Category: finances

WASHINGTON ? Millions of older people face shrinking Social Security checks next year, the first time in a generation that payments would not rise.

The trustees who oversee Social Security are projecting there won’t be a cost of living adjustment (COLA) for the next two years. That hasn’t happened since automatic increases were adopted in 1975.

Venus and Serena Williams have found a new sport: pro football. The tennis-playing sisters will become the latest celebrities to own a stake in the Miami Dolphins, a person familiar with the deal said Wednesday. The person didn’t want to be identified because the team plans an announcement Tuesday.

Filed under: Celebrity News, Dr. Boyce Money

The NBA and NFL are fickle places. We forget that professional sports is more of a business than anything else, and the truth is that team owners love to manipulate our emotions for their profitability: they get citizens to support and pay for sports stadiums that their local governments can’t afford, companies spend thousands on box seats that aren’t worth very much and we drop hundreds in one night taking our family out to see a game. That’s all fine and good.

There’s the other angle of sports that might seem confusing to some, which is why a guy like Allen Iverson is still sitting around without a job. He’s worked hard year in, year out and has been a productive player for most of his teams of the past, so many people are wondering why he’s still sitting on the sidelines. Added to this list are other high quality, yet jobless, veterans in the NFL: Edgerrin James, Marvin Harrison and Derrick Brooks. All of these guys have been worth their weight in platinum as they’ve built amazing careers in professional sports. Here are a few reasons these guys might be not be playing this season or ever again.

1) We all get old. When a player gets an established name, its easy to believe that they are invincible. Many of us suffered through the last clumsy years of Michael Jordan’s NBA career, and we’ve seen Shaq turn into a bloated shadow of himself. It breaks your heart, as we all once saw these athletes display nothing less than pure dominance. Many of the vets I’ve mentioned, including Iverson, are simply not young guys anymore (Allen is now 34). The problem is that they have the performance and salary expectations of superstars, pricing them out of most opportunities. An NBA athlete is nothing but a commodity to most teams, and human beings are a perishable commodity at that.

2) When it comes to pricing, everything is relative. People always wonder how great players are cut by their teams. Well, it’s all a matter of the player’s value relative to their price. If an All-Star is hired for $10 million dollars per year and gives an $8 million dollar performance, that individual needs to be cut from the team. Older NFL vets typically end up taking league minimum salaries and getting one-year contracts. The truth is that the value of an investment is not determined by the value of the commodity. A good investment is something with a price that is less than its intrinsic value.

3) It’s the leadership stupid. Dr. Deborah Stroman, an expert on sports and leadership at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had this to say about unsigned free agents. “Money is only one aspect of a good veteran not being picked up by a team. The other factor is leadership. If the organization is trying to develop new leaders, the coach and/or general manager will not gamble the new leader’s development and team chemistry with the introduction of a veteran leader.”

4) Pro sports isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I can’t tell you how many NFL vets I’ve met who’ve entered their 40s with the bodies of old men. I wouldn’t wish the life of an NFL player on my worst enemy, as the dreams of riches and power are slammed by the reality of pain killers, short contracts, financial insecurity and league minimums. Personally, if I were going into professional sports, I would enter the field as an agent or owner, not as an athlete.

5) Are you still worth the trouble? Dennis Rodman, once one of the most “interesting” characters in all of sports, never had trouble finding a new team because he was an amazing rebounder. Once Rodman got a little older, he went from being exceptional on the boards to being just “pretty good.” Well, for all the trouble Rodman brought to the table, he was no longer worth the risk and unable to find a place to lay his sneakers.

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Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Distinguished Scholar with the Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered directly to your email, please click here.

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Filed under: Celebrity News, Dr. Boyce Money

I was as shocked as anyone to see that Michael Jackson’s death was ruled a homicide by the coroner. While we all figured out that the drugs killed him, an accidental overdose is certainly not the same as negligence on the part of a physician. It turns out that Dr. Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s physician, may have displayed a deadly combination of both unethical behavior and serious incompetence. At least that’s how things are shaping up.

There is the broader issue of money. We all know that Michael Jackson paid Dr. Murray $150,000 per month to get him the drugs he needed. That’s a lot of money to turn down, so even if we are disgusted by what Murray did, most of us can understand the temptation. There is also the added fact that Michael Jackson, a larger than life celebrity, is begging you for drugs that are available with the stroke of a pen. That would make anyone do a double-take.

There is a clear risk/return trade-off here, in which Murray was being asked to do something illegal in exchange for a great deal of money. Some of us can understand how a doctor with money problems might be tempted to take some extra cash to give away access to his stash of dope. After all, Jackson was the one asking for the drugs, so should he be held responsible for any of these outcomes?

“No,” says Dr. Elaina George, an Otolaryngologist out of Atlanta. Dr. George argues that Jackson was not the one to blame for his untimely death. She explains that physicians have an oath to “not do harm” to their patients and that by giving Jackson such a deadly combination of drugs, Dr. Murray violated that oath.

“‘Michael Jackson did not have a chance’ was my first thought when I read the report that just came out about what caused his untimely and tragic death,” says Dr. George, who generally serves as an advocate for other physicians. “I was unprepared for the absolute disregard for the first tenant of the doctors’ Hippocratic Oath – ‘First do no harm.’”

It is quite possible that Dr. Murray’s financial problems may have played a role in his decision to allegedly break the law in treating Jackson. His house was in foreclosure, he was deeply in debt and he’d declared bankruptcy in the past. He’d also accumulated $435,000 in unpaid legal judgments over the last three years. On the outside, Dr. Murray appeared to be successful, but on the inside, he was in as much financial pain as Michael Jackson was in physical pain. In this regard, Dr. Murray was like many other Americans who don’t earn enough to keep up with their lavish lifestyles.

There are some who would argue that this entire scenario was driven by addiction: Jackson’s addiction to drugs, and Dr. Murray’s addiction to money. In the end, Jackson got death and Dr. Murray is going to get prison time. The story ends sadly for everyone.

To hear an audio interview with Dr. Elaina George over the Michael Jackson case, please click the image below.

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Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Finance Professor at Syracuse University and founder of YourBlackWorld.com. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered directly to your email, please click here.

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When Candi Carter launched a line of educational DVDs for children in March, she had to confront a lack of cash.
“We didn’t have a multimillion dollar budget,” Carter says. So instead of paying for advertising, the 40-year-old mom and television producer turned to social media—blogs, online videos and social networking sites such as Twitter (www.twitter.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com)—to expose her business to potential customers and build a brand.

The collective goal of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Commerce’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor Rick Wade, and Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) National Director David Hinson, among others, is to bolster the nation’s 4 million businesses which generate revenues of 660 billion and employ 4.7 million workers. In fact, Hinson believes if his agency can help these firms achieve “economic parity” by growing the percentage of companies owned by minorities to match their representation in the US population then such enterprises would produce 2.5 trillion in annual revenues and employ 16 million workers.