A study by the Consumer Federation of America shows that single women are the most likely to get subprime rates on mortgages.

What’s more, women are likely to receive subprime loans regardless of income level. Although, on average, women have better credit histories than men, they are more likely than men to receive more expensive mortgages. And the disparity rises as income levels rise. In the lowest income brackets the rate of women receiving subprime rate mortgages is only slightly higher than men, but women earning twice the median income are 28.1% more likely to receive a subprime loan.

Meanwhile, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, it is these types of loans which become unsustainable and are most likely to fall delinquent or subject to foreclosure.

Women Most Likely to Receive Subprime Home Loans

In a previous post, I poked a little fun at the Nutrition Facts label on food items. Let’s face it, the incomprehensible arrangement of calories and percentages of daily allowances based on your daily caloric intake (without any guidance whatsoever as to what your daily caloric intake ought to be) make nutrition labeling much less useful and practical than it should be.

Well, someone over at the FDA must be reading Fifty-Something Women because they have just developed an online interactive game to teach consumers how to read the nutrition label. The program, called Make Your Calories Count, features a character called Labelman (I swear I am not making this up). Labelman will lead you through the murky waters of nutrition labeling, explaining portion sizes and servings per container.

Actually serving size and servings per container are the pivotal bits of information on any nutrition label and the manufacturers use them to their advantage quite well. No one wants to look at a bag of chips they are about to consume and read that it contains 1140 calories! So the manufacturer will put on the label that a one-ounce serving contains 190 calories. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for a snack. It’s probably not bad. It gets bad when you eat the whole bag which is actually six one-ounce servings.

Make Your Calories Count looks slightly amateurish and a bit like one of those overhead projector slide show presentations at some pyramid scheme motivational meeting. There are a few beeps and pings as Labelman slaps his pointer at the label facts and then exits, stage left.

Go see our tax dollars at work at Make Your Calories Count

According to the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, today’s workers are at risk of having insufficient resources at retirement. With lifespans lengthening, the retirement age rising and poorly funded 401K accounts, the baby boomer faces an uncertain future.

But housing equity is growing and offers at least one source of retirement funding for the baby boomer - a reverse mortgage.

In Will Reverse Mortgages Rescue the Baby Boomers? by Andrew D. Eschtruth, Wei Sun, and Anthony Webb, the authors explore the complicated subject of accessing home equity through reverse mortgages.

When average people have unused items they want to dispose of they hold a garage sale. I like garage sales, it’s a cheap way to spend Saturday morning and an even cheaper way to spend Saturday afternoon - after the sales end - as you pick through the unsold items now left by the side of the road.

But if you’re famous, like Cher, and you want to redecorate your house, how do you get rid of unwanted junk and fund the new look?

Auctions at which prized possessions of a celebrity are offered to those members of the public that can afford to outbid other interested fans are generally held after the star’s death. But both Elton John and now Cher have deviated from tradition, offering their cast-offs during their lifetimes to turn a few bucks.

In Cher’s case it was a huge success, netting more than $3.5 million. Part of the money goes to charity and part of it goes to…well, Cher (or her interior decorator). Among the items sold were Cher’s 2005 Bentley and some of Cher’s costumes, jewelry, a couple of furs. How about some Catalano Rhinestone Platform shoes? Went for a mere $3,300. One of the costumes she wore in stage concerts sold for $60,000.

I didn’t bid on anything because I am still waiting for this item to go on the block. I think it would be a great hit at the grocery store.