This American Life senior producer Julie Snyder found herself in a ten-month battle with her phone company, MCI Worldcom, which had overcharged her $946.36. She spent hours on hold in a bureaucratic nowhere.

What happens if you're poor, and do everything right, all your budgeting, all your choices...are you actually any better off? Actor Liza Colón-Zayas reads a passage from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's book Random Family.

An excerpt of Bernard Cooper's story about the bill he got from his own father, for the entire cost of his childhood. Actor Josh Hamilton reads.

Katy Vine reports on yet another promising young person, Tye Thomas, and how he went through the rise and fall of a full political career, in just one year, at the age of 21, in the Texas town of Gun Barrel City.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Chris Sewell, who was living on the street and yet somehow managed to find $610,940 of lost money that belonged to the city of New York, hidden away on the Internet.

The story of a man who might have a better grip on what's going on in the economy of middle-class America than all the experts you ever read in the paper or see on TV. Dave Ramsey hosts a call-in radio show about personal finance, but he ends up answering questions about more than money.