cities

Personal-finance site WalletHub ran the numbers on the job-seeker-friendliness of more than 120 Illinois cities.

Out of all the towns and cities in Illinois' 102 counties, only 2 make the safest cities list.

With this coming Tuesday being Halloween, you might want to know when your little ghosts and ghoulies can head out for their candy run--or, what time the neighborhood monsters will start ringing your doorbell.

If you're beginning to think there isn't a safe place to live in Illinois. Think again. 10 Illinois towns recently made the 100 Safest Cities in America list.

I was just watching something on YouTube that had people from anywhere other than the Midwest trying to pronounce Midwestern place names. As you might imagine, it was pretty humorous to watch folks take on names that we're fairly familiar with, but they had never heard of.

So, have you got your holiday budgeting figured out? You know the drill: how much do I have to spend (assuming you don't want a credit card bomb to go off in your mailbox in January), and how much of it do I spend on the people on my gift list. It might be that your city of residence will help determine the answers.

It doesn't take much perusing of daily news stories to realize that the world is a dangerous place. The same is true if we zoom in a bit to our state, even to our own home towns. If you think Chicago is the only spot in Illinois to be concerned about, you're in for a surprise.

As anyone who lives here in the Rockford area can attest, our city is not without its challenges. However, trying to make ends meet in one of the world's priciest metropolitan areas is not one of them.

It's certainly not the kind of ranking any city aims to receive, but in crunching the numbers from the FBI, which looks at the rates of violent crime in American cities, Rockford ranks high, and that's not good.