Financial Mindset

Heading off to college is exciting, but it also involves new adult responsibilities. That makes it a great time to start getting comfortable with credit, building healthy  spending habits  and learning  how to manage money . It’s important for all students to build a solid foundation in managing their finances, said Sara Wilson, director of product innovation at Student Connections, an organization that helps students overcome financial barriers. “You have to consider the financial decisions you make in college because they impact what your financial security is going to be once you enter your first job,” Wilson said. If you’re starting college this fall or you’re currently a student, here are some expert recommendations: 1. Start building your credit College is the perfect time to start building your credit score, said Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma. A  credit score  is a mathematical formula that helps lenders d...

Harvard Management Co. disclosed a $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, showing how the university’s endowment has profited from an early bet on Elon Musk’s giant rocket company. Harvard  reported it holds the position in its 13F filing on Friday, revealing it’s one of the largest endowment holders of the stock. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is the largest single stock disclosed in the filing, which shows Harvard held $4.3 billion of US equities. Harvard oversaw  $57 billion  as of June 2025, the latest publicly available figure.  SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering in June has  boosted returns  for college endowments that made investments through venture capital firms, sometimes more than a decade ago.  Others that have profited include the University of California’s investment arm, which reported in a filing this week a position worth about $1 billion, as well as the University of North Carolina and  Washington Universi...

The first U.S.-Japan joint intervention in three decades aimed at boosting the yen has come and gone without doing much to ease anxiety in currency markets. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s notepad  suggested the U.S. bought  $5 billion-$10 billion worth of yen, while Japan’s move topped $50 billion. The exchange rate initially strengthened to about 157 yen per dollar from nearly 164, but has since given back some gains and hovered around 159 on Friday. To be sure, efforts to prop up the yen were seen as short-term measures to address the symptoms rather than the root causes of the currency’s weakness. Those include Japan’s massive debt that exceeds 200% of GDP, fiscal stimulus that’s expected to worsen the deficit, and a central bank that’s been slow to raise rates in the face of high inflation. But given that the yen’s recent instability was enough to trigger the U.S.-Japan intervention, a key underpinning of global financial markets ...

Search “losing lottery tickets” on eBay and the site turns up something odd: stacks of worthless scratch-offs and instant tickets. Your choice if you want to pay by value or by weight: some listings offer a pound’s worth of losing lottery tickets from Pennsylvania for just $10, while others offer thousands of dollars’ worth of losing tickets, like Ohio lottery tickets worth $5,200 in losses, for $29.99. One listing even boasts $90,000 worth of losing Florida tickets for $575. Why would anyone drop more than five Benjamins for $90,000 worth of losing lottery tickets? Most of the listings you’ll see on eBay will be entitled along the lines of “collectibles” or for “arts and crafts” purposes. You’ll see the word “vintage” brandished about here and there, a “rare” or “no value” dropped in others. But search long enough and you’ll see the words “tax write offs” or “...

Amy Prosenjak was running inventory for a billion-dollar furniture company in Ohio when her husband floated an idea that would change their lives. Prosenjak and her husband were in their early 30s and had fallen in love with wine tourism, traveling to Napa and to Italy whenever they had the chance. One day, her husband asked why she didn’t get a job in the wine business. “I said, ‘Well, who would hire me?'” Prosenjak recalled. “And he said, ‘I don’t know.'” WineJobs.com answered that question for them. A to Z Wineworks, then a small Oregon winery owned by two couples and in the process of buying Rex Hill, happened to be looking for a chief financial officer, and Prosenjak said she sent her resume “kind of on a whim.” One of A to Z’s founders, Bill Hatcher, who was CEO at the time, called to ask whether she understood cost accounting, and Prosenjak replied, “I’m the director of inventory for a $1 bil...

Two of the biggest names in American online dating are rethinking the product that built their businesses. Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd summed up the shift on an Aug. 5 earnings call, saying the company is moving away from “optimizing for swipe speed and velocity” toward “something more intentional, fewer, better, and more considered signals.” A day earlier, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff said Tinder’s Events tab, an in-app feature that shows users local activities they can attend together, had expanded to 10 U.S. and European cities since March, with plans to reach 75 by year’s end. The rethink comes as the industry’s core numbers soften. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, ended the second quarter with 13.3 million paying users, down 6% from a year earlier, while Tinder’s monthly active users fell 7%. Bumble’s paying users dropped 16.4% to 3.2 million. Both companies are charging more per subscriber to off...

The results of the Democratic primary delivered a blow to the progressive wing of the party, but also to Polymarket and Kalshi —popular prediction market platforms that had gained a near-infallible reputation after accurately forecasting the outcome of every state in the 2024 presidential election. Polymarket and Kalshi event contracts on the outcome of the Wisconsin governor’s primary aligned with the sentiments of traditional polling firms, which had predicted an easy win for progressive candidate Francesca Hong. Both platforms gave Francesca Hong roughly a 95% chance of winning, but when the votes were counted, her rival, David Crowley, prevailed by less than half a percentage point. The surprise loss led Polymarket to delete one of its more boastful posts on X, which said Hong had a 96% chance of winning the primary, despite Hong’s lack of endorsements from prominent Democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They deleted this tweet. pic...