The Money's Two Cents blog from MONEY magazine was relaunched in October 2009 as More Money. Please visit CNNMoney.com/moremoney for the latest posts.

It's rotten enough, of course, that September's unemployment rate, as reported Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rose to 9.8%; it's looking as if the unemployment rate will reach the 10% mark before the Dow hits its own nice round number of 10,000.

But the numbers are even worse for particular segments of the population. As USA Today reports, the jobless rate for single people is more than double that of married people — 13.5% for the unmarried in August vs. 6.3% for wedded workers. More

Catastrophes or triumphs can define generations. If you're part of "The Greatest Generation," a moniker coined by Tom Brokaw, the Great Depression and World War II molded your early life. And those first 30 years of deprivation and struggle probably influence your decisions now.

Today's Millennials (roughly, Americans born after 1980) haven't had a world war to contend with. But as we speak, their worldviews are being shaped by the most severe recession since the 1930s. Where could that lead?
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If you want to measure the impact of the recession, there’s no better place to look than college financial aid offices. According to a just-released survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, some 90% of colleges and universities reported a spike in financial aid applications during the last admissions cycle. To meet the surge in demand, schools provided financial assistance to a larger number of  students, as well as boosted the amount of grants, loans and work-study.

Another bullet dodged. But the scramble to meet the needs of last year’s freshman class raises a couple of urgent questions. Will the schools be able to provide adequate aid for students applying for next year’s freshman class? And over the long run, will colleges remain affordable for middle-class students? More

This is sure to make financial advisers cringe, or at least send me a few angry emails. German researchers have found that on the whole, investors who use a financial adviser tend to underperform do-it-yourselfers.

Professors from Goethe University Frankfurt gathered data from a large German brokerage firm that allowed its clients to either run their portfolios themselves or use an independent financial adviser. On the whole, the adviser-led clients did better. But the researchers found that clients with advisers tended to be older and wealthier than average. Once the professors controlled for age and wealth, they found that the clients with advisers did worse.
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Of course you already use Google to look up movie times, settle trivia disputes or stalk, er, "research" former flames on the Internet. But the world's most famous search engine can also help you save some dough. Here are five money-saving Google features you might not know about:

1. Google 411

I only learned about this one when my uncle — who lives in Pakistan, no less — emailed to tell me about it. More

Mortgage rates are below 5% again. But they might not stay that way for long — even though the Federal Reserve reaffirmed its ridiculously low, 0% to 0.25% target for the federal funds rate.

Yes, it's great for borrowers that the Fed kept its target rate so low. But the text you should really care about is this little tidbit from the Federal Open Market Committee's policy statement:

"To provide support to mortgage lending and housing markets and to improve overall conditions in private credit markets, the Federal Reserve will purchase a total of $1.25 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities and up to $200 billion of agency debt. The Committee will gradually slow the pace of these purchases in order to promote a smooth transition in markets and anticipates that they will be executed by the end of the first quarter of 2010."

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It's not shocking that the National Association of Realtors is working hard to have the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit extended past its current December 1st expiration. But what is surprising is how little public discussion there is of the downside of this extension.

It's a full-court press from the NAR: The powerful trade association has its lobbyists pushing the case on the Hill, and it's asking its members to get the message out too. In a video featuring member Realtors talking up the virtues of the credit, the NAR includes a message superimposed on a wave of stars evoking the U.S. flag: Congress: Don’t Let America’s Real Estate Recovery Expire.
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Employment figures are poor all around, but if there's any class of workers that's held up relatively well, it's the college educated. Unemployment stands at only 4.7% for those with college degrees, versus 9.7% for those holding just a high school diploma, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department.

As much as a college diploma may assist today's youth with their future employment, paying for that education is giving their parents a severe headache. New surveys released by Fidelity Investments, the College Savings Foundation, and Sallie Mae have found that parents understand they're not saving enough, are worried about it, and are even planning to delay their own retirement to pay their kids' tuition.

Saving for college nowadays has been like trying to climb a sand dune: While 63% of parents have started saving for college (versus 60% last year), 43% say that they'll have to delay retirement to pay for it, up from 35% last year, according to Fidelity.
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Will success spoil Mint.com? That's the $170 million question following Monday's news that tax software giant Intuit is spending that whopping sum to buy the startup, which operates a popular, free online service for tracking and managing people's financial lives. (MONEY gave Mint top honors last year when we reviewed four online money trackers, including Intuit's.)

Even though the Internet is all about change, users of both Mint.com and Intuit's free QuickenOnline.com are suddenly anxious about changes that might result from the deal (which is expected to close by year's end). Maybe it's because personal finances are so…you know, personal. More

When the Obama Administration announced the Making Home Affordable program in February, it estimated that the refinancing part of the program, known as HARP, could help as many as four million to five million homeowners with little or no equity (and even up to 5% underwater) refinance into less costly loans. So far it hasn’t exactly played out to expectations. Through July just 60,000 or so homeowners have landed a refi through HARP.

That makes it unlikely that HARP will come anywhere close to delivering on the administration’s goal by the time the program’s current authorization runs out in June 2010. (Its sister program, Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, is authorized through 2012.)

While Treasury has the power to extend HARP past next year's deadline — which won't really help unless Treasury can also arm-twist lenders into doing these deals — a handful of other crisis-induced rule changes will need  Congressional action to be extended beyond this year. More

It's Friday — time to catch up on some of the week's most interesting, and sometimes puzzling, news in the world of personal finance.

1. Thought you had health insurance? Hah! The Washington Post ran a great story Monday about how insurance companies have canceled the health insurance policies of thousands of people after those policyholders have filed for claims related to expensive medical problems. The cancellations, known in the trade as "rescissions," are ostensibly justified by policyholders' failure to disclose previously existing medical conditions — think of someone who survives a heart attack who doesn't admit to cardiac problems when applying for health coverage the following year. The problem, according to the Post, is that rescission has become not only a tool for fighting fraud, but an excuse for insurance companies to weasel out of paying claims. One such case: After a woman filed a claim for emergency gallbladder surgery, her attorney alleges, her health insurer canceled coverage for her and her husband because he had failed to mention his high cholesterol. More

A personal finance course at Wellesley College in Massachusetts is one of America's 10 Hottest College Classes, proclaims The Daily Beast. An impressive feat, given that other courses on the list include a Yale lab that takes students on a trip to an Amazon rain forest and the University of Michigan's History of College Athletics, which brings in storied Big 10 football coaches to address the class.

One former student of the personal finance course told The Daily Beast: "Students take out loans and credit cards all the time without even thinking about it. [The class] should be renamed ‘life skills’ and be mandatory." More

Okay, so that headline packs all the shock value of  "Sun Rises in the East." But given the widespread annoyance so many readers have with their credit card issuers (check out comments to blog posts here and here) I thought it might be, well, satisfying to know card wrath is a bit of a national epidemic.

J.D. Power reports that overall customer satisfaction with credit card issuers hit a three-year low, clocking in at 703 (on a scale of 1000) in 2009. That was slightly lower than the already anemic 710 score from 2008, and is the lowest showing since the firm started looking at credit cards in 2007. More

If you want evidence that our economy may be on the way to recovery, forget about car sales and new home starts and all that stuff — and instead look at men's underpants. If they don't have holes in them, good times may be coming soon.

That's the premise of an interesting theory proffered — at least half seriously — in a recent article in the Washington Post by writer Ylan Q. Mui. "Here's the theory, briefly," she writes. "Sales of men's underwear typically are stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing underwear sales to dip." More