New Years has come and gone and this week we will be celebrating the actual arrival of spring (at least on the calendar.)

It’s a good time to reassess. How are your New Years money resolutions doing?

If you’re like most people, many might have gone by the wayside. But a surprising 60% of people achieve their resolutions in the first two months of the year- as long as it was the #1 resolution on their list.

Keys to maintaining your goals (from the experts at University of Washington):

To be successful with your own resolutions, Marlatt, who has studied the subject for more than 20 years, suggests:
€¢ Have a strong initial commitment to make a change.
€¢ Have coping strategies to deal with problems that will come up.
€¢ Keep track of your progress. The more monitoring you do and feedback you get, the better you will do.

It’s not too late to start down the road of savings. Maybe your goal was to make an emergency fund. Or maybe it was to finally open up that stock trading account. Or maybe it was to start saving a downpayment to buy a house.

All are great goals. Don’t let them overwhelm you.

Rule #1: Start small.

Many people get overwhelmed that they need to save $5,000 for the new car or $10,000 for the house downpayment. It can seem unreachable. Start by putting just $100 a month into a savings account. The smaller amount likely won’t be as painful. You’d be surprised at how quickly even $100 a month can add up. And don’t let others tell you that $100 isn’t “enough.” It is.

Rule #2: Don’t get fancy.

Open up a savings account at your local bank. If you can, have a portion of your paycheck directly deposited there. If you can’t do that, as soon as your paycheck is put into your checking account, move over the money. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Was your piggybank in the first grade really that great? No. But it sure was FUN.

Rule #3: Confront your fears.

I’ve heard from people many times, “I don’t know how to invest in the stock market” or “it’s too complicated” or “I could lose money.”

Yes, yes, and yes.

But don’t let it overcome you. Check out a service like Sharebuilder.com that will allow you to invest for as little as $4 a month. It takes about 10 minutes to sign up for an account. Afraid you won’t know what stocks to buy? Buy an ETF that covers the entire S&P 500 like the Spyder ETF (SPY). Simply put your $100 a month into that. Or buy what you know. Do you go to Starbucks every day? Become an owner. Everyone is scared in the beginning of investing. Don’t let it hold you back.

Rule #4: Sign up for your 401k

At least 25% of employees don’t sign up for their 401k plans. If your employer pays a matching amount, it is free money you are leaving behind even if it doesn’t seem like much. You do not need to sign up for your 401k at the beginning of the year. Most employers have enrollment periods that are once a year, but for employees who are starting a new account, many times it will be once a quarter. The easiest thing you can do is have money taken out of your account pre-tax. Trust me. You won’t notice that it is missing. Start small.

Rule #5: Write it down.

Just because New Years was three months ago, does not mean it’s too late to start working towards your New Years goals. It’s never too late to start saving. Write down your goal on a piece of paper. Writing it down makes it seem more real (and obtainable.)

Again, don’t let it overwhelm you. Give yourself rewards for reaching goals. After you save the first, say, $500, treat yourself to something you love- a movie, fresh flowers, a ride in a horse drawn carriage through Central Park.

Half the fun of saving, is the satisfaction of actually getting there.

And you can.

It’s not too late. It’s never too late.

There is an unwritten rule for former Presidents of the United States that even if they disagree with a successor’s policies, they will not criticize him/her openly. For the most part, most have followed that unwritten rule (with the exception, perhaps, of Jimmy Carter, who recently has taken to being an outspoken critic of the current administration’s war strategy.)

When they have gone abroad to give speeches, they are mainly on mundane topics like “living the American Dream” or such things. That is a given.

But what do you do with a former Federal Reserve Chairman who was in office for 19 years and only just left the post? Other former Reserver Chairman, like Paul Volker, have been giving speeches for years. Heck, Volker has been writing op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal for seemingly forever.

But he didn’t just leave the position. He left it in the early 1980s- ancient history.

Because when Greenspan talks, people still listen. A few weeks ago, he told a Japanese audience, via videoconference, that the United States would likely be in a recession by the end of 2007. The stock markets tanked. Last week he said that subprime mortgage problem probably wouldn’t spread, but then changed his mind and said that it would. The markets, again, didn’t like it.

Should Greenspan not be speaking on the economy right now? Does it take away authority from the current chairman, Ben Bernanke when he does? What DO you do with a retired Chairman?

Wall Street seems particularly irritated that he is seemingly giving manifestos about various parts of the economy nearly every week. From the UK’s Fin 24:

“I’m kind of disappointed with Greenspan,” said Andrew Brenner, a market analyst at MAN Financial. “I find it unusual that he’s been talking so much.”

Making matters worse, he seems to be contradicting some of what he said only a few years ago as Fed Chairman.

This is what he had to say back in 2005 about the subprime mortgage market, where rising default rates have now sparked concern about a broader economic crisis: “Lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately,” he argued at the height of the housing boom.

With many of those very same lenders now declaring bankruptcy, their efficiency in measuring risk now seems a lot less sturdy - making Greenspan’s assessment seem off target.

It’s not just housing that has suddenly yanked the former central bank chief off the pedestal where he once stood. For some, the biggest beef comes from his prediction that a US recession was possible this year.

Coming at a difficult juncture for financial markets, his comments contributed to the biggest plunge in US stocks since September 11 2001, and revived an aversion to risk from which global investors had yet to recover.

Again, this is a departure from statements near the end of his term at the Fed, when he endorsed the theory that growth was likely to slow moderately to a more sustainable pace.

One Wall Streeter actually suggested that Greenspan simply misses the limelight after two decades in it. From Reuters:

In part, Greenspan may be making a comeback because he simply missed the attention.

“This last speech suggested he kind of liked the limelight,” said Mike Englund, chief economist at Action Economics.

But to the extent that Greenspan’s words affect the markets, potentially making it tougher for the central bank to keep the economy humming along, his loose lips could be detrimental to the country.

Or as Brenner at MAN Financial, put it: “He’s setting a very bad precedent.”

Could Greenspan be naive enough to believe that his “closed door” speeches via videoconference aren’t some way going to be leaked to the larger world? Or does he really believe that his outspokenness isn’t harming the current Fed Chairman’s grip on the economy?

Either way, it’s strange indeed.

Greenspan’s upcoming memoirs are to be called “The Age of Turbulance.”

Ah, the irony.

There is an unscientific way to measure when a boom turns into a bust: go the on-line chat rooms.

There are numerous stock market chat rooms, where investors can go and share information about a stock (or, more likely, simply gossip about it and act like they know something about the company - when they do not.) You can find these on Yahoo Finance (the message boards) and Siliconinvestor.com.

During the dot-com boom, there were thousands of posters on the various chat rooms, gleefully watching their companies shooting to the moon. Some were even posting fake information, on the hope that they could “pump” and then “dump” the stock for profit. Several went to jail or were fined.

And then, stocks did an awful thing: they went down. And chat rooms were no longer cool.

A declining market just isn’t that much fun to talk about, apparently.

People abandoned the chat rooms. They didn’t go away completely but the number of posters on them dwindled significantly.

And now you can see the same thing occuring with the housing boom. During the boom, chatrooms were plentiful, from the Wall Street Journal’s housing forum to the infamous Craigslist forum.

I have read the Craigslist housing forum for at about four years now. I admit it. In 2005, some of the chains of messages would go for over a page. Look at it now. Very few people are posting. The San Francisco board used to be the most active, but it pales in comparison to its former self.

It means only one thing: the game is over. What is there to debate now that housing is actually slowing and/or going down? In the past, there used to be rousing debates about the benefits of renting, with renters being called losers in life (and other things much worse.) The housing bubble was debated, with both sides making their arguments.

Now, there isn’t much of a debate- about anything. I haven’t seen a renter called a loser in quite a few months. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard the infamous phrase, “if you don’t buy now, you’ll be priced out” for awhile either.

Hm…interesting.

I told you it was unscientific but when the crazies stop wasting their time posting on the chat rooms, you know the jig is up.

On the housing forum chat rooms, Elvis has clearly left the building.

Am I the only one who reads the obituary page? Is that morbid?

I find it fascinating. The big city papers usually have nice articles about local prominent people who contributed in some way to the community, but were not “famous” for the most part. Sometimes they are teachers, professors, writers or businessmen.

But that’s just it. Most times, they are “men.” I’m not trying to start a gender war but apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed. The studying of obituaries for a look inside our culture and society has been going on for quite some time. In the 1970s, researchers began to investigate the percentage of men versus women that were mentioned in obituaries. Many researchers thought it would matter if it was an east coast paper (more the mainstream establishment) or a west coast paper (with its frontier and anything goes attitude). Apparently, it really didn’t. From the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying:

Kastenbaum and his colleagues set the bar; others challenged it using a variety of methods and data sources. For example, in 1979 Bernard Spilka, Gerald Lacey, and Barbara Gelb examined obituaries in two Denver newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, arguing that the West is more progressive than the East. They sampled obituaries from July 1976 through July 1977 in both papers. Their findings provided weak support for gender bias favoring males. This is most pronounced in terms of obituary length, but there is evidence that women receive fewer obituaries and fewer photographs as well. They concluded: “Economic, political, and social factors within Western society continue to support a greater valuation of males and this is perpetuated even in the manner in which one’s death is marked and remembered”.

In the 1970s, researchers believed that the “women’s movement” hadn’t progressed far enough along to make an impact on the obituaries- as those dying had been born, for the most part, before women were even given the right to vote. But research in the 1990s still showed that men continued to dominate:

Robin Moremen and Cathy Cradduck examined gender differences in obituaries in four regional newspapers in the late 1990s, following the original Kastenbaum method. In Moremen and Cradduck’s study, the New York Times represents the Northeast and is included in the original study; the Chicago Tribune represents the Midwest, the Los Angeles Times the West, and the Miami Herald the Southeast. As in previous studies, men receive significantly more obituaries than women, however, unlike the Maybury study results, Moremen and Cradduck’s study found regional differences: Obituaries are 7.69 times more likely to be written about a man than a woman in the New York Times (compared to 4.02 times in the original study); 4.21 times more likely in the Los Angeles Times; 3.11 times more likely in the Miami Herald; and 2.47 times more likely in the Chicago Tribune.

Male obituaries are longer (except for the Miami Herald), and significantly more likely to be accompanied by a photograph (except for the Miami Herald). The average age at death is seventy-nine for women and seventy-two for men, which is consistent with national averages. People in business and the performing arts receive the most recognition, with men dominating these categories. Women dominate categories like miscellaneous (including devoted to family, animals, and children; homemaker; volunteer; active with seniors), clerical/retail, and related to someone famous, usually a man.

Again, maybe those women who ran for Congress in the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been dying yet by the 1990s. Now, there were women on the Supreme Court, more women as CEOs and more women Senators. But in November of 2006, the Chicago Tribune found itself asking the same question- are more men dying than women?

Why is it that so far this year about 73 percent of the Tribune’s obituaries are about males?

The newspaper’s research library checked previous years and found the gender breakdown roughly the same back in 2002 and in 1998. A man was the lead obituary writer one of those years, and a woman the other. The Tribune’s library also checked with other newspapers, from St. Louis to New York, and found the imbalance was similar or even greater.

The newspaper’s lead obituary writer, Trevor Jensen, said he scans news articles and death notices for interesting life stories. Obituaries should be neither tributes nor eulogies, he told me, but interesting stories that also reflect a part of society and the community. “They are lives that pique my interest and, I would hope, readers’ interest too.”

Could it be that many women’s lives just aren’t that “interesting”? It then becomes a question of what is an interesting life.

Maybe the obituaries will be changing in the next ten to twenty years as the Hillary Rodham Clinton generation starts to head to the heavenly gates.

But in a recent online interview, Bill McDonald, the obituaries editor at The New York Times, was asked whether his paper would consider an “affirmative action” policy to have more obituaries for women. “Ask me in another generation,” he replied “… the obit page is not a reflection of the times in which we live. It’s a mirror on a past that is slipping away.”

In past decades, women were not making inroads in areas that would warrant an obituary- i.e. in making money. Now, however, the tide is turning. In 2006, 70% of veterinarian students were women (making up 36% of all vets.) In the legal profession, 30% of all lawyers are women, but they make up 50% of law students (and, at some schools, are the majority.) It’s only a matter of time before these women are getting written up in the paper upon their deaths.

Or is it?