There is a lot to be said about a vacuum that runs good. If you have a vacuum that picks up great, I feel very happy for you. I have just a cheap vacuum from the store and I hate it. Every time I use it, the floor still looks the same. I was complaining to my friend and she told me that I should look into buying a Dyson. She has had hers for the past four years and loves the thing. To me it seems like a lot of money to pay for a vacuum, but I guess if you break it down into how many years she has had it, then it is not too bad. She told me there are some Dyson DC19T2 that can be found on the computer and I might want to look. I found a really good price on one and have decided to order it. She knows that if it does not work I will be mad at her.

It’s easy to become confused when you’re trying to sell or buy your own home as to how much a property is worth. There are often disparities between the price a surveyor may quote and the figures that are available on home buying websites, estate agents and the government’s figures which it uses to inform policy and economic strategy.

The Land Registry has been recording house price data since 2000 and using data that goes back to 1995. The information they gather is the final settlement price that is agreed on the each house sold. Using the Repeat Sales Regression the changes in property value can be assessed and the value of a particular area extrapolated. This means that the system only records the price of properties that are actually sold. While only a few exceptions are excluded, these include business properties, council houses and flats sold at a discount, repossessions and those homes sold off in order to facilitate a divorce are excluded form the registry in order to prevent queering the pitch. Because the data can be added together and then divided by number of house sales an average for any location, district or post code.

The government also provides its own monthly house price index. This covers the UK as a whole and is based on information provided by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. This takes a large sample, around 60%, of completed house sales which have been bought with the help of a mortgage. Of course this excludes homes which are exchanged, bought with private funds et cetera.

Surveys provided by mortgage providers and banks are weighted toward transactions while the Department for Communities and Local Government survey relies on the total amount of money spent by the purchaser. This means that homes in the south east, especially in London, where the price of housing is much higher than the national average, will have a bias effect on the government’s figures for the nation overall.

The UK’s biggest mortgage lenders, the Halifax Building Society and Nationwide both provide data for the whole of the UK but are based upon information relating to their monthly lending, meaning that the information is based upon mortgage applications rather than the actual price that the property realises. The two lenders use the same sampling methods but necessarily take information from different samples meaning that the information they come back with can differ both in terms of monthly changes and annual price patterns. Again, like the government’s figures, they are only privy to data where a mortgage has been used in the buying process.

The surveys carried out by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors is inclined to reflect consumer confidence rather than provide empirical data on the housing market. Estate agents from across the country complete a survey offering opinion on whether they feel prices are rising or falling in their area each quarter. While this seems rather subjective and liable to error, it does provide a consistently accurate barometer of price changes on the market.

They say a change is as good as a rest and as long as we’re still battling our way through the cold winter nights now is as good a time as any to give your home that much needed revamp. The best thing about giving your home a bit of a facelift is it doesn’t have to cost a fortune; here are a few simple ways to give your favourite rooms an update on a budget.

Add A Splash Of Colour

The best way to give any room a fresh new feel is by changing the colour scheme and this can be easily done without spending lots of cash on expensive wallpaper or spending hours repainting all the walls. Let’s start with the windows, it’s so easy to find quality cheap window blinds and they’re really quick and easy to install too. Choose something in a cheerful colour like orange or yellow to give your windows and your room a warm feel and you’ll find your mood instantly lifts when you’re in that room.

Accessorise

Now you know what colour scheme you’re going to be working with you can pick up other simple accessories to compliment it, things like the lamp shades, throws for the furniture and even cheap rugs can help change the overall colour of any room without having to go anywhere a paint brush. If you do want to inject some colour into the walls pick a large wall hanging or just pain the one wall, so long as the rest of the room is accessorised properly it won’t look out of place.

Clear That Clutter

You’ve given your room a whole new feel without having to drastically redecorate and without breaking the bank. Now it’s time to build on it so look at what you’ve got on display. If you’re looking at a family room like the dining room or living room you’ve probably got lots of clutter so decide what really needs to be left out and find a home for everything else. Have a scout round the local charity and junk shops and you’re bound to come across an old wooden chest which can sit in almost any room with a lick of paint or throw over it. Most homes have the standard items on display but if you honestly never drink out of the stunning crystal champagne glasses you got as a wedding present or if you haven’t read any of the books on the bookcase since you were at university replace them with something the suits your style a little better. You want to feel relaxed when you come home so only have the items you really love on show.

Have A Shift Around

The last simple thing to try is rearranging some of the furniture, obviously some things aren’t going to be negotiable but you’d be amazed at how much difference having the sofa against a different wall can make.  It’s not just a larger piece of furniture that can help revamp a room, moving a lamp to a new surface or placing a clock on a different wall can have just as big an impact. The art of Feng Shui believes where you place certain items in the room has an impact on the energy of that room, things like having an even number of chairs in a room, always having the sofa against a wall and always having circular instead of square tables is thought to being a harmonious vibe to the home.

Unfortunately, I seriously under-estimated the costs of living and how banks generally don’t have a sense of humour when it comes to extending credit once they have a good idea of your regular income! I soon found myself having to eke out costs on a number of credit cards and not being the most organised of souls I confess to missing a couple of payments here and there. I caught up with them pretty quickly but ended up having to pay what I thought were fairly punitive charges, and once or twice this pushed me over my monthly limit at the bank and they clobbered me with fees too!

Once you get into a situation like that it’s easy to see how debt can be a self-perpetuating spiral. Unless you are 100% on top of your repayments (and this includes ensuring payment amounts clear with enough working days before weekends and holidays) it’s easy to fall foul of repayment deadlines and find yourself even more out of pocket. There were times I seriously regretted having carelessly signed away to store cards and the like without scrupulously reading the terms and conditions, along with the charging schedule for late payments. My fault, of course.

Then came a huge change in circumstance and I needed to get myself some transportation. As this would involve some major, regular travelling I didn’t want to get myself some cheap, second-hand piece of junk that would end up costing more in the long term through repairs and breakdown recovery. Besides, I felt I owed myself a little congratulatory treat and so I found myself at a local car dealership, looking at the new and nearly-new models on the forecourt.

The test drive went well, the salesperson was persuasive, and so I found myself going through the initial paperwork. I could almost visualise myself in the new car until it came to the credit check.

Although the dealership wasn’t crowded, words cannot explain the feelings of being told in pubic that credit had been refused. I was astounded: I’d been careless in past yes, but I thought I’d got back on track and the latest purchase wouldn’t have driven me beyond my means . . . I’d at least learned some lessons from my previous mistakes. With cheeks burning, I left the dealership in a hurry and resolved to see what I could about this pessimistic opinion about my creditworthiness.

The first step was to find out what exactly the credit agencies had on file about me. I was relieved to learn that most credit checks are made with one out of three major reference agencies and, even better, they were legally obliged to divulge their records.

After sending a £2 admin fee plus a form of identification, they sent over a printout of my credit history. Although it didn’t contain an actual score (although that was available for a subscription fee, which I didn’t bother with) I could see right away that several credit blunders I’d made in the past were there for all to see, plus a couple I thought had long been resolved. I had to admit that if I were a lender, there wasn’t much on these reports that would convince me to lend money to myself, either!

After sending off a written request to correct some details on there, I checked out some credit help websites to see what else I could do.

The first thing was to register on the electoral roll. I’d never really bothered to do this as I thought it was just an easy way for people to bother me at election day, but this turns out to be a major mistake. I guess that’s part of the trade-off of making your details available to Big Brother – they feel a bit happier about extending you credit when they know where you live!

Most of the sites explained a great deal about limited expenditure and meeting repayments. Ironically this was one area where after my initial mishaps I was actually pretty good at. I thought that having my account in credit at the end of the month was a positive thing, but it hadn’t done a great deal to help the overall perception of my credit score.

The other major eye-opener was that my actual record of paying credit (that is, credit I’d been extended on cards and the like) wasn’t great. I may have had more cash in the bank, but my history of credit repayments was a bit spotty, having ditched most of the cards I’d taken out once the balance had been eventually cleared.

The next bit was more difficult as I needed to get a credit card to help establish a track record of paying credit, but of course the only cards I stood a chance of being accepted for were ones with higher interest rates, designed for bad credit folks like me, I guess. Fortunately I’d been warned about re-applying for credit cards after refusals, or else I might have kept applying for low rate cards I never stood a chance of getting. This would have wrecked my rating even more! Another example of how being in bad credit can be one of those loops where you can end up getting deeper in trouble if you are not careful.

Over the next six months I used my new credit card to put a little on my credit limit (never enough to risk going over it) and religiously paid off the full amount to avoid the interest charges on the balance. This perhaps is the least fun part about credit repair, as like tackling debt problems it usually means having to limit your outgoings to make sure you have enough cash to cover repayments. The good news is that it isn’t forever, and on my next trip to the car dealership, I left as a proud owner of a nice, shiny (nearly) new car!

Pasta

Pasta, especially brown or wholegrain, is a great food for sustainable energy (although make sure you leave enough for you to digest it before you start running around). Keeping you going for longer than sugary snacks, you can also eat it in a variety of ways. Take it from me that nothing beats a nice hot lasagne before a cold night out on the pitch!

Flapjack

Oats are an incredible slow release energy source, and what better way to enjoy them than in the form of a delicious flapjack? Although not something you should live off, the sugar gives you a quick initial boost while the oats keep you going for the long term.

Brownies

A bit of a guilty pleasure of mine (and one certainly not good for long term energy!). However, if made with dark chocolate then they technically contain a fair amount of helpful antioxidants, and the addition of nuts can also result in a number of other health benefits. Whatever kind of chocolate you use, chocolate is definitely good for an instant energy boost, it also tending to contain that classic energy-booster caffeine. My attempts at justification aside, what would you rather do: look up heating oil prices or eat a tantalisingly warm brownie or two?

Gardening offers numerous benefits for those that choose to take it up as a hobby. One of the more important of those benefits is that it makes us more self-sufficient. Even if we grow flowers, we learn skills that could be turned to producing our own food. The tips outlined in this article will help you toward that goal.

It is crucial that you have the proper tools before starting a garden. You do not want to begin the process of starting a garden only to realize that you are in need of a tool you do not have. Try to get shovels, trowels, pruners, hoes, garden forks, and rakes.

When buying a shade tree, buy a smaller seedling that has been grown in a pot. Buying a larger tree seems like a better idea, but it has to be dug out of the ground. This damages the root system of the tree, so it spends its first growing years replacing those roots. The potted seedling, however, can immediately start growing new leaves and branches.

When your summer blooms have bloomed and faded away, remember to dead-head the flowers. This means pinching off the flower heads. This will encourage new flowers to bloom longer next year, and it will also strengthen the plant. Since the flower heads have seeds, you can also save the flower heads that you have pinched off for planting at another time.

Winter season does not mean that a gardener can’t grow beautiful and delicious herbs. Many cool-weather herbs can be grown if placed in a sunny location of the garden. Try growing favourite herbs that do well in colder months of winter like basil, sage, dill, cilantro, borage, catnip and many varieties of mint.

Before settling on your garden space, visit it at multiple times throughout the day. You need to understand what type of light the spot gets on an hourly basis, as it can have ramifications on the plants you can grow and your ability to grow anything at all! If the location receives no direct sunlight, reconsider your options.

You must water your plants correctly, to achieve success with your garden. When watering your garden, always try to do it early in the morning or in the evening, when the sun has gone down. This gives the soil a chance to actually soak up the water without it evaporating. Also, if you have pots, try to hand water them with a can, rather than using a hose. This way you can make sure that each pot gets enough water, since potted plants can dry out completely in a matter of hours, if they haven’t had a deep watering.

Don’t grow food no one will eat. Just because you can grow something, doesn’t mean you should. If your kids don’t like spinach now, fresh spinach from the garden isn’t going to change that and much will go to waste. Consider what you and your family like to eat and then determine your garden accordingly.

Gardening does indeed go hand in hand with many benefits. There are numerous societal benefits to gardening. Whether we are growing food plants or purely decorative ones, they all add to the aesthetics and beauty of our world. Gardening provides even more important benefits to the gardener, by instilling a sense of self-sufficiency. It’s funny what you can learn on a night in, in front of your Samsung TV, isn’t it!

Show your partner how good you are by following these simple pieces of advice, you still have the time to ensure everything is perfect for that night that the ladies love so much. It is not only about planning to take the partner out either, as Valentines day is the perfect time to plan a romantic gesture for your object of desire.

Ask Early

If you have a long term girlfriend, wife or partner, let them know that you are keeping it in your mind by making sure they know you intend to spend Valentines day together well in advanced. It is not uncommon for the ladies to have plenty of single friends about or a friend who’s birthday also happens to fall on Valentines day.

If you are planning a night of seduction and attraction for someone you have had your eye on for a while, then you have to plan exactly when you are going to ask her as leaving it too late will come across as too desperate to bag a date and if you ask too early, you risk her holding out for a better offer.

Want to be precise? Ask between the 6^th and the 9th to give her and yourself enough time to plan the evening to perfection.

Plan In Advanced

You can’t expect there to be any spaces left for the Valentines Day meal if you are trying to book the table on the day or the day before. So try and consider where the lady would most like to go and book the most romantic table as soon as you can.

Getting too and from the destination is a big deal as well, ensure you have a taxi booked in advance to take you anywhere you plan, as the last thing you want to do is have to wait for a train or a bus.

You could go one better and pan a limousine, a lot will be doing multiple trips so booking one where a time conveniently fits into the plans of the driver then you are sure to score valuable points, even if it is just a one way trip.

Doing Gifts?

The general rule of thumb is if you have a long standing partner, then buying a gift is a must. If it is a blooming relationship, a romantic gesture will suffice such as flowers, a bottle of sparkling Rosé wine or a box of chocolates.

A thoughtful card with a nice message in is an absolute necessity though.

Long Term Partner

• Spa Gift Vouchers – Sanctuary Spa
• Beauty Products – The Beauty Room and Feel Unique
• Holiday Deals – Lastminute.com

New Object of Desire

• Flowers ­– Interflora
• Wine – Marks and Spencer
• Chocolates – Thorntons

Everyone

• Cards – Hallmark

On the Night

She accepted your invitation, great news, you have planned the most romantic table at the nicest restaurant you could find. Make sure you dress to impress, shirt, tie, polished and clean shoes, get a hair cut and make sure you are cleanly shaven. Be on time, not early, definitely not late and help her in and out of every doorway and pull out every chair.

Chivalry is perhaps the most important aspect of the date and is key to impressing and remember chivalry doesn’t cost a penny!

The other side of this equation of this equation is the lenders: following the crash the banks can no longer trade and dispose of high risk debts, so despite being assisted by cash bailouts and a stay of execution on the Vickers report recommendations, are increasingly reluctant to lend to poor credit risks.

If you are in the position of being refused credit, there are some practical steps you can take to help address this and improve your prospects so that better credit options will be open to you. None of this can be achieved overnight however, and if you are trapped in a pattern of debt or poor control over your finances, you will need to address this first for this strategy to work.

Firstly, obtain a copy of your credit report. This is a score that the main credit reference agencies keep on you and is consulted every time you apply for a form of credit. Even card companies that offer a “no check” credit card will check with the credit bureaus. No-one, especially given the state of the global economy, is going to lend money to anyone without assessing the risk involved in getting the money paid back. There is no such thing as a “no check” credit card. Companies that market this will offer a higher rate card once they establish you fail the criteria for their main product, or else refuse completely.

The good news is that you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report (although there is usually a small admin/postage charge of about £2). The details of the agencies you need to contact in the UK are:

Equifax Ltd
Credit File Advice Centre
PO Box 1140
Bradford
BD1 5US
0844 335 0550
www.equifax.co.uk

Callcredit Plc
Consumer Services Team
PO Box 491
Leeds
LS3 1WZ
0870 060 1414
www.callcredit.co.uk

Experian Ltd
Customer Support Centre
PO Box 8000
Nottingham
NG80 7WF
0844 481 8000
www.experian.co.uk

Each of the agencies calculates its own score, and their overall rating will differ. They also offer subscription services which provide access to your report in greater detail, but this usually involves registering a payment card; be careful that you cancel this before your free introductory period expires if you don’t wish to continue paying for this.

Check the details on your credit report: it may be an error that is causing problems or you may have been the victim of fraud and debt attributed to you that you had no knowledge of. Contact the agencies with any corrections immediately. Late or missed payments on cards can linger on your file for over a year, if they have been settled with the creditor, get these cleared off your file and your overall assessment score will rise.

If you are not on the electoral roll (either new to the country or just turned 18), then this is another essential step in improving your credit report. Credit agencies like people they can trace to an address, so supplying proof of this with the electoral roll goes a long way to helping your credibility, as does staying at a given address for longer than a year.

In some cases, financial troubles in the past will be on your report. Things like bankruptcies or County Court Judgements (CCJs) create significant warning signals and will take some time to clear before they stop negatively affecting your credit applications.

Firstly, leave some time before applying for credit after a recent bankruptcy or CCJ. Some sources suggest four months, others recommend six. In any case, if you are refused for credit of any kind (particularly a credit card), don’t immediately re-apply or apply for another card. Refusals also appear on your credit record and a number of refusals in a short period of time will do more damage to your credit rating. Wait at least a month after a card refusal to apply again and be realistic in our expectations: applying for low interest cards with high credit limits when you have a poor credit score isn’t likely to be successful. You may have to settle for a sub-prime card that has a lower limit and higher APR (this reflects the “risk” the lender takes by lending you credit), however if you pay this back in full every month you will not be hit by the higher interest rate and will also be sending positive signals to the credit agencies about your reliability at repaying credit.

If you are having credit issues, make sure that any scheduled loans you need to make payments on are met and that money reaches the creditor and clears in their account ahead of weekends and bank holidays. This will save you being hit by penalty fees and expensive additional interest, protecting all the hard work done to improve your credit rating. Talk to a credit counsellor or consider reducing your lifestyle outgoings if it looks unlikely that you will be able to meet your repayment obligations. Unless you can show regular and continued process of reducing your credit deficit, it’s unlikely that your score will improve significantly (the same principle applied recently to countries unwilling to implement deficit reductions – their national credit ratings were reduced).

In this provocative book, economist and work/life expert Robert Drago constructs a unique vision of the meaning of balance, unmasking the real reasons most Americans lead unbalanced lives. Sifting through the vast body of relevant research from a range of academic disciplines, including new findings from the author’s own studies, Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life examines the deeply held but unexamined beliefs about work, womanhood, and society that are responsible for our out-of-balance lives. In his optimistic final chapter, Drago calls on us to challenge those beliefs and provides a roadmap for change. If we take this path, he argues, we will not only improve life balance but also address the nearly one-fifth of our population who require but do not receive adequate care, the “new gender gap” between women who care for others and women who succeed in high-powered careers, and even the rise in income inequality.

The Boston Globe says:
A book on systemic obstacles to better work-life balance is not a beach read. But labor economist Robert W. Drago’s clearly argued volume gives us something that’s in short supply: Perspective. “In Striking A Balance: Work, Family, Life,” (Dollars & Sense), this respected researcher explores three growing gaps in society related to income, care, and gender. The widening gap between rich and poor is a concern, as is the substandard care received by many of our elderly and children.

Midwest Book Review says:
Written by Robert W. Drago (Professor of Labor Studies and Women’s Studies, Penn State University), Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life is not a self-help book for the individual, but rather a scholarly examination of the modern societal problems of the care gap (too many children, elderly, and disabled, particularly among the poor, are not getting the care they need), the gender gap (women are forced to choose between success in their careers and providing adequate care to their children, or any other form of care work for low or no pay) and the income gap (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer). At the heart of these problems is not just cold hard economics, but also societal norms – the “motherhood norm” that insists women should provide care for little or no pay; the “ideal worker norm” that conditions employers to expect their workers to put in long hours up to an inhuman level; and the “individualism norm”, a society-infused belief that the government should not help those needing care. Striking a Balance prescribes society-wide remedies to these growing problems: paid family leave, early childhood education and child care financing, guaranteed health insurance, and a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation, and the simple importance of allowing men and women from all walks of life to have their voices heard. Extensively researched, Striking a Balance: Work Family Life is a persuasive academic treatise about the need for social change, and highly recommended for reading for not only college library shelves, but also anyone looking for a better understanding of why the government needs to pay more attention to minimum wage, health care, and paid family leave issues.

Bob Drago provides us with a powerful new framework to help solve the problem of imbalance in contemporary society— some people have too much work, many have too little income and not enough care-giving, and virtually everyone suffers from a lack of gender equality. To the work-life paradigm he adds the almost forgotten concept of leisure, with surprising results. His real-life solutions are inspiring, his policy prescriptions are simple, clear, and mercifully few. This book is an enjoyable, engaging read. Read it and change your life and the world.
—Heidi Hartmann, Ph.D., President, Institute for Women’s Policy Research

Framed in terms of the care gap, the new gender gap between mothers and others, and the widening income gap, this lively and accessible book makes it clear why so many of us find it difficult to strike a balance in our lives. It can be read with profit by students of labor economics, those concerned with women and work, or anyone who has ever had to juggle the demands of care and career.
— Eileen Appelbaum, Director, Center for Women and Work, and Professor, School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University

It is hard for American working parents to achieve balanced lives, but as Bob Drago argues in this important and timely book, we can change that. We know we have a crisis when, as his research shows, over half of the mothers who teach college chemistry and about 40 percent who teach English say that they returned to work sooner than they wanted after having a child because they wanted to be taken seriously as academics, and many of them felt forced to choose their work over their children. Rather than groaning about forced imbalance, however, Drago powerfully marshals the evidence and points to the models we need to create balance for both sexes. A must read for us all.
—Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind and The Commercialization of Intimate Life

This book is for anyone who feels that life is complicated and getting more so all the time. In clear language Drago gives data to show that Americans are working more and defines 3 important gaps Americans face: a care gap, a gender gap, and an income gap. These are interrelated, of course, as Drago makes clear. And he contributes to our understanding of the gender gap by expanding it to include the gap between women who are involved in actual care work (whether paid or not) and those successful in professional jobs and hence not directly involved in care. He anchors his discussion in three norms, all of which contribute to these gaps: motherhood, ideal worker, and individualism, and supports his discussion with both data and stories. A particularly interesting formulation is his definition of balance, by which he means involvement in all three of paid work, unpaid work, and leisure. He describes the kind of social infrastructure necessary to support such balance for all people in our society and ends with a work and family bill of rights. A great discussion of the challenges we all face.
—Lotte Bailyn, T Wilson Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

Written by a true scholar in the work/family domain, this book captures twenty years of research, including the most current. Further, it is eminently readable for scholars, practitioners, and working parents. sensible and empathic.
—Patricia Raskin, Associate Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Bob Drago has long been recognized as a leader in the work-life balance world through his work with Take Care Net and on the Work and Family Bill of Rights. After decades in the wilderness, many of us have reached a shared vision of what does and doesn’t help us to lead balanced lives. Drago captures this new consensus, explains why it has taken so long for us to reach this point, and provides a blueprint for change. Anyone stressed about their own lives, and what to do about it, should read this interesting, insightful, wise, and humorous work, and then join with Drago and others to change things.
—John de Graaf, Author of AFFLUENZA

This excellent analysis of the current state of working and trying to live at the same time in America is a great wakeup call from the overwork hypnosis reining for too long. Unlike in other advanced nations, we’ve never had a real national conversation about the impacts of large numbers of caregivers in the workplace and skyrocketing workweeks. Drago makes those repercussions of work without end very clear, in imploding families, skyrocketing health costs and absentee lives. Armed with a trove of research, he shows us not only the downside, but also a way out, when we can see the unconscious norms that skew our value system and sanity–the ideal worker norm, the motherhood norm, and the individualism norm. This much-needed book should should be required reading for every exec, congressperson, and presidential-candidate policy guru in the land.
—Joe Robinson, Author and founder of Work to Live (www.worktolive.info) in Santa Monica, Calif.

About the Author

Robert Drago is Professor of Labor Studies and Women’s Studies at Penn State University , is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, is a co-founder and co-chair of the Take Care Net , is past president of the College and University Work-Family Association, and moderates the Workfam newsgroup on the internet. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and was a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar.

The author of four books and over 70 articles, his most recent book is Striking a Balance, published by Dollars & Sense in 2007. His research, largely funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, concerns working time flexibility, biases against caregiving in the academic workplace, the decline of women in intercollegiate coaching, and public policies for working families.  He is a frequent contributor to major media outlets, and has provided Congressional Briefings sponsored by Senators Clinton, Kennedy, and Obama, among others. He was the 2001 recipient of the R.I. Downing Fellowship from the University of Melbourne, serves on the board of the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, and is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families and the International Association for Feminist Economics.