Do you know where your Pension Plan is? Many people know they have a pension plan, but they’re not quite sure how it works, how stable it is, or exactly how their money is invested. The details are often hazy.
I had been missing Northern Michigan fiercely. It’s hard to be away from home, and even my husband, West Texas boy that he is – he missed the Mitten, too. So, we planned a long weekend visit to my family in late August. Nothing special; just a weekend when we could find cheap flights. A little cooler weather to break the monotony of the unrelenting Houston heat and some time “Up North” to complete our summer.
AHHH! It’s September! And every boy and girl who loves fashion is now scouring the Internet to find a flight to New York City. Why? September is the glorious month when designers debut their new collections for Summer/Spring 2018. Paparazzi snap photos of every trend and street style worn by every influencer and celebrity in hopes of having those photos go viral. Magazines produce their biggest issues of the year with all the new fall “must-have” pieces for the masses to purchase. The dream of every designer is to present their collection at New York Fashion Week!
Spring is the cyclical season of renewal, but I tend to associate revival with the fall. This has stemmed from a life spent thinking that every football autumn will be the one for the Detroit Lions to end the curse of Bobby Layne and begin an unprecedented march to the Super Bowl.
In this Labor Day season of family cookouts and unofficial end-of-summer get-togethers, many of us have relaxing at the top of our priority lists. Food has found its way into the center of America’s celebration of the hardworking laborers who keep our country going. As a mother of two, I’d like to make Labor Day a chance for my little ones to enjoy their parents, extended family and friends all together at this year’s gathering. So, instead of spending all day preparing food, I plan to reclaim my time from the kitchen on this upcoming holiday.
I think September is one of my favorite months of the year. It’s the last month of summer and the weather isn’t too hot, the sunsets and sunrises are brilliant, and it offers the last chance to enjoy the final days of summer before the fall chill sets in.
To commemorate his life and contributions to the City of Flint, a statue of C.S. Mott now stands Downtown in GM Automotive Pioneer Plaza. Unveiled on August 19 during the 2017 Back to the Bricks event, the life-size bronze memorial was created by local artist, Joe Rundell, who also sculpted the other four key auto industry figures that accompany Mott’s replica at the historic site.
One day during our trip to Valencia, my husband got it into his head to climb to the top of the Micalet. The Micalet is a cathedral in the center of Valencia’s old town that features a Gothic-style, octagonal bell tower and winding, spiral staircase with an ungodly number of stairs.
A Wisconsin software company is offering to implant microchips into its employees’ hands so that they can effortlessly open doors, make purchases in the break room, log in to computers, use the copy machine and so forth.
Although many people perceive that our infrastructure is decaying, the reality is more nuanced. State trunkline highways – roads designated with an “I,” “U.S.,” or “M” – carry 53 percent of all traffic and 66 percent of all commercial truck traffic. Of these roads, 85 percent are rated as being “fair” or “good” condition, with only five percent of bridges rated as structurally deficient. Thus, the roads that carry the majority of vehicle traffic in Michigan are in pretty good shape, though these roads are slowly decaying over time. In 2008, 92 percent of Michigan trunkline was rated as “fair” or “good.”
Markets continue to baffle investors as mediocre news, lunacy in Washington D.C., and threats of nuclear war with North Korea seem to be hitting the headlines on a weekly, if not daily basis. One would think that with these types of events going on, the markets could easily be in free-fall; but for the time being, it seems the exact opposite is happening. Per bigcharts.com, the markets continue to grind to all-time highs on the Dow Jones Industrial Average to higher than 22,000. In previous writings, I eluded to the possibility that the next great crash probably won’t come until everyone stops asking about the next crash. We may need to be wary of getting too comfortable with the markets parading higher.
