Weekly financial Q&A, with items on The Legacy Drawer and land purchases.

This guy knows from experience that the customer is not always right. A.J. Adams’ book contains the 100 best anecdotes from the author’s Web site, and also 100 new stories. Much of it will seem strange to customers not actually portrayed in the volume. But retail employees might find the world the book describes rather recognizable.

A Manhattan fashion photographer for most of the year, Belwing Turkey Farm co-owner Roslyn Dickens spends a little portion of each year raising thousands of turkeys that will eventually become part of Thanksgiving dinner.

The 2011 Lexus LF-A is powered by an all-new 4.8-liter V10 engine so sophisticated it’s built in the same limited-production plant that produces the engines for Toyota’s Formula One race cars. Featuring such track-ready technology as titanium valves, it can rev to a blinding 9,000 RPMs, and make 552 horsepower in the process. Power is fed through a six-speed sequential manual gearbox to the rear wheels.

This Thanksgiving, our budget is tighter than in years’ past, posing a big challenge to this entertaining junkie. I can’t bear the thought of running out of food. I struggle to say “no” to special décor and like to pull together recipes with way more ingredients than servings. This year, I’ll implement a few strategies to ensure that I stay within the entertaining budget and get to enjoy myself a bit, too.

Weekly auto rail, with cold-weather car care tips, Car Q&A with Junior Damato and more.

You've seen the decorations in the stores. That tells me that the year end is approaching, and there may be some last-minute financial moves worth considering.

Congress just threw the beleaguered real estate industry a major lifeline, and a wide range of consumers will also benefit from the homebuyer tax credit extension and expansion.   

Maclaren USA Inc., a popular British company whose strollers typically retail for more than $125, issued a voluntary recall of nine models after receiving 12 reports of children amputating their fingertips on stroller hinges while caretakers were folding or unfolding the strollers.

So your grandmother lives in San Diego and your uncle in Orlando. That’s a recipe for a huge phone bill. How about zero, free, no charge? Now we’re talking. It takes some coordination, but www.Skype.com is revolutionizing the way we phone.

Weekly business rail, with working from home tips, BBB Watch on charity giving and more.

Weekly financial Q&A, with items on ambition and contentment, and marriage and debt.

After entering a store in early October, my son made a beeline to the various Halloween decorations for sale. His excitement was soon tempered by confusion: jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts were competing for shelf space with Christmas tree ornaments and holly. We expected orange and black and instead found green and red.

While I’m certainly no rocket scientist when it comes to elaborate excuses for not completing home improvement projects, I learned early in my work career that employers are a cynical bunch, bent on catching employees who try to trick them out of a work day.

When used to describe money, the word "counterfeit" summons images of shady-looking characters skillfully engraving lead plates and running off near-perfect $100 bills on an old-fashioned sheet-fed press in the basement of some crime lord's mansion. Old mobster movies notwithstanding, it hardly ever works that way, says Secret Service Agent Danny Farris.