Returning to your old workplace

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

Returning to your old workplace

More "boomerang" employees are returning to the jobs they left a year ago, said Charlie Wells in Bloomberg. "In the U.S. in the first quarter of this year, 4.2 percent of all new hires for companies that advertised jobs on LinkedIn were boomerangs, compared with 3.3 percent in 2019." Employers haven't always welcomed returnees, but that's changed in the still-tight labor market. Some companies have even been using boomerang examples on social media to counter the Great Resignation narrative and boast that "the grass isn't always greener on the other side." One downside: When employees return, they're often more expensive. One study comparing boomerangs with employees who had not switched jobs found that they "were paid more but performed on a similar level as employees who stayed."

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Money and mind games

The financial therapy industry is booming, said Charlotte Cowles in The New York Times. The 2008 financial crisis was a wake-up call for many financial planners who weren't trained for handling clients who are "melting down and emotionally distraught." The Financial Therapy Association (FTA) was inaugurated to "spread the awareness of the connections between psychology and personal finance." Now "the uncertainty and anxiety" around the pandemic has lit a flame under financial therapy yet again. In 2019, the FTA introduced accreditation with coursework that "takes three to six months to complete" followed by an exam; interest in the program has surged in recent months. There remains confusion, however, about who can claim to be qualified. And "not all certified financial therapists are licensed mental health workers."

A gusher at the University of Texas

Thanks to the dramatic increase in the price of oil and a quirk of history, the University of Texas could soon surpass Harvard as the richest university, said Spencer Jakab in The Wall Street Journal. UT was seeded 146 years ago "with vast but seemingly not very valuable scrubland to fund its operations." That's now part of the country's "most prolific oil and natural-gas patch." While at many universities "oil has practically been a four-letter word," it propelled UT's endowment of $42.9 billion last year; the number has grown since. One caveat: The UT money is "spread over about 13 times as many undergraduate and graduate students combined as Harvard's."

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