The proper way to email your boss

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

Make your résumé longer

The conventional wisdom on résumés is dead wrong, said Mark Abadi at Business Insider​. Invariably, the advice is to keep them to one page. But in a study based on 20,000 résumés sent to 482 recruiters, two-page CVs came out way ahead. The recruiters were asked to screen the documents for a simulated hiring decision. "Out of the 7,712 résumés they approved, 5,375 of them were two pages long, while just 2,337 were one page long." For management-level jobs, 74 percent of the résumés that made it to the next round used the two-page format. The results held even for entry-level jobs, for which relevant experience could easily be compressed into one page. The wildly unexpected results "prove how little we actually know about the art of ­résumé writing, and how much of the advice you hear isn't necessarily based in fact."

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Parents of the bride, beware

"There are so many emotions wrapped up in wedding planning," said Michelle Singletary at The Washington Post, "that affordability can get tossed aside like a garter at the reception." The median cost of a wedding is now $15,000, and typically parents still pay 60 percent of that. According to a 2017 survey of nearly 18,000 newlyweds, 20 percent of parents put expenses on their credit cards, 9 percent dipped into retirement funds, and 3 percent even refinanced their home. Traditionally, the bride's parents pay for the wedding and the groom's for the rehearsal dinner. But traditions change; instead of robbing your retirement, "manage expectations with your head, not your heart."

How to email your boss

Your boss gets 500 emails a day, so most get skipped, said Catie L'Heureux at New York. "Like most of us do, her screen allows her to see only the first few words of an email before she chooses to reply, delete, or ignore it." How do you break through that? First, always start with a question: "Do you think...?" or "Could we...?" or "Will you confirm...?" Another tip: Write "Could you please tell me if...?" and "Would you consider...?" rather than "Can you...?" or "Will you...?" You might worry you'll sound "ridiculously formal," but people will be shockingly nice to you and "move mountains to help," because you sound like a "very nice refined person with poise." Lastly, write "Of course" when your boss asks you to do something, instead of "Sure" or "No problem," because it makes you "sound as if you were already going to do it."