PODCAST: How to Find a Job After Graduation, with Beth Handler-Grunt

PODCAST: How to Find a Job After Graduation, with Beth Handler-Grunt

Today’s successful job applicants need to know how to ace the virtual interview and be prepared to do good old-fashioned research and networking. Also, gas prices are high, but try a little global perspective,

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Transcript

David Muhlbaum: Welcome to Your Money ’ s Worth . I’m kiplinger.com senior online editor David Muhlbaum, joined by my cohost, senior editor Sandy Block. How are you doing, Sandy?

Sandy Block: I’m good. How was your road trip last weekend? I think you went to Chicago.

David Muhlbaum: Yes, there and back in one weekend to pick up a kid from college. A lot of miles. There’s a lot of bug jerky still plastered on the front of my car.

Sandy Block: Well, in Michigan we get fish flies and that’s worse. But you used a lot of gas, right? I hope you got the most out of all of your fuel-saving tips .

David Muhlbaum: Well, I can choose what metrics I want the car to show on the dash, and yeah, I had miles per gallon up there. The MPG I’m getting right now, the MPG, since I last filled up, the MPG for the whole trip. Yeah. I had my navigator, my daughter, next to me checking GasBuddy the whole time to find the lowest prices which, as you know, can vary by state.

Sandy Block: Mostly because of taxes.

David Muhlbaum: Yeah. Mostly. As we’ve heard here on the pod , environmental regulations and infrastructure, that matters too.

Sandy Block: Right. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of an article we posted that’s getting a lot of traffic and was actually very interesting to me. It’s a very straightforward title, Gas Prices Around the World . Looking at that list as a reminder, well, and this was even true before, anyone who’s gone overseas knew this, things could be a lot worse. Americans are paying more for fuel these days, but they’re still paying a whole lot less than most other countries.

David Muhlbaum: Hah. I’m glad you saw that piece because I just updated the numbers in it. The simple answer is yeah, we’re in the bottom half for the data source that we used, which is a site called globalpetrolprices.com, petrol being British-speak for gasoline. We are the lowest of what that site calls economically advanced countries.

Sandy Block: Right. You can get gas pretty cheap some places, but they’re not necessarily places you want to go.

David Muhlbaum: Yeah. So Venezuela, Libya, Iran. Yeah. Those are the outliers, the places where gas is sold for — sometimes in limited amounts — for pennies, because of government subsidies. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that those places are oil-producing countries. That’s a significant factor as well. So even though oil is a global commodity, this can matter. But actually just because you have and produce oil doesn’t mean you’re going to make gas cheap. The biggest example of this is Norway, which has oodles of oil and gas, but they tax the heck out of it when it’s sold domestically. Sandy Block: Right. The other example, and this is from personal experience, is Canada which has always had higher gas prices than we do I think basically because of taxes and other things. Years ago-

David Muhlbaum: Right. Another big oil producer.

Sandy Block: Another big oil producer. Years ago, we went there on vacation. We pulled into a gas station and I thought, “Well, that’s not so bad. Gas prices aren’t that bad here. It looks about the same.” Then I realized, of course, Canada is on the metric system and what I was looking at is liters.

David Muhlbaum: Is a liter.

Sandy Block: Not gallons. Once you converted it to liters, you realize that we were paying about twice as much for gas as we would’ve paid in Detroit. The same thing happened with beer. What I thought was a pretty good price turned out to be for a six pack not a case. David Muhlbaum: Canada, they produce oil, they produce beer. I think that there’s a significant flow of gasoline from the United States to Canada — in cars. Sandy Block: Fill up. David Muhlbaum: This is a real phenomenon. People in Windsor, Ontario, they buy their gas in Detroit. They might throw in a 5-gallon for the lawnmower in the back too. Sandy Block: Oh yeah. We’ve got lots of […]

source PODCAST: How to Find a Job After Graduation, with Beth Handler-Grunt

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