Best of Blog Posts for Week of September 7th

Every Friday afternoon I share some of the more interesting or notable posts that I have seen in the personal finance blogs and other sources for the past week.

FreeMoneyFinances gives the cautionary gale of A Co-Signing Horror Story

Planet Money has some cool charts in Jobs In America, In 2 Graph that show job loses and gains over the past 4 ears in various sectors.   For example construction industry has been ravaged with about 2 million lost jobs down ~25% yet Health care jobs are up about 1.25M gaining almost 10%.

RetireBy40 recommends we Avoid Lifestyle Inflation


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FREE - $5 MP3 at Amazon for signing up for Scott Shared Values

Right now you can get a free $5 MP3 credit at Amazon.com by signing up for Scott Shared Values.

Sign up here : 

Scott Amazon Offer

You don't have to buy anything, just sign up for an account.   They ask for email address but don't require mailing address so they won't mail you junk, but you may get email.  At one point during the signup they talk about getting coupons for Scott products, and there is a smaller and less noticable link to skip that and go to the Amazon deal.  I skipped the coupons myself but if you want the coupons then I assume the Amazon deal is after that at some point.   So if you get to a point that appears they are just trying to give you Scott coupons then look closer and you should see the Amazon link.

The Amazon credit lasts until 1/31/2013.   I'm not sure how long the Scott offer lasts though.

I saw this deal on Slickdeals.net

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Distribution of Wealth in US by Age

Recently over on FreeMoneyFinance an author claimed that senior citizens control 'most' of the nations wealth.   That didn't sound right to me so I decided to investigate.   I found that seniors actually hold about 1/3 of the nations wealth.

The Survey of Consumer Finances 2010 breaks down net worth by family based on age of households.   They give the median and mean net worth for families in each age range.   I can use that and the total number of people in various age ranges (table 1 from the Census CPS ) to figure the total net worth for people of different age groups in the US.   When we then add up the total net worth we can find the distribution of net worth based on age of household head.

Here's the data :

And table form :

Age of head (years)
Less than 35	2.9%
35–44	8.1%
45–54	24.7%
55–64	31.2%
65–74	19.3%
75 or more	13.9%

As you can see the younger families hold very little of the total wealth and the older families have most of the money.    I expect that this is simply due to accumulating money over time.   Seniors do hold a disproportionately high portion of the nations wealth.   People age 65 and older have just about 1/3 at 33.2% of the whole.   At the other end of the spectrum families with heads under age 35 have just 2.9% of the wealth yet they represent 22% of the population.



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The Government is the Largest Source of University Funding

I went to a large public university.  I recall back then learning that the student tuition paid for around 10-20% of the schools budget.   Today public schools get a higher % of their money from tuition but most of their money is still from other sources primarily from state, local and federal government money.   Private schools get a larger portion of their money from tuition and also have larger gift and endowment funding.   But private schools also do get a significant portion of their money from governments.    How does it all add up?


The Delta Cost Projects Trends in College Spending 1998-2008 report has information on the source of revenue for universities.    In the report, Figure A1 has the revenue per student for each category broken down by each type of institution.     If you add that to the # of students for each type of school in figure 2 of the report, we can find out how much money each type of university gets from the various sources.    The math is simple, e.g. just take the # of students at the type of university then multiply by the average funding per student and you get the total funding for that type of university.   Add up all the funding from all the sources and you can find the % of funding for each source.    Unfortunately the numbers for the # of students in the report are in a graph and not I had to estimate the actual figures based on the graphic.    Because of that all my numbers here are going to have a margin of error of 1-2%.

I'm breaking up funding sources into 5 categories as follows :
Tuition - this is the NET tuition after accounting for student aid.   So this is the total amount of tuition the schools get after things like scholarships or tuition waivers.
State/local government - This is various funding from state and local governments.   It may be outright tax subsidies or grants for specific projects.
Fed government - This is funding from the federal government level
Other - this category includes other sources of money like student housing, athletics, teaching hospitals etc.
Private - this is gift and endowment money.

Note that here we're ONLY looking at money that goes straight to the universities.   So this doesn't cover how student financial aid is handled.    Student aid comes from various sources and pays the tuition and room and board for students.   So for example if the government gives a student loan to a student and the student then uses that money to pay the tuition bill then that money shows up in the tuition category.   A large portion of the tuition segment of funding comes from student aid which has other various sources.

Total funding from the different sources is as follows :

For all universities its a mix of private and public universities.    This is heavily weighted towards  public schools since the large majority (about 80%) of college students go to public schools.    As a whole government funding including the state, local and federal portions provides 44% of university budgets.   Government is the largest single source of funding for universities in the US.


Looking at just public schools we get :

As you'd guess the public universities get even more of their money from government.   For public schools government is the majority source of funding and contributes 55%.  

Private schools look like this :

Private students pay larger tuition bills in general and their tuition money accounts for the largest single source of revenue at private universities at 44%.   However private universities do also get tax dollars in various ways and they get about 13% of their funding in total from government sources.    Private gifts and endowments also play a larger part in private school funding at 20%.

In table format all the numbers from the graphics are :

	Total	Public	Private
tuition	27%	22%	41%
state/loc	25%	34%	1%
fed	19%	21%	12%
other	21%	19%	25%
private	8%	3%	20%

Of course these numbers are nation wide total funding sums.   The figures will vary greatly from state to state and from university to university.  


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