At my parents' house in San Francisco, I'm just literally two blocks from the businesses that provided me my first high school jobs: the bagel shop, which has changed hands and name by now, and the smoothie shop, which is long out of business (in fact, that was the first job I was ever laid off from). If I go further afield, to downtown San Francisco, I can visit the themed diner that gave me my first gig waiting tables on summers home from college. Unlike at Manhattan Bagel and Juice It!, however, I'd likely encounter plenty of familiar faces at Mel's if I were to swing by. Restaurant work has a way of sinking its claws into you. In my case, it very nearly did, at the expense of a more interesting career. 

Financial institutions have teams to monitor conversation surrounding their brand on news sites, blogs and especially social networks due to the incredible amount of negative press they receive. In an age when consumers are generally unhappy with the banking world, banks need constant vigilance. Corporate Insight, a financial services consulting firm, believes that banks can use Pinterest to promote their brand. But putting a bank on Pinterest is like trying to force a conversation between your mom and your banker -- about cupcakes.

From location-based deals to merchant-funded rewards, there are plenty of ways that financial technology can lead to more spending. In fact, recent data suggests that just owning a contactless payment cards might prompt consumers to spend more. But I don't buy it.

Tuesday night, from 6:00-7:00, is “Startup Boot Camp.” Next up is the “Running Club.” The day before was “Unstudy Night,” with one of the colleges downtown. The next Tuesday, it's Budokon yoga, after another morning session of “Teaching kids about money.” Sunday is open mic night. Each event is scrawled, in a bubbly script, on a giant chalkboard calendar that spans half of the wall at the Next Door Cafe. Two doors down from the Lincoln Park Trader Joe’s, next to the Express store, this is State Farm’s newest experiment—part coffee shop, part financial planning hub, part community center.

After Facebook updated their S-1 filing recently, it came out that Zuckerberg et al. are on track to earn $1 billion in revenue from payments alone in 2012. Their payments revenue is growing faster than their advertising revenue, and this has rekindled excited speculation about Facebook Credits, the mandated medium of exchange on Facebook: Is it the currency of the future? When we shop online will we do so only using our Facebook Credits? Will nothing ever be the same again? Updated at end with Zynga Q1 2012 earnings.

In 2007, my ING Direct savings account carried a 4.50% APY. Today, that same account pays a mere 0.80% APY. So, there’s no question that it's barely profitable to keep money in the bank. However, based on bank data on loan revenue and interest expenses, banks had the potential to offer better rates, but failed to do so.

When considering an object's value or utility, there are perhaps two ways of approaching the question: you can judge it by its quality or by its quantity. With wines, this is easy (especially with help from an old label): a bottle of Bordeaux from a respected chateau is likely better than a jug of plonk from a farm south of Fresno. But with commodities, like corn for example, quantity and value are conflated: one begets the other. The main differences between French and American culture can, in fact, be distilled this way.

I've spent much time of late thinking about a quote from Liz Funk, the Gen Y author of 'Coming of Age in a Crap Economy.' In a recent interview, Funk noted that today's young people, who are starting their adult lives at a particularly bad time, were often raised by people who faced a similarly difficult start. Funk suggests that there's hard-won wisdom available from the people who became adults during the 'malaise' era of the Carter presidency and the contracting economy of the early Reagan years. I'm one of those people. And I think Funk is right about us, although perhaps not in the way she thinks. We children of the tail end of the baby boom have been through this. Our experience is unlike that of the rest of the boomers, and dramatically different from that of Gen X. Our experience is like yours, Gen Y. And we know something you should know -- the financial crisis could be the best thing that ever happened to you. And if you, Gen Y, remember this, then you could be the best thing that ever happened to the country.

In recent months, Americans have been mindful of multiple attempts by banks to raise existing fees or introduce new ones. Bank of America’s $5 debit-card fee debacle is an obvious example. But, consumers should not forget that there are other expenses that deserve the same attention.

For some people, there's no greater injustice than missing out on a seasonally-available food item. It seems this feeling is more pronounced when a product is artificially seasonal. The limited springtime availability of McDonald's Shamrock Shake and Cadbury's Creme Eggs are more likely to inspire rage than soft-shell crabs' or ramps' short seasons, which are dictated by Mother Nature, and not a corporation's bottom line. It seems likely that it's the awareness of being manipulated through arbitrary seasonality that inspires this rage.