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More than 3 million people decided it was worth $99 to get that last-minute present delivered from Amazon Prime last week.

Amazon [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] announced Sunday that a staggering 3 million people joined the membership service during the third week of December, a major record for the company. More than 200 million items were shipped for free over the holiday season this year, Amazon said in a press release Sunday.

More than 3 million people signed up for Amazon Prime in the third week of December.

Amazon doesn’t say how many Prime members exist, but some have estimated as many as 13 percent of Americans – 41 million people – subscribe to the service. That means Amazon boosted its membership by more 7 percent in just week, something that’s pretty much unheard of for a retailer.

Source: Amazon dominates the holidays: Prime adds 3 million members in a week – Puget Sound Business Journal

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Starbucks Corp. [stckqut]SBUX[/stckqut] stands to reap big benefits from the Christmas season through a robust gift-card business that experts say drives loyalty and traffic to the company’s cafes.

“Starbucks has pioneered the development in gift cards,” said Brian Riley, executive adviser and a gift-card expert at CEB, a professional services firm. “They’ve gone beyond the gift card as a transaction device.”

Instead, Starbucks has turned the Starbucks Card into a way to enlist new, repeat customers from the first use.

Starbucks said on Tuesday that it expects a record number of gift-card purchases on Christmas Eve based on the nearly 2.5 million that were purchased in the U.S. and Canada on that day last year. Between October 2014 and September 2015, $5.1 billion was loaded onto cards in those two countries, the company said. Nearly all of the money put on Starbucks Cards — between 97% and 98% — is redeemed, according to Sanja Gould, a spokeswoman for Starbucks.

Source: No one does gift cards like Starbucks – MarketWatch

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This article in the Wall Street Journal is a great reason why you should not rely on Social Security for your income.  You need to have an investment plan that makes Social Security your additional savings and NOT your main savings.

It is beyond the scope of this site to improve the management of your Social Security contributions to the Federal government. However, it is the goal of this site to help you dramatically increase your personal savings so that it can grow to a level that will sustain you in prosperity. I suggest that your first step in this process is to read my book, The Confident Investor. You can purchase my book wherever books are sold such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books A Million. It is available in e-book formats for Nook, Kindle, and iPad.

Enjoy the brief excerpt out of the article and if you are a WSJ.com subscriber, you can read the entire article at the link provided below.

One commonly held belief about the Social Security system is that baby boomers and the generation that preceded them are making out like bandits, draining both the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and leaving little for younger generations.

It is also widely believed—fervently so in some quarters—that the rich don’t pay their “fair share” of Social Security, since the earnings subject to the program’s taxes are capped each year. (The maximum amount of taxable earnings this year is $118,500.)

Do these notions—particularly the latter—stand up? Last month I turned 70 and, thanks to my earnings, became entitled to Social Security’s maximum benefit, currently $3,500 a month, or $42,000 a year. And so, if I live to 90, I will receive $840,000 worth of (inflation-adjusted) benefits.

Over the past 50 years, according to the Social Security Administration, the combined taxes paid into the system by me and my employers equaled $329,640.

This sounds like a good deal—the benefits I would collect over the next 20 years are more than twice what I put in. But the benefits are only about one-third the $2.27 million I would have accumulated had the taxes instead been invested, over time, in a stock index fund.

Source: My Sorry Social Security Return – WSJ

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With the S&P 500 down about 3% this month, the stock market is having one of its worst Decembers on record. Absent a late comeback, what has tended to be the stock market’s best month is looking like a big disappointment.

But why? A good starting point for looking at this selloff is prices. The S&P 500 is trading at about 16 times expected earnings, according to FactSet, putting it at its most expensive level, other than earlier this year, of the past decade. And the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio popularized by Yale University economist Robert Shiller , which seeks to smooth out temporary swings in earnings, is now above 26 times. That puts it well above its half-century average of 20.

When stocks are expensive, they are more vulnerable to bad news. One reason investors haven’t minded paying up for stocks in recent years, however, is that with rates so low, the alternatives of Treasurys have seemed so unattractive. The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise rates last week may helped provoke a reassessment—not because rates are no longer extraordinarily low, but because it is easier for investors to imagine a day when they aren’t with Fed officials projecting they will raise rates by a full percentage point next year.

Source: Why Markets Aren’t in the Holiday Spirit

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As you tackle your finances, look for new opportunities to save, spend and make money. Pass your resume out to recruiters, rethink your insurance and cell phone plans, and pay down high-interest debt rather than sprinkle payments across the board.

  1. Shop the Job Market
  2. Track Your Spending
  3. ‘Ladder’ Your Credit Card Debt
  4. Say ‘No’ to Extended Warranties
  5. Step Up Your Savings Strategy
  6. Hang Up on Cell Phone Contracts
  7. Limit Your Auto Loan to 42 Months
  8. Choose a Fee-Only Financial Advisor
  9. Raise Your Deductible and Reduce Your Withholding
  10. Ignore Expiration Dates on Food and Medicine

Source: 10 Best Money Tips From Clark Howard of All Time | GOBankingRates