$12.87 an hour?

"My job sucks."

Everybody I know, black or white, has said this before. But if you're black, you're more likely to mean it and with good reason: a new study from U.C. Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education says more than half of black workers in the US have jobs that, well, suck.

Whether you like your job is irrelevant; the point of the study was to show that race matters when it comes to finding work with decent pay and benefits. 56.4 percent of black workers make $12.87 or less. Only Hispanics had a higher percentage, but it's a good bet those numbers are skewed by immigrants doing manual labor and other low-paying jobs.

At first glance, $12.87 an hour might not sound that bad, but think about it this way: that's less than $28 grand a year, or $514 per week. And that's before taxes. My rent would eat up almost half that.

And you think YOU got it hard.

There's more to this story, I'm sure, but the full report won't come out for a few weeks. I'll come back to it then.

Got! (by online jackers)

A couple months ago, while I was still blogging for AOL Black Voices, I posted an item about preventing identity theft. It's a huge problem, especially given how much business most people do electronically these days (how many times have you punched in your credit card number or address online this month?).

But even though I've talked about this topic on TV before, I never thought I'd know somebody who fell for one of those "phishing" schemes, you know, where they send you an email saying your lost aunt in Nigeria has a trillion dollars for you and all she needs is your social and bank account number to get it to you. They're so obviously scams that no reasonable person, I figured, would go for it.

I stand corrected. A friend of mine who I know is a really smart and pretty sophisticated woman, wasted no time replying with her social security number and bank account pin number after getting an email claiming she has refund money coming from the IRS. The money never came, of course and she spent the rest of her day cancelling credit cards, closing bank accounts and placing fraud alerts in her credit files.

All that is to say that I suppose not even smart people are immune to dumb scams when greed is involved. Free money? Great, here's my info! So in the interest of helping you protect yourself, here's a link to the Federal Trade Commission's tips on identity theft.

Why Blackpeoplesmoney?

First a big shout out to all my former Ways & Means readers who followed me over here. Thanks for sticking with the kid.

With that in mind, one of the faithful W&M readers emailed me a question: Why is this blog called blackpeoplesmoney? Seems self-explanatory, but he had a point: all money is green, it all spends and everybody wants and needs it , no matter what color they are, right?

True. Because this blog is about everyone's favorite topic, money, pretty much anybody can get something out of reading it and I hope they do. But as there are social and cultural nuances to black American life, there are also economic ones. And as a professional business writer, I don't believe those are explored enough in the media, so I took the initiative to do it here.

Now, quick, shameless plug time before I end this: Look out for Ebony magazine's September cover story, written by yours truly. And don't forget that I'm guest-blogging for BET's Meet The Faith show for the next two weeks.

Homless in Prince George's

Even in the wealthiest black county in America, foolishness and foreclosures go hand in hand:

Foreclosures Bloom at Corner Of Prosperity and Gullibility

Check me out on BET.com

Just a quick reminder that my stint as guest blogger for BET's Meet the Faith Program kicks off today and will continue through July 19. As usual, I'm writing about financial matters among African-Americans. You can read it all at www.betintroduces.com/shows/meetthefaith.

Tyra on treating her workers

Tyra Banks says she finds it easier to send her employees on vacation than to splurge on herself -- and that her workers reward her for it.

Kimora Lee Simmons on Learning to Handle Money

Supermodel turned entrpreneur diva Kimora Lee Simmons talks about her biggest money mistake ever and what she learned from it.