Tell It To Al

If moms got paid for the work they do out of love, they’d be making $113,586 a year, according to a survey by
Salary.com.

Salary.com, owned by IBM Corp., provides compensation data it collects from HR departments. It’s 13th annual Mother’s Day survey of 6,000 moms found that the average stay-at-home mom puts in a a 94-hour work week. And the working mom puts in 58 hours of work at home per week, on top of the time she spends at work.

With overtime, this puts an average stay-at-home mom’s salary $113,586, up $624 from last year. A working mom’s at-home pay rose by $457 amount to $67,436.

“While no dollar amount can truly reflect the value of a mom, the mom salaries give us a sense of just how much they could bring home if they were compensated for their work in both roles,” said Abby Euler, general manager at Salary.com.

Click here to read more from salary.com.

Too bad mom’s don’t get paid what they’re worth, but there’s a lot of that going around in society. Child care workers, teachers, social workers – the people who have the most contact with children – are typically the ones making the lowest salaries.

All businesses have generally been allowed to deduct what they pay their employees and executives. This, after all, is a cost of doing business.

But what happens when a company pays its executives astronomical sums of money?  Is this a real cost of doing business? Or is it just part of that little game executives and their crony boards play to convert shareholders’ money into their own money?

In 1993, Congress passes a law putting a cap on the deduct ability of CEO pay at $1 million. There was one big exception, though. Any pay that could be characterized as “performance pay” remained fully deductible.

Since 1993, CEO performance pay has grown enormously. With stock options and bonuses, it’s often hundreds of times what average workers make.

A study by the Institute For Policy Studies takes aim at this in a new report called “Fix The Debt CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer Subsidized Pay.” Click here to read the report. It claims the CEOs on the Fix The Debt campaign – the group telling everyone in America what they need to cut – are making millions of dollars a year and the tax code gives their companies a break for paying them.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

What’s it take to be middle class? A house in the suburbs? A couple of leased SUVs? The ability to send kids to college?

No.  That’s now for the rich.

All you have to do to be middle class is try not to fall too far behind. In the 16th quarterly Allstate-National Journal Heartland Monitor Pol, 54% of Americans surveyed defined the middle class as those who could still keep up with bills, not get too buried in debt, and not lose their jobs.

They’re not even thinking about getting ahead.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And click here for results from the detailed survey.

You wouldn’t know we were in a five-year economic slump from the loot kids are spending on their high school proms.

Prom spending spiked for the second year in a row to an average of $1,139 per family in 2013, according to a survey released today by Visa Inc. That’s up 5% over last year. ( Click here for links to the survey and a handy app that helps people budget for the big night.)

“Prom has devolved into a competition to crown the victor of high school society, but teens shouldn’t be trying to keep up with the Kardashians,” said Nat Sillin Visa’s head of US Financial Education.

Some highlights from the survey:

* Northeastern families will spend an average of $1,528;  Southern families, $1,203; Western families, $1,079; and Midwestern families will spend an average of $722.

* Families with less than $50,000 in annual income plan to spend more than the national average, $1,245. Those with more than $50,000 will spend a little less, $1,129.

* Families with single parents plan to spend $1,563, almost double what married parents plan to spend, $770.

* Of the total costs, parents plan to pay for 59% with kids covering the rest.

Kids these days. Whatever happened to just stealing a bottle of liquor and a pack of cigarettes from your parents and calling it a great night?

Most people would never cheat on their taxes – a whopping 76% – according to a study by global ad agency DDB.

Then there’s 18% who said they might cheat on their taxes, and the 6% who said they definitely would cheat, according to DDB’s Life Styles Study. DDB has been conducting its Life Style Study every year since 1975.

Here’s a little tip for the IRS auditors: Of those who would definitely cheat: 59% are male; 79% are between the ages of 18 and 54; 60% are white; 52% are married. (Yikes! I seem to fit the profile, but count me among the 76%.)

Some of the folks who say they would never cheat have apparently learned their lesson. Of them, 3% of report that they actually have cheated in the past.

Others never seem to learn. Of those who say they might cheat, 25% say they actually have. And of those who say they definitely would cheat, 20% say they have.

Would you cheat on your taxes? And if you would, would you admit it in a survey? That’s not the mark of a very good cheat, now, is it?

Here’s a sign that confidence in the economy and the stock market may not be all it’s hyped up to be: Nearly half of all women surveyed fear becoming bag ladies.

This is the conclusion of the “2013 Women, Money & Power Study” from Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America. Click here to read it.

Yes, I know. This falls under the category of “you can’t make this stuff up.”

The survey included more than 2,200 women, 25 to 75  years old, with a minimum household income of $30,000 a year. Of those, 49% said they sometimes fear becoming a “bag lady” – one of those shabby denizens of the streets overloaded with collected stuff.

Many of these women in the survey have a long way to go before realizing this fear: 27% of women who shared this crazy idea were making more than $200,000 a year, Allianz Life reported.

Perhaps it’s just the daily pressure of keeping everything together. Of those surveyed, more than 60% described themselves as the primary breadwinner and 54% said they were essentially the chief financial officers of their households.

The fear of becoming a bag lady was found among 56% of single women,  54% of divorced women, 47% of widows and 43% of married women.

“Women everywhere – even well-educated, successful, financially independent women – have major gaps and unmet needs when it comes to achieving comfort and confidence with money,” said Allianz Life Vice President of Consumer Insights Katie Libbe. “The real message here is that the financial services industry needs to help women learn about money and prepare for their retirement.”

Or at least start saving up bags.

A survey by Junior Achievement and The Allstate Foundation logged a 20% increase for 2012 in the number of teens who believe they will be better off than their parents.

Maybe they’ll be better off because they won’t have to pay the rent.

The survey also found that 25% of teens believe they will be age 25 to 27 before becoming financially independent from their parents. That’s up from 12 percent in 2011.

What kind of warped optimisms is this? Call me crotchety. But I, for one, am not going to put up with my kid, living in my house at age 27, bragging to me about how much better he’s going to do in life.

Some other survey highlights from the teen survey:

* 30% say they haven’t discussed paying for higher education with their parents.

* Only 9% say they are  saving for college.

* 33% say they do not use a budget. Of those 42% say they are “not interested” and 26% say “budgets are for adults.”

Kids these days.

Click here to read more about the survey from JA and Allstate.

CEOs have grown more confident about the economy, but not so confident that they’re hiring.

A survey by the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs from America’s top companies, shows CEOs expect 2.1 percent growth for 2013, up from last quarter’s estimate of 2.0 percent. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed also said they expect employment levels to stay the same or decrease.

Blame it on Washington, says Jim McNerney, chairman of the group and CEO of The Boeing Company.

“CEOs foresee somewhat better economic performance for the next six months,” he said .  “The outlook for hiring, however, may reflect ongoing uncertainty and a wait-and-see attitude about the business climate in the United States, as agreement on the nation’s debt and budgetary issues remains elusive.”

A prediction of 2.1% is not exactly reaching for the stars, particularly coming nearly four years after a recession. But it is fairly optimistic considering the fourth quarter of last year when the economy posted a contraction of .1% that was later revised to growth of .1%.

Whatever the numbers, what good are they really, if we’re not producing enough jobs?

Click here to read more from The Business Roundtable.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and you have to sleep through at least some of them, so how does one buy time?

Time is constant, but one’s perception of time is not. New research suggests people can expand time by doing something that sounds completely counter intuitive: Give time away.

Studies show that people who spend more of their time helping others suddenly feel that they have more time for themselves.

Click here to read more about it from the Stanford School of Business.

“When individuals feel time constrained, they should become more generous with their time — despite their inclination to be less so,” the Stanford article says.

What are the odds of fraud at a company in a given year?

A new study pegs it at 14.5%.

Click here to read the study by Alexander Dyck, University of Toronto; Adair Morse, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, and the National Bureau of Economics; and, Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago, NBER, & the Center for Economic Policy research.

So if there’s a 14.5% chance of fraud at a company every year, then given enough time, fraud becomes almost a sure thing.

Frauds cost investors within a company an average of 22% of the total enterprise value. And it costs all investors across all companies 3% of enterprise value, the study estimates.

“Until recently, the United States was deemed the corporate governance standard towards which other countries aspired,” the study says. ?The major wave of corporate scandals that emerged at the beginning of the millennium deeply shook this confidence. How was it possible for companies like HealthSouth to falsify its financial statements for 11 years without notice, or WorldCom to transform 3.8 billion of expenses into capital investments, or Enron to allow managers to enrich themselves while hiding billions of liabilities? Do these examples just reflect a few rotten apples, or are they instead the tip of the proverbial iceberg? … If we knew the frequency and cost of frauds this would help investors and boards to tailor resources to mitigate the scope of the problem.”

The study, however, has a slight flaw, beginning with its very first sentence: “We estimate what percentage of firms engage in fraud and the economic cost of fraud.”

Firms don’t’ commit fraud. People hiding within them do.