OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

Many of us are now a full month into social distancing, and things are starting to get nasty on social media. As a financial professional, I've seen firsthand the fear of small business owners whose businesses have been deemed non-essential and ordered to temporarily close. I've helped some make the heartbreaking decision to furlough loyal, long-time employees in order to help ensure the survival of the company so those employees have a job to return to when this crisis has passed. And the business owners I work with are better off than most - most of them had a cash reserve going into this "intentional recession" - but even the ones with robust savings will feel the strain if their businesses remain closed for more than another month. The "help" promised by the government in the form of the PPPL and EIDL has fallen short. I'm concerned many small businesses that survive the initial crisis will ultimately close when they are unable to make their loan...

I hope I haven't caused mass hysteria. I hope I haven't sent dozens of people scrambling to their nearest bookstore to purchase books and avoid certain death. Okay, that second one isn't entirely true. If you own a bookstore and notice a spike in sales, you're welcome. Seriously, though, I do  hope you read the headline for this article and clicked on it to find out what on earth I was writing about. (I'll know how many of you did when I check my view count.) With that little headline up there, I intended to spark enough interest to get people to open the article and read it. Why? Because I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want the ego boost I get when I see a high view count for an article. The media wants the same things I do. Ever since the invention of the newspaper, headlines have been written to spark interest. The more sensational the headline, the more likely people were to buy the paper. This meant the paper made money,...