DST and daylight savings were trending Monday on Twitter, and the theme of many of the tweets had to do with workers’ difficulties adjusting to the time switcheroo.

“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day.

Many employees are feeling out of sorts and tired because the clocks have sprung ahead an hour, and that’s going to impact productivity; as witnessed by the plethora of workers spending time tweeting about their hatred of DST instead of working.

Making matters worse is the commencement of office pools this week for March Madness, the NCAA Men’s division basketball championship, that is also expected to be an employee time sink.

It’s the perfect storm of non-productivity.

A recent study by Penn State released found that daylight savings leads to more workers slacking off.

The time switch results in a loss of sleep and an uptick in web surfing, maintained D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Ferris, along with other researchers, looked at six years of Google data and found that tired employees are more apt to make bad decisions.

“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.

March Madness will likely contribute to the problem. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., predicted the basketball fever could attract more than 2.5 million visitors on the web per day, and each spending 90 minutes watching the games.

While John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, said the slacking off wouldn’t bring the economy down, he did estimate it could cost employers about $175 million in the first two full days of the basketball tournament.

“Monday could be particularly dreadful on the productivity front,” he noted.

Beyond March Madness and DST, there may be a general falling off of worker efficiency going on the United States.

A Wall Street Journal story Monday reported that Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has found the productivity spike in 2009  after mass layoffs that made employees fearful of losing their jobs has fallen off. He said there were “clear signs everywhere” that productivity has hit the skids.

So maybe, March Madness and DST are just great excuses to sit back and kick up our heels even more. 

Ambitious, successful people who actually make it to the top not only are richer than the rest of us, but they apparently live longer, too, a new study shows.

Researchers found that ambitious people who achieve their goals live longer than those with average drive and determination.  Making matters worse, they’re even a little happier than everyone else, according to a study to be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

“I guess you could say that those people got it all,” says the study’s lead author Timothy Judge, the Franklin Schurz Chair of Management at the University of Notre Dame. “Of course we don’t know what they did to claw their way to the top, but they took their aspirations and made good.”

Like most everything else, ambition does come with a dark side: climbers who don’t manage to scratch their way to the top are most likely to die younger, the researchers found.

Judge and co-author John D. Kammeyer-Mueller of the Warrington College of Business looked at data collected as part of a multi-decade study that followed more than 1,500 California children who had scored high on intelligence tests. The teens were followed for more than 70 years starting in 1922 by a Stanford psychologist named Lewis Terman.

The Stanford study looked at a wide range of topics, including the teens’ level of ambition. The study volunteers were asked about their physical and emotional development, school histories, recreational activities, home life, family background, as well as educational, vocational and marital histories. As the years passed follow-up surveys asked about the evolution of the participants’ careers, activity patterns and personal adjustment.

Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller looked at the impact of high and low ambition on death rates among study volunteers. They found that very ambitious people were more likely to die younger than those with less drive. Of those who scored among the top 10 percent on ambition more than 45 percent were dead by 1982, which was some 60 years into the study. The overall death rate for study participants at that point was 33 percent.

But things got more interesting when the researchers divided the ambitious volunteers into two categories: those who had fulfilled their life goals and those who had not. The death rate among those who achieved their ambitions was 31.7 percent, as compared to 46.7 percent among those who had not.

In other words, ambitious people who failed to achieve their goals tended to die younger.

Another just-published study in Japan found that hard-driving male managers and professionals there are dying younger than other men, apparently because they put work before their health.

Scientists who examined the death certificates of Japanese men who died between 1980 and 2005 found managers and professionals had a 1.7 times higher risk of dying before the age of 60 than those in clerical, sales, services, security, agriculture, production and transport jobs.

"Managers and professionals have higher stress and poor lifestyles, they don't have time for exercise, sleeping," said study leader Koji Wada at the Kitasato University School of Medicine, according to Reuters.  "Even with higher wages, they have unhealthy lifestyles," Wada said.

One thing that might give us all pause: The American study found that people with the lowest ambition scores also were likely to live longer. By 1982 only 30 percent had died, compared with 33 percent for the overall group.

The moral of the studies may be: Don’t worry, be happy and you’ll live a longer life.

The steady improvement in the job market is good news for all Americans, but a detailed look at the data shows that older workers have been the biggest beneficiaries.

The number of people over age 55 who have a job has increased by 1.69 million over the past year, to nearly 30.2 million workers, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of the monthly employment report.

That’s a far larger increase than for any other age group. By contrast, the number of jobholders age 25 to 54 has increased by just 322,000 over the same period, even though that group includes more than three times as many total workers.

In total, about 2.51 million more people were employed in February vs. a year earlier, according to the household survey of Americans conducted monthly by the BLS.

The unemployment rate for workers 55 and over, at 5.9 percent, is also lower than for any other age group.

“Obviously you have a lot of older workers that want to stay in the labor force,” said Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research who noted the trend.

Baker said there are several reasons why older workers appear to be doing better.

One is demographics: As the American population ages, more people are turning 55 and being calculated as part of the cohort. That helps explain why those figures are growing.

But another element is economics. Older people who may once have considered retiring are now holding on to their jobs or seeking new jobs, either because their retirement nest egg has diminished or they need the health care benefits that come with a solid job, Baker said.

Peter Simons, 57, and his wife are among the older workers who had expected to be at least semi-retired by now but instead are still working.

Simons moved to Bend, Ore., from California in 2004 with the hope of working for a while longer and then retiring. But when the economy started to turn and the housing market in the area went downhill, he saw a sharp drop in his computer repair business. Even now, he said, business is only about half what it was in 2007.

His wife, meanwhile, was working at a lumber mill but business there started to drop. Worried about a layoff, Simons said she found another job at a local resort a couple years ago.

The couple feel fortunate that she got, and has been able to hold onto, that job. That’s partly because it comes with health insurance benefits.

“One of the big components of why we haven’t been able to consider retirement is because of what we would do for health care,” Simons said. “It’s not just a question of being able to afford the premium for health care -  it’s finding anyone that would be able to give us health care because we both have pre-existing conditions.”

If they do wind up without health insurance, Simons said a last resort would be to move back to his native England. He hasn’t lived there since 1980 and would much prefer to remain in the United States, but he sees few other options if they end up unemployed before Medicare kicks in.

“The simple reality is we simply cannot retire and not have health insurance, because we could be wiped out,” he said.

Despite the lower unemployment rate, older workers do have good reason to fear a job loss: They can expect a long slog to find a new job. A separate set of government data shows that the median amount of time it takes unemployed people ages 55 to 64 to find a new job is 31.4 weeks, higher than for any other age group.

There was some encouraging news Friday showing that, once again, the economy created more than 200,000 jobs last month. That’s a sign that the jobs recovery continues to chug along, if slowly.

Still, even if you are lucky enough to get a job these days, there’s a good chance you can’t command the kind of salary you might have before the Great Recession.

A post this week showing that wages for young workers have actually been declining for more than a decade prompted a lot of discussion about who’s to blame. Contenders included President Obama and a host of other politicians, corporate America and lax parents.

Amid all the arguing, one reader perhaps unwittingly pointed out what may be the biggest reason wages have been pushed down – because so many people need a job that they are willing to take low wages just to be employed.

“I'd like a full-time, permanent job. $25,000 sounds wonderful,” the reader wrote.

Of course, that salary won’t be going quite as far if gas prices keep rising. Another post this week found that, on average, Americans will said they will have to start making significant life changes only if gas prices hit around $5.30.

More than half of our readers say they are already making significant changes in response to the recent spike in gas prices.

Again, many of you had lots of ideas about who’s to blame for higher gas prices: Politicians, speculators, big oil companies … can we blame lax parenting for this one, too?

Probably not. A few of you did have some simple solutions of the problem, though.

“Starting next week I'll be commuting via bicycle,” one reader wrote.

Time for a distraction from all these weighty topics: How about March Madness?

Bad news on that front. We also informed readers this week that there’s a good chance your IT department will try to thwart your March Madness viewing at work, for the sake of the network and those people who want to do actual work.

About one-third of you said you’d be checking scores occasionally during the annual college basketball showdown, and nearly 20 percent said you’d watch a bit of the tournament here and there while in the office.

Some readers won’t be counting on skirting the IT department at all in order to keep tabs on their brackets.

“I just take Thursday & Friday off so I can enjoy the games,” one reader wrote.

Despite rising crude oil prices and threats to stability in the Middle East, the price of gas is unlikely to reach a national average as high as $5 per gallon in the near term, ExxonMobil’s Chief Executive Rex Tillerson told TODAY’s Matt Lauer Friday.

“As I look at just the supply and demand fundamentals, I would not expect prices to reach that level,” Tillerson told TODAY.

“Again, the unknown in here is the market’s view of the political risk; if the rhetoric gets more heated, if a problem flares up anywhere else in the world, then certainly it could drive these prices up further,” he said.

With the busy summer driving period approaching, many observers are fearful that the price for a gallon of gas, which AAA says is now $3.76 on average across the U.S., could move up to the dreaded $5 mark and derail the economic recovery.

Ongoing conflict in Syria, political tensions between Iran and the West and rising demand for oil from emerging economies such as China are also threatening to push up gas prices.

One source of tension in the Middle East has been concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel sees as a threat to its existence. If Israel were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities the impact on gas prices would be “fairly immediate and highly volatile,” Tillerson said.

“It would be largely driven too by what the response was, and whether that resulted in an actual physical disruption of oil to the market.”

Faced with trade embargoes and the possibility of an attack, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz -- a strategic shipping channel through which a majority of the Middle East’s oil-producing countries supply the world’s economies with crude oil.

Related:

Magic number for gas prices? Try $5.30 a gallon

U.S. Census Bureau

The U.S. Census Bureau this week released a report looking at what counties have the highest level of household income inequality. The counties in the darkest blue have the highest disparity.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the growing gap between rich and poor Americans. A new government report sheds light on where the gap is the widest.

In general the South is home to the biggest concentration of counties with high levels of household income inequality, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday.

Sparsely populated East Carroll Parish, La., topped the list with the highest level of income inequality of any county under a formula that considers whether wealth is concentrated in just a few hands or more evenly distributed. It was followed by another small Southern county: Edwards County, Texas.

But income inequality is hardly limited to small, rural counties.

No. 3 on the list was New York County, N.Y., also known as the borough of Manhattan, a place where rich and poor famously live nearly side by side in many neighborhoods.

Overall the nation's biggest metropolitan areas tended to have elevated levels of income inequality, according to the report.

If you want to live in a place where there is a narrower gap between rich and poor neighbors, you may want to head to the middle of the country. Counties in the Midwest had much lower levels of household income inequality, according to the report.

Overall, household income inequality has grown by 18 percent since 1967, although the trend has slowed more recently, the report said.

The report was based on government household income surveys conducted between 2006 and 2010 that asked about income of all people ages 15 and older living in each household.

Related:

The rich got richer and well, you know the rest

More see class conflict between rich and poor

Gene J. Puskar / AP

This Feb. 27 photo shows gas prices at a Pittsburgh Exxon mini-mart. Gas prices have been on the rise.

The recent spike in gas prices has caused plenty of griping about pain at the pump, but a new survey finds that it’s going to take a much bigger jump before many people start rethinking their spending habits.

A Gallup poll released Thursday found that, on average, gas prices would have to hit $5.30 before people would be forced to make significant cutbacks in other types of spending.

The survey, conducted just a few days ago, also found that, on average, Americans said they would be forced to make significant changes in how they lived their life only if gas hit $5.35 a gallon.

Still, that means about half of Americans would have to start making significant changes in their spending or other habits long before we hit $5-a-gallon gas.

Prices at the pump finally eased a couple of days ago, after 27 straight days of increases. A gallon of regular gas currently costs $3.76 on average, up from $3.52 a year ago, according to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report.

Gallup surveyed about 1,000 people to come up with its results.

The Internal Revenue Service has announced plans to help people who are struggling to pay their taxes because of a job loss or big drop in income.

The new offerings are an expansion of an initiative, called “Fresh Start,” that dates to 2008. This week the IRS said it is expanding the program so it can help more people get back on their feet financially.

“We have an obligation to work with taxpayers who are struggling to make ends meet," IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said in a statement.

Under the expanded program, the IRS will grant a six-month grace period on failure-to-pay penalties for people who were unemployed for at least 30 days in 2011 or early 2012.

They also will grant the grace period to self-employed people who saw their income fall by 25 percent or more in 2011 because of the weak economy.

There are some restrictions. To quality, the taxpayer’s income must not exceed $100,000 for individual filers or $200,000 for those  filing jointly. In addition, they must not owe more than $50,000 in taxes 2011.

There’s also one caveat: The IRS will continue to charge interest on unpaid back taxes, since it said it does not have the authority to waive that charge.

Did you opt not to go to college? We want to hear from you!

The IRS also said it is expanding a program that lets people pay back taxes in installments rather than a lump sum. The program will now be more readily available to people who owe up to $50,000 in back taxes, and the term of repayment has been extended to 72 months from 60 months.

If you owe more than $50,000, you’ll still have to supply the IRS with some paperwork, and you may also have to pay down your balance somewhat to qualify for the program.

For more information, check out the IRS website.

TODAY

Jean Chatzky

Being a conscientious consumer can be tiring work. And for most of us, we simply do not have the time to shop for the perfect bargain. 

Retailers understand this. They bank on the fact that you will most likely buy the product – even though you know you’re getting ripped off.

Well, my friends, it’s about time we do something about it! 

We want to hear from you: What are you paying too much for?

Maybe your dry-cleaning or dog food. Maybe it’s breakfast cereal for your kids.

Email us the description of the product and the price you paid for it. Please include your contact information and we’ll do our best to find you a better deal. 

We all hate to overspend. So let’s team up and start saving money!

Did you opt not to go to college, or were you unable to continue your education after high school?  If so, we want to hear from you for an upcoming story on how career prospects for high school graduates have changed over the years.

If you’re interested in being part of this project, please e-mail us here.

Please share some details, including when you went to high school, why you didn’t go to college, what jobs you’ve held over the years and whether other people in your family went to college.

Also, let us know how to best reach you! Selected responses will be used in upcoming stories.

The Forbes billionaires list isn’t quite a He-Man Woman Haters Club, but it’s not exactly a picture of gender parity either. The list has far more men than women, even though a record 104 women made the list this time.

Of note about the women involved in the Forbes ranking:

Christy Walton of Wal-Mart family fame was the richest at $25.3 billion. She pulled down almost $200 million in dividends from the world’s largest retailer this year.

Europe's richest woman, France’s Liliane Bettencourt, made her money from L’Oreal. Bettencourt is worth $24 billion.

Jacqueline Mars is is worth $13.8 billion. She and her brothers own the world’s largest candy company.

Savitri Jindal, of India, is the richest Asian on the list at $10.9 billion. Her fortune took a big hit as the steel business in her family’s conglomerate was forced to cut production after a court decree against iron ore mining in the southern part of the country.

Laurene Powell Jobs was added to the list after her husband, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, died last year. The inheritance made her worth $9 billion.

Miuccia Prada, who runs the fashion empire her grandfather Mario Prada founded, is worth $6.8 billion.

Yang Huiyan, China’s richest person in 2007 at $16.2 billion, has seen her net worth crumble to a paltry $4.7 billion this year. Most of her money has come from the family’s Hong Kong real estate business. Don’t worry about her too much. At 30, she’s among the youngest on the billionaires list and has a few years to earn it all back.

Chinese gambling mogul Pansy Ho is a newcomer to the list at $4.5 billion. One of 16 children of the mogul that developed the island of Macau into China’s version of Las Vegas, she runs her own company.

The chair of French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, Elisabeth Badinter, is another newcomer to the list at $1.1 billion.

Sara Blakely was 29 when she invested her then-life savings, $5,000, in an underwear venture. Spanx ended up becoming one of Oprah’s Favorite Things. She is another newcomer at $1 billion.

Complete list of Forbes billionaires 2012
Forbes.com: The world’s billionaire women
Forbes.com: The world’s billionaire newcomers
Forbes.com: The world’s youngest billionaires

National Center for Health Statistics

When we think of the growing burden of paying for health care, we often think of older Americans struggling to pay for medicines and procedures that can become more prevalent as we age.

But new data from the National Center for Health Statistics finds that kids who are 17 and under are the most likely of any age group they studied to be living in a family that has recently had trouble affording their medical bills.

The data, released Wednesday by the government researchers, found that about 24 percent of children ages 17 and under are living in a family that has had trouble paying their medical bills in the past year.

By contrast, just about 10 percent of people who are 65 to 74 years old were living in a family that had had problems paying medical bills in the past year.

Experts say we shouldn’t take the data to mean that kids aren’t getting the health care they need. In fact, most kids have some sort of health insurance.

An analysis of insurance coverage for children, released by the Carsey Institute last fall, found that around 92 percent of children under age 18 were covered by health insurance as of 2010.

The researchers did find that private health care coverage for kids had fallen slightly from a year earlier, but that was more than offset by an uptick in the percentage of kids who were covered under public plans such as the state children’s health insurance program.

Overall, the Carsey report found that about 36 percent of kids were covered by public plans.

“Kids’ coverage is much better than adults,” said Shana Alex Lavarreda, director of health insurance studies for the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Still, just because the kids are covered doesn’t mean that Mom and Dad have health insurance. Lavarreda said, her research has shown that in California many kids who are covered by government insurance programs are in families where the parents are uninsured.

Lavarreda said families that include children may have health care debt in part because their budgets are stretched by family bills such as child care, food, clothing and other expenses. That leaves little wiggle room for covering an unexpected illness or injury.

“There are probably compounding factors here where families with children are also those who have extra expenses,” she said. “And that puts an extra squeeze on being able to pay for other things, like medical bills.”

The CDC researchers found that nearly 39 percent of families with kids under 17 had had some financial burden from medical care, including bills that are being paid over time and bills they couldn't pay at all.

The government analysis  was based on surveys of about 52,000 people conducted in the first six months of 2011. It found that generally, the older a person gets the less likely they are to live in a family experiencing trouble paying for medical needs.

Lavarreda said Americans who are 65 or older may have more health problems and health needs, but also more wealth to use toward those bills. In addition, older Americans are likely have Medicare to help cover health expenses.

The parents of children under 17 may either not have insurance at all, or have insurance but still have to pay out of pocket.

Medical debt can affect people’s financial and personal well-being, Lavarreda said. People with medical debt are more likely to be dealing with financial problems such as bankruptcy, and also to have trouble paying for needed care such as doctor’s visits. In addition, they are more likely to end up in the emergency room seeking care, she said.

Related:

1 in 5 older Americans scrimping on health care to save money

When it comes to work attire, many of us are worried about the message our fashion choices send to colleagues. But what about the message our clothing sends to us?

What we choose to wear to the office or factory can actually make us smarter or dumber, found one recent study. And that’s bad news for employees who think it’s casual Friday every day.

“Clothes can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioral consequences for their wearers,” according to a study on the effects of clothing on employees by professors at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which was published in the recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The study found that work garb associated with “attentiveness and carefulness” actually makes workers more attentive and careful.

In testing the theory, the researchers used a lab coat on their subjects and looked at how wearing the coat impacted their work. It turned out, the study found, that “physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat.”

So does that mean shorts and miniskirts make you dumber? It depends.

“To the extent that a person associated high heels and miniskirts with less intelligence, then it could make a person less attentive,” said Adam Galinsky, a professor of ethics and decisions in management, and a coauthor of the article. “But if a person associated those clothes with a commanding presence then wearing those clothes could make them more assertive and more attentive.”

Galinsky calls the process of how fashion influences us, “enclothed cognition,” and when that happens, individuals are mentally giving the clothing they’re wearing “symbolic meaning.”

The research may lend support to companies that impose dress codes. A draconian clothing policy implemented by Swiss bank UBS in 2010 that called for workers to wear certain types of underwear, among other restrictions, was ridiculed around the globe, prompting the bank to revise the code last year.

But maybe UBS was on to something after all.

Galinsky’s research, however, stopped short of offering fashionista advice on what not to wear to work, and he acknowledged in the study that age-old questions such as whether an expensive suit makes you feel more powerful or whether a uniform makes a police officer more courageous have yet to be answered.

“Answering these kinds of questions would further elucidate how a seemingly trivial, yet ubiquitous item like an article of clothing can influence how we think, feel, and act," the article noted. "Although the saying goes that clothes do not make the man, our results suggest that they do hold a strange power over their wearers."

They also give a whole new meaning to the phrase "a smart-looking suit."

Related: Whatever happened to casual days at work?

Leading-edge technology nearly always carries a hefty price tag, and 3D TVs are no exception. A set with this capability can easily run well over $1,000 -- and most of the time that doesn’t even include the glasses. That said, these top picks from Cheapism.com can satisfy early adopters as economically as possible.

• The Samsung PND8000 (starting at $1,250 for a 51-inch) also comes in more expensive 59- and 64-inch models with the same technology and feature set. This plasma series earns praise in online reviews for its crisp, clear 3D display and minimal “crosstalk,” where an image intended for one eye appears in front of the other. (Where to buy)
• The Sony Bravia KDL NX720 (starting at $1,080 for a 46-inch) is available in pricier 55- and 60-inch models as well. Experts and users aren’t effusive about this LED TV’s 3D performance but positively rave about the 2D picture -- something to consider, given that most of what you watch won’t be in 3D. (Where to buy)
• The LG Infinia LW5600 (starting at $1,000 for a 47-inch) also comes in a 55-inch model and includes four pairs of 3D glasses. Experts admire the LED screen’s ability to render bright, accurate colors in both 2D and 3D. (Where to buy)
• The Panasonic Viera TC-PST30 (starting at $1,200 for a 42-inch) is available in myriad other screen sizes: 46, 50, 55, 60, and 65 inches. The plasma display delivers solid performance. (Where to buy)

Plasma screens are a favorite of expert reviewers and generally offer excellent picture quality in both 2D and 3D, with very deep black levels. Low-cost LED TVs use light-emitting diodes around the edges of an LCD screen to improve black levels and color accuracy. Like other TVs with liquid crystal displays, these 3D TVs are best viewed straight on, rather than at an angle. To figure out how big a screen to buy, CNET suggests measuring the distance from your seating area to the designated spot for your TV and dividing by 1.5. For instance, if you sit 7 feet (84 inches) from your TV, look for at least a 56-inch screen.

Most of our picks use “active” 3D technology, which requires battery-powered 3D glasses that are typically sold separately for as much as $150 a pair. (Note that active 3D glasses work with only the corresponding brand of 3D TV.) The LG Infinia is a “passive” 3D TV that comes with four pairs of the not-so-heavy-duty glasses distributed at movie theaters. Viewers find that passive 3D generally delivers a more comfortable but less immersive experience.

All the 3D TVs on our list come with multiple HDMI ports for connecting Blu-ray players, video game consoles, and other devices. Component and composite inputs accommodate older DVD players and VCRs. PC, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB connectivity are also available.

A 3D Blu-ray player is perhaps your most reliable source of 3D content, which is still scarce on television. The good news is that 3D TVs boast some of the best 2D image quality you can buy.

More from Cheapism:
Cheap 3D TVs
March deals
Cheap workouts
Cheap cordless drills

Today Money financial expert Lynnette Khalfani-Cox joined us for a live Web chat Wednesday to answer your questions.

Here’s one of his answers to questions from the live chat. (See below for the full Q&A and video of Lynnette’s TV appearance this morning.)

Marie asked:

“What would you recommend as the best credit counseling service to use? I have about $15000 in debt, which I've tried to make arrangements with, but keep getting bugged with phone calls. I've had some medical probs, but still receive DI pay. Some of these bills have gone to collections. I'm at my wit’s end trying to handle all of this...Thks.”

Lynnette replied:

“Anytime you pick a credit counseling agency, make sure it's a HUD-certified agency. Check out the National Foundation for Debt Management. Their website is www.NFDM.org. They're a very reputable organization that is HUD-certified. They also have a terrific BBB rating and low cost services. Many of their services, in fact, are affordable or free. So it's a good place for people who are looking for help with credit and debt problems.”

Here’s the full chat archive and Lynnette’s TV appearance:

If you have a question for our TODAY Money experts, submit it here.

To sign up for an e-mail reminder for our next chat, click here.

Young adults may be facing their own version of “The Hunger Games” when entering the workforce today because they’re probably going to be hungry for more money.

Wages for young workers have been declining for more than a decade. They fell off a cliff during the Great Recession to levels not seen since the 1970s for certain groups of entry-level workers, according to new data from center-left think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

(OK, maybe it’s not exactly “The Hunger Games” just yet. In that dystopian future, depicted in a trilogy of novels and now a movie, a reality TV show follows teens fighting to their death, with the winner earning food for his/her home state. But you get our point.)

Not surprisingly, the news is worse for those with less education; and the pay gap between entry level men and women no matter what the education level is still alive and well.

Entry-level wages for high school graduates were actually lower than they were in the 1970s. For college grads, starting wages were below what their counterparts pocketed in the late 1990s. Today, the average wage for all these young adults, no matter education level, is about $15 an hour.

And whether they have a college degree or not, women still aren’t bringing home as much bacon as the men, but the gap has been narrowing. The good news, unfortunately, is partly attributable to the fact that the guys are getting paid less because of the economy.

“When the labor market is strong for workers the prospects for young workers are very strong, and when the labor market is weak their prospects are very weak,” maintained the Institute’s president Lawrence Mishel about the data that’s part of his forthcoming book ‘The State of Working America” due out in August. “The recent decade affirms this general finding, as the wages of entry-level workers have fared extremely poorly during this period of general wage stagnation.”

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers:

• The entry-level hourly wage of a young male high school graduate in 2011 was 25.3 percent less than that for the equivalent worker in 1979, a drop of roughly $4.00 per hour in 2011.
• Among women, the entry-level high school wage fell 14.2 percent over the same period, and dropped by $1.64 last year.
• Wages for high-school educated women are still far below those of their male counterparts, a gap of 15 percent.
• In 2011 the hourly wage of entry-level male college graduates was just a bit over $1.00 higher than in 1979, a rise of 5.2 percent over thirty-two years.
• Women college grads did better, with their wages growing by 15.4 percent, or $2.50, from 1979 to 2011.
• The gender pay gap among this group, however, still persists. The hourly wage for college educated men was $21.68 in 2011, compared with $18.80 for women.

Too bad young adults don't qualify for child ticket prices anymore. Adult tickets for the upcoming "The Hunger Games" movie are going for $11 a pop.

AP/file

Since her husband was laid off last fall, Julee Schirmacher has found herself in a spot that has become familiar to many families over the past few years. She works full-time for a marketing company and, for now, her husband stays home and takes care of the couple’s two kids, ages 5 and 2.

“Money worries me constantly,” said Schirmacher, 29.

The number of women earning more than their husbands had gradually been rising for years, but the pace appeared to quicken during the Great Recession of 2007-09.

Nearly 38 percent of wives earned more than their husbands in 2009, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up about 3 percentage points from 2008.

As Schirmacher's case shows, in some cases women are earning more than their spouses not because the women are getting ahead, but because their husband has experienced a setback. Schirmacher's husband has been unable to find a job since getting laid off last September.

“Ideally, I would like us just to be working and in stable jobs,” Schirmacher said. “I don’t need to make a $100,000-a-year salary. I just want to be able to make money to be able to pay my bills on time, pay for the school for my kids. I just want to be able to have, like, nice Christmases with them. I want to be able (to say), on Friday when I get home from work, ‘Yeah, we can go to Friendly’s for dinner.’”

The BLS figures include families like Schirmacher's in which the husband may not be working at all. Looking more narrowly at families where both husband and wife are working, 28.9 percent of wives earned more than their husbands in 2009, up from 26.6 percent in 2008.

Mary Gatta, a senior scholar with the advocacy and research organization Wider Opportunities for Women, said it’s hard to say exactly what is behind the trend.

“The recession is a significant factor here in that during the recession we saw higher numbers of men lose their jobs,” Gatta said.

The official period of economic contraction, from December 2007 to June 2009, was so hard on men that some people dubbed it the “mancession” because so many men lost their jobs.

However, in the years of weak economic recovery that followed, women were harder hit while men started to gain jobs again. The trend appears to have started to even out in recent months.

Still, Gatta noted, that there are other, longer-term factors at work. For example, women have been graduating from college at higher rates than men for years. Workers with a college degree generally have higher earnings potential than those without one.

“It’s more than just the recession,” Gatta said.

In general, women’s earnings have become a much more intrinsic part of a family’s financial well-being over the past few decades, said Ellen Galinsky, co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. Her research from 2008 found that in dual-earning households, women were contributing about 45 percent of a family’s income on average.

Even in the families where wives make more than their husbands, she notes, many are struggling to get by – whether they have one or two salaries. In some cases women may be earning more their husbands because he lost a job or endured a pay cut.

“We have an image of (the wives) being the CEO of Xerox or something,” Galinsky said.

In fact, she said, many families in which both spouses work are in lower income brackets.

Galinsky expects that women’s earnings will continue to be key to many family’s financial survival.

“My view about the recession is that … it didn’t shift the course,” she said. “It accelerated the course we were already on.”

Schirmacher, who lives in Pottstown, Pa., always expected that both she and her husband would work.

She was actually the first to get laid off, in 2009. She ended up being out of work for more than two years, during which they had a second child and moved from Rhode Island to the Philadelphia area, where he got a better job.

In February 2011, she landed a job with a marketing company, and it seemed like the couple was getting back on financial track.

But then in September her husband lost his job as a property manager. That’s left him looking for a new job and taking care of the kids so they can save on child care costs.

Schirmacher said the situation is stressful for both of them. She recently took a promotion and has been working long hours, which means she doesn’t always get much time with the kids. Meanwhile, her husband is feeling the frustration of not being able to land a new job.

With just one income, the couple struggles to save money and worries about unexpected expenses. She recently had to borrow money from her parents for a major car repair.

“We can’t really catch a break,” she said. “We’re getting by but definitely not living the way that we were.”

Related:

More women seeking MBAs, but pay gap persists 

There’s good news on the employment front. A growing number of employees are calling it quits.

In a sign that workers spooked by the Great Recession may be getting some of their career mojo back, two studies find an uptick in the number of employees resigning.

MRINetwork, one of the nation’s largest recruiters, released a survey of recruiters Tuesday that found 28 percent of the job openings employers had in January were a result of employee resignations, up from 21 percent in July of last year. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in a February report, showed that the number of workers quitting has been steadily rising since its low point in December of 2009.

“Quits tend to rise when there is a perception that jobs are available and tend to fall when there is a perception that jobs are scarce,” the BLS reported.

While it’s a good sign for the employment picture that 1.9 million people pink-slipped their employers, workers still aren’t quitting like it’s December of 2007, the first month of the recession, when 2.8 million said goodbye to their bosses.

Indeed, the unemployment rate is still above 8 percent now, but reports of increasing employee desertions may bode well for what we'll be seeing this Friday when February employment data is released.

“Our candidates, as they’re seeing the economy start to rebound, are becoming more and more confident, where in the past they were just happy to have a job,” said Nancy Halverson, senior vice president of operations at MRINetwork.

Employers, she continued, are beginning to hire more, but they’re still not at pre-recession levels. “Organizations are adding and upgrading talent, and all of a sudden, employees are willing to say, 'I’ll put my name out there.'”

In another good sign, the MRINetwork report found that 56 percent of recruiters polled saw the job market as candidate-driven, while 44 percent said employers drove it.

The online survey polled 163 recruiters and was conducted from Dec. 2011 through January 2012.

Job openings are mainly occurring because companies have created new positions. The top trait employers are looking for in candidates is a history of creating revenues, followed by applicants who’ve worked for a brand name company, and then individuals with advanced degrees, the survey found.

The report also looked at how employers are finding those perfect candidates:

• 11 percent said an active candidate was already in their database.
• 12 percent said they were already in their database but were not actively seeking work.
• 16 percent were found via direct sourcing from competitor employers.
• 18 percent were found as a referral for the position.
• 25 percent were found in a search of third-party databases (LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc.) for this specific role.
• 12 percent had responded to a job posting.
• 6 percent cited other.

Are you ready to call it quits?

Related story: For job hunters, social networking options abound

Figuring out which social networking site is the best for your job search is like trying to decipher a riddle with a constantly changing answer.

When Google+ was introduced, many expected the site to rival Facebook and LinkedIn when it came to its job-hunting potential. But recent data show that the social networking site hasn’t lived up to all the hype. Google+ users only spend mere minutes on the site each month, compared to almost eight hours a month on Facebook, comScore reported last week.

And now, an increasing number of people are using Pinterest, the latest social-networking darling; and some are even posting graphic-intensive resumes in an effort to impress employers. The number of unique visitors to the site jumped 56 percent since December, according to comScore, to nearly 12 million.

All this social media ballyhoo has many wondering which site will help them land the job of their dreams.

Once upon a time, career experts pointed to LinkedIn as the only site workers had to be on, but now that’s changing. “More playful sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Quora, and even Pinterest are turning out to be valuable tools for job-hunters, too,” wrote George Anders, author of “The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else," in a Harvard Business Review post last week. 

If the alphabet soup of social media choices has you wanting to shun them all, think again. Employers are increasingly using social media to connect with applicants. The most recent data show 56 percent of the organizations currently use social networking websites when recruiting for potential jobs, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which surveyed nearly 550 HR professionals via email last year. That’s up from 34 percent in 2008, the last time the survey was conducted.  

Where recruiters are going to find you out in cyber space, however, is a moving target.

Among the employers SHRM polled there are three top choices:

• 95 percent use LinkedIn.
• 58 percent use Facebook.
• 42 percent use Twitter.

But a survey put out last month by The Creative Group, an interactive advertising company, of advertising and marketing executives found that if they had to pick one social networking, 56 percent would choose Facebook, followed by LinkedIn and Google+.

Facebook is beginning to give career stalwart LinkedIn some competition by offering more recruiting tools for hiring managers and job seekers, including apps such as BranchOut and BeKnown.

Both options are luring more recruiters to Facebook as a result, said Curtis Midkiff, SHRM’s director of social strategy and engagement. “It’s catching on but not competing quite yet,” he noted.

In the end, he stressed, your social networking choice should be tied to the type of job you’re looking for. LinkedIn, he said, is the “suit-and-tie network,” and people looking for professional jobs in traditional industries are probably making a good call to be on there.

For positions in healthcare or manufacturing, and generally more blue-collar jobs, Facebook is gaining interest from recruiters as a way to find applicants. The site is also gaining popularity with employers looking to fill seasonal jobs, such as UPS looking for holiday drivers, Midkiff explained.

UPS’s Jobs Facebook page often includes posts about job openings, and the page now has more than 36,000 likes. A post from earlier this year stated: “UPS is hiring Sales professionals!” The post included 70 comments and a company official even answered questions of Facebook users interested in a sales job; a big difference from the black hole so many job seekers face when they apply these days.

Hiring managers may also be looking to sites beyond LinkedIn if they want to connect with younger workers.

E. Chandlee Bryan, a career coach and co-author of "The Twitter Job Search Guide," sees sites such as Pinterest and Google+ filling a niche for specific professionals. Pinterest, she said, is useful for people looking for jobs in the design and interior decorating fields, while Google+ seems skewed toward tech jobs.

The best rule of thumb is to check out where the companies you want to work for have the most presence and base your social media focus on those sites. Do they have a careers page on Facebook, or networking groups on LinkedIn or Google+? But don’t jump from networking site to networking site just because one job you want is posted there, Midkiff advised.

Don't just follow the latest media madness. You need a thought-out plan on what site works for your career aspirations.

Your friendly IT guys may not have a UNC-Duke-quality rivalry with March Madness, but they have the dates circled.

It happens in offices around the country, around this time of year.

There you are, squinting at your computer, pretending to be oh-so-immersed in that spreadsheet, but what you’re really doing is waiting for the boss to leave so you can get back to watching March Madness on the other screen.

But why won’t the game load?

Blame the IT department.

A new survey finds that about two-thirds of IT departments take some sort of action to block, ban or throttle non-work streaming content, including the March Madness college basketball tournament.

When it comes to March Madness specifically, four in 10 admit they monitor employees who try to access March Madness on their computers, in order to protect the company’s network.

That’s according to a survey of about 500 IT professionals conducted this February on behalf of Modis, an IT staffing firm that is part of Adecco.

Let’s be fair to the IT folks. They aren’t necessarily trying to keep you from keeping tabs on your bracket during the work day, but they are trying to keep your network running.

According to the Modis survey, four in 10 respondents said streaming content from the annual basketball tournament has had some impact on the company’s network, such as slowing or even shutting it down.

Most IT professionals surveyed said they block streaming content to make sure everyone can do their regular work without network disruptions. But the majority also said they do so to keep people from getting too distracted at work.

It’s not clear how much March Madness, which begins March 11, really distracts people from getting their work done.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas this year poked fun at its own assessment of how much game time takes away from company time, and even admitted no one’s likely going out of business because of a basketball tournament.

 The outplacement firm’s advice: As with most things, March Madness should be viewed in moderation. At least while you’re at work.

We had a leap day this week, which for some salaried employees may mean that your employer got an extra day of work out of you, without giving you anything extra in return.

If you’re working for free anyway, you might as well take a little time out and discuss it amongst yourselves.

A post earlier this week on whether leap days equal work-for-free days prompted a lot of back-and-forth about whether people are really working for free, complete with a surprising amount of math (some of it fuzzy).

Some chose to take a more light-hearted view of the whole thing.

“The company I work for is so cheap, they'd argue that they pay us for a day we don't work on non-leap years,” one reader joked (we assume it was a joke).

Others, perhaps mindful of the fact that the unemployment rate remains unusually high, opted to stay above the fray.

“Just be thankful you have a payday at all and leave it at that,” another suggested.

Perhaps that reader is a government worker. Another popular story this week looked at who is happiest at work. Government and education workers top the list, while agriculture and mining is at the bottom.

Cue the obvious barbs about government workers having nothing to do. Many readers took that path, but a few chose to stay above the fray.

“Why wouldn't they be happy? They provide a much needed service. I'm glad they are happy!” one reader wrote.

Here’s what doesn’t make most of us happy, no matter how much we like our jobs: A big workplace embarrassment. Luckily, we can usually laugh about it later. Years and years later.

A post this week on your most embarrassing work moments prompted lots of you to recall wardrobe malfunctions, unfortunate typos and misuse of the mute button. Check them out, and share your own, on our Facebook page.

U.S. Cenusu Bureau

Amid all the chatter recently about whether President Barack Obama is a “snob” for wanting Americans to be educated or Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorumis anti-education for critizing Obama, many may have missed an important milestone.

The Census Bureau reported last week that a record 30 percent of Americans ages 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree. The data, from March 2011, marks first time ever that such high a proportion of Americans have had at least a four-year degree, and it follows decades of gradually improving higher education rates.

In the long term, experts say, that’s good news for the U.S. economy. After all, the majority of the U.S. economy is service-oriented, and that means many Americans who want to get ahead need to find ways to succeed in white-collar settings. Many also believe a highly educated, innovative workforce is one of several key ingredients succeeding against global competitors.

“The future of the U.S. economy is not assembling the computer. The future of the U.S. economy is coming up with a novel design for a semiconductor that gets into a computer, that will then be assembled in some emerging economy,” said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist with Mesirow Financial.

And yet, such long-term thinking may not feel so great to the many Americans out there who have a degree but either don’t have the job they want – or don’t have a job at all.

The unemployment rate for college graduates, which stood at 4.2 percent in February, is half the unemployment rate for high school grads but still high by historical norms. Also, although a college degree also generally leads to much higher lifelong earnings, many young grads in particular are feeling squeezed these days by low starting salaries.

“(There are) people who are very disappointed that, yes, they can get a white-collar job but that does not imply the financial success that it used to imply for their father’s generation,” Laurenti said.

In addition, many are burdened by student loan debt from earning that degree.

Another issue that has slowly been gaining attention over the past few years is whether every kid should be aiming to go to college. Manufacturers in particular are increasingly complaining that they can’t find skilled workers to run the more complex, sophisticated factories that are now the norm in America.

These people are calling for a return to the type of vocational training that fell out of favor over the past few decades, amid a push to get more kids to go to college.

Laurenti, the economist, said he is tentatively encouraged by more discussion about how to provide that kind of training to keep those types of factories running. But he thinks high schools need to be doing more to help prepare kids who would do well in those type of skilled factory jobs.

“They are not much interested in people with a bachelor’s degree in political science, but it’s not enough to get people who drop out of high school, either,” he said.

 Related:

Role reversal: Employers say they can't find workers

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