money: A song written by Berry Gordy, first recorded by Barrett Strong, then a bit later by a British band called the Beatles.

But income is not income. If you check the results of the Census/ACS and BEA for similar time frames, you'll see two different definitions of income. The Census/ACS definition is MONEY income. BEA measures PERSONAL income.

Data Detective Lenny explains:
Money income is essentially gross cash received on a regular basis (inheritence, etc. are not included). So wages and salaries are measured before taxes are removed.

According to the BEA web site:
Personal Income is the income that is received by all persons from all sources. It is calculated as the sum of wage and salary disbursements, supplements to wages and salaries, proprietors' income with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments, rental income of persons with capital consumption adjustment, personal dividend income, personal interest income, and personal current transfer receipts, less contributions for government social insurance.

The personal income of an area is the income that is received by, or on behalf of, all the individuals who live in the area; therefore, the estimates of personal income are presented by the place of residence of the income recipients.

This includes such income as housing subsidies, Medicare/Medicaid payments to hospitals on behalf of individuals, etc. even though the individual does not personally see it. The idea is that this is money supporting individuals. So the BEA figures will be significantly different ($10k higher) then the Census Bureau's.