So you're glad you're not a Wall Street trader these days? At least they banked fat salaries and maybe got a golden parachute. The story's not so green at your local restaurant. These are bad times to be a server. Dangerous, even, because their tips have plummeted faster than the Dow Jones.

One New York City waiter has said that the bottom has fallen out for America's service professionals. He wrote that early this year, he'd make about $500 a week over five shifts. This summer, restaurant sales fell for the first time in two and a half years. Today, $270 for a full week is typical. People are guarding their cash, and they aren't coming into restaurants as much anymore. When they do, they're increasingly cheap. The 20% tip, once more or less standard for good service, is a memory. Some customers are merely rounding up to the nearest dollar.

The horror of this comes from the fact that many of our service professionals are vulnerable even in the best of times. They simply don't make an adequate hourly wage -- it's below minimum wage. They usually don't get insurance. They can be fired at the drop of a napkin. The expectations have been that they'd make plenty to live on through their gratuities, and if that failed, they could just switch to another restaurant. But with more people paying less in service charges, and with few places in need of new staff, that is now just a fantasy.

Most customers would never consider walking out of a restaurant without paying their bill in full. That would be theft. But because tips are discretionary, there are plenty of cheapskates who think nothing of bolting without a proper tip, or of justifying a dramatically reduced tip with some minor infraction. And now waiters (and bellhops, and valet parking attendants, and dozens of other ubiquitous workers) are finding it impossible to make their rents.

So you buy an airfare at a ridiculous price -- or even a good one. And a week later, the airline decides it hasn't sold enough seats. Rather than fly an empty plane, which would cost it money, it slashes the prices on seats. Come the day of the flight, you turn to the person sitting next to you and learn, to your disgust, that they paid $200 less than you did.

What can you do? Well, by the time you're on the flight, often nothing. But if you discover you've paid more than you had to before you have used the ticket, you can usually petition the airline for the price difference. Usually, that refund comes in the form of a voucher that you use for future travel, but that's still money you don't have to spend later on.

But, surprise! Some airlines have a nasty trick up their sleeve. Many charge obscene change fees since, the way they see it, they have to pull your old ticket and issue a new one to give you the better price. That means that for domestic flights on U.S. Airways, Continental, and American, the price has to drop by more than $150 in order to give you an ultimate benefit. But plenty of other airlines don't charge any fee at all (JetBlue, Alaska, United), or their fee is small enough to give you pretty good chances (Northwest's is $50, AirTran's $75). The fees are usually steeper for international flights, but then again, the price drops stand to be higher for those, too.

After you book a flight, you could keep returning to the airlines' websites to double-check the rate status of your booked flights. That will work. But one of the lesser-known airline booking sites, Yapta, keeps tracking the price of the stuff you've bought, and if it descends past the point where you can actually make some money back, it alerts you by e-mail. (The site, like Hotwire's Trip Watcher and Farecast, will also keep an eye on rates for flights you haven't bought.) Every bit helps, right? Maybe the amount you save will pay for a pack of peanuts. Barely.

During the summers when I was in college, I was a waiter and came to quickly appreciate the skills needed for such a job. I never really managed to get very good as a waiter, or server, as it's often called.

I was a terrible waiter -- I was the guy you'd hear dropping a plate of dishes. Once I spilled a gallon of milk in the kitchen, and then ended up slipping on it. During a particularly busy period when I was the only waiter on duty, I once delivered a guy his salad -- after he and his family were finishing their dessert.

I never really loved my job. I was always too stressed out, trying to remember the orders, which I wrote down but still had trouble remembering who had what and deciphering my handwriting; I kept half-hoping I'd be fired, but I think it was hard for the manager to find anyone willing to work at this restaurant, which was adjoining a sleepy hotel off an interstate, and so somehow, they kept me on. And so I toiled away, exhausted, anxious and klutzy, but there were bright moments: my tip.

No one used to talk about this. But in the past year, several friends, all of them travelers I trust, have told me that when they stay at hotels, they always leave a few bucks on the nightstand for the hotel housekeeping staff.

News to you? This concept is growing. Call it Tipping Creep, which is the slow introduction of new optional surcharges in the world's service industries. But when to do it, where, and why are still open questions.

I asked one friend, who travels a lot for work, why she does it. "Because someone told me once that you should," is all she could think of. Not surprisingly, her rules are fuzzy: Leave money when she's staying for a few days, but not if she's only there for a night or two. Presumably, tipping in that way might encourage better service over time.

And there you have the two rationales for tipping: Because the staff needs it and because it buys better service.

We all do it. When we're planning a trip to an unfamiliar city or we're looking for a new hole-in-the-wall for a dinner date near home, we poke around online for reviews of local restaurants.

But on some sites, reviews are serving up a steaming plate of B.S.

WalletPop told you about the hugely popular Yelp, which has been accused of extorting restaurants and shops that got received bad reviews. For a price, says a San Francisco CBS affiliate, Yelp will move the badmouthing blurb lower down the page, potentially out of sight. One sofa store owner paid Yelp $350 a month to bury her embarrassing reviews.

Last year, one New York City hotel was awarded a five-star review by an effusive reader of TripAdvisor. Except the hotel hadn't even completed construction yet. Public relations flacks were suspected.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. TripAdvisor says it tries to weed out these obviously false postings. But some readers allege it swerves too far even in that. One travel expert about Hawaii accuses TripAdvisor of twice killing reviews that conflicted with its paid sponsors. For sites like these, integrity is everything. Many publications, though, don't have the resources to do the follow-ups necessary. Increasingly, the phonies are not apparent.

I've complained before on WalletPop about how everyone and their brother expects a tip these days. A tip jar at the dry cleaner? A tip jar at Starbucks after I buy a $4.00 coffee??? I'm sick of everyone expecting tips for merely doing their jobs, and someone at Einstein Bros. Bagels agrees with me.

I stop there several times a week for coffee, and am used to the tip jar on the counter. On occasion I drop something in, but since their coffee is self-serve, I don't feel too obligated to contribute. And today that all changed... I paid for my coffee and told the employee to throw my change in the tip jar. And he said they didn't have one anymore.

What? Sure enough, there's even an official sign on the counter, telling customers that no tips are to be left because Einstein Bagels wants their employees to offer good service all the time. The employee reinforced what the sign said, "Management doesn't want us to give good service just because we're getting a tip. They want us to be nice to all the customers."

Someone has heard my plea. Thank you to those at Einstein Bagels who made this decision. I know a tip is just a buck here and a buck there, but it's nice to know that a company believes a customer should get a good product and good service because that's what they pay for.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

Now that Apple has launched the App store for iPhones it is easier than ever to get a hold of your personal finances. Numerous companies have stepped in to fill the app store with personal finace applications ranging from free tip tools to $15 expense trackers. David at MoneyNing.com put in the effort to create a listing of many though not varied personal finance apps for the iPhone.

While there are enough tip calculators to let you eat out every night and still not have to use the same program to go dutch, split the tip and make sure you hit 20% there are quite a few worthwhile apps out there.

Applications which MoneyNing recommends include:

• Bloomberg - Free app which keeps you up to date on stocks.
• Budget - A nice budgeting tool with graphs.
• Expense2Go - Free expense tracking app which makes use of the iPhone camera.
• Mobile Banking - Free banking app for Bank of America customers.
• Pocket Money - A feature rich expense tracking program.
• Save Benjis - Free price comparison tool.

There are many more programs and further analysis of the pros and cons of each app, which is very useful since the App store currently doesn't offer any way to try out applications.

One part of successfully managing your personal finances is the ease with which you can do just that. Spending $5 to enable your iPhone to track your spending may be one of the best investments you make. Especially once you consider how much your new iPhone contract will cost you over the course of your 2 year agreement!

Summer is upon us and if you are anything like me you are ready to fire up your grill for some delicious summer steaks and burgers! If your grill didn't make it through the winter and you need to find a replacement for a season of outdoor cooking, then Consumer Reports has the information you need to make an educated purchase.
Aside from the standard grill purchase guide, it also released a video of quick tips for gas grill shopping.

One of the best pieces of advice for finding a quality grill this summer is to take a magnet to the store with you, (or if you are really frugal, borrow one from the hardware section.) This will let you determine the quality of steel the grill is made out of, the magnet will stick to the cheaper steel mixtures which typically rust quicker, so look for one which doesn't hold your magnet. The video offers additional advice including the importance of stability, external temperature and the grilling area when you make your next grill purchase.

Since our grill is relatively new, all I need to do is get a new grill to place inside and clean up the rest of the body and I'll be flipping steaks and brats quicker than you can say 4th of July! Looking back, I wish I had known these tips when I picked out the grill. While it has held up well so far, I doubt the model we purchased would pass the magnet test, and without an indoor storage place for the winter I'd be surprised if ours made it through another season without significant weathering.

Do you have any grill buying secrets? What is your favorite brand?

Tighter economic conditions are giving waitstaff a double whammy. Not only are food and gas prices rising rapidly, many who work in restaurants are earning less than they used to.

As consumers become more thrifty and eat out less, this hits waitstaff right in the pocketbooks. And when diners do show up, they're often likely to order less (decreasing their bill and therefore the tip if they do a percentage) and some even tip a lower percentage than usual.

Check out this video for some insights on just how much this can hurt restaurant employees:



Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

Last week's story about tips at Starbucks has me thinking again about this topic I hate so much. A judge ruled that the tips left at Starbucks are for the baristas, and that shift supervisors shouldn't get a portion of the tips. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz disagrees, and he says they're not giving the baristas the money for those tips, period. He basically says that the supervisors have every right to be tipped for their good customer service too, and the company isn't going along with the court ruling.

I have an easy solution to this problem at Starbucks: Do away with the tip jars. When I go into Starbucks to buy a grossly overpriced cup of coffee, I expect that the employees actually make the coffee and serve it to me nicely. Isn't that what I should expect for several dollars? Why on earth do I need to tip them in addition? Just for doing their job?

I don't know about you, but I am frankly sick of tip jars everywhere I go. Tipping used to be reserved for restaurants only, as a method of showing appreciation to your server. Good service meant a good tip. Poor service meant a not-so-good tip. It was a simple system and it worked.

If you work at a restaurant or any establishment where you receive tips, you need to be sure to report those tips on your income tax return. This includes any business or job at which tips are received – a casino, drycleaner, hair stylist, manicurist, bell hop, valet, golf caddy, and the like.

The tips you must report include both credit card tips and cash tips. It's tempting to not report the money, especially if the tips are in cash. But beware that the IRS has ways of going after employees for not reporting cash tips. Most notably, they like to look at the documentation related to tips on credit cards, and use that to figure out what you probably received in cash tips.

Your best bet is to keep daily records of the cash tips you receive in case you're ever audited. Just ask any restaurant employee who's been audited for cash tips: It's not pleasant and the IRS will make you prove any numbers that conflict with the amount they think you should have reported. More information on reporting your tips can be found in IRS Publication 531.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.