CNBC

"False financial comparisons" can lead anyone to spend beyond their means. Here's what can make people lose sight of reality and overstretch themselves.

London Glorfield can hardly remember a world where smartphones and screens weren't a fixture of his everyday life. The 23-year-old former recording artist was just five years old when the iPhone was first released, and recalls feeling "inundated by tech" growing up. In recent years, Glorfield noticed that both he and his friends were periodically deleting social media apps in an effort to get control over their screen time. "I was spending an exorbitant amount of time glued to my screen, glued to my phone, communicating with fans, friends, etcetera," Glorfield says. "It just made me very, very unhappy."

Goldman Sachs Asset Management is trying to serve more investors looking for downside protection from market turmoil. Bryon Lake helped the firm launch its newest buffer exchange-traded fund this month: the Goldman Sachs U.S. Large Cap Buffer 3 ETF. "I'm an investor. You're an investor. The folks watching are investors, and there's an incredible amount of uncertainty right now: Tariffs, the widening out of equity markets away from Mag 7 [and] geopolitical issues," the Goldman Sachs chief transformation officer told anchor Bob Pisani on CNBC's "ETF Edge."

Silicon Valley's earliest stage companies are getting a major boost from artificial intelligence. Startup accelerator Y Combinator -- known for backing Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe -- this week held its annual demo day in San Francisco, where founders pitched their startups to an auditorium of potential venture capital investors. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC that this group is growing significantly faster than past cohorts and with actual revenue. For the last nine months, the entire batch of YC companies in aggregate grew 10% per week, he said.

When approaching conflict, most people aim to get their way, while others try to find common ground. This is a mistake authors Robert Bordone and Joel Salinas say. In their new book "Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In" the two argue that trying to solve conflict strips the interaction of its value and that you'll gain more from having those tough conversations if you're trying to learn, not trying to win. "We think of conflict as having the possibility for furthering connection and for actually building a relationship," Bordone says. He is the founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

It only took two hours for Krista Ray to sell $25,000 worth of needlepoint canvases after her side hustle, Penny Linn Designs, launched in September 2020. It seemed like an impressive number on the surface, but LeRay and her dad had done the math prior to the site's launch. Each 4-inch-by-4-inch cotton canvas, which sold for $50 each, took six hours to paint over the course of four months. After $7,000 spent on supplies, her profits came out to roughly $2 an hour, she says. "It made me think this could never be my job, just because it's so labor intensive," LeRay, 33, tells CNBC Make It.

President Donald Trump's tariff rhetoric against Canada has only started to heat up, but Vermont's small businesses are already feeling some pain. A shipment of spirits, ordered by the Société des alcools du Québec – an entity that's responsible for the trade of alcoholic beverages in the province – has been sitting on a shipping dock at Montpelier-based Barr Hill by Caledonia Spirits for about a month. The SAQ called off the order shortly after Trump announced the tariffs against Canada in February, according to Ryan Christiansen, president and head distiller at Caledonia Spirits.

Business: Cognizant Technology Solutions engineers modern businesses. Its services include artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services and solutions, consulting, application development, systems integration, quality engineering and assurance. Its segments include Health Sciences (HS), Financial Services (FS), Products and Resources (P&R), and Communications, Media and Technology (CMT). The HS segment consists of health-care providers and payers, as well as life sciences companies. The FS segment includes banking, capital markets, payments and insurance companies. The P&R segment includes manufacturers, automakers, retailers, consumer goods companies, and travel and hospitality companies, as well as businesses providing logistics, energy and utility services. The CMT segment includes global communications, media and entertainment, education, information services and technology companies. Stock Market Value: $39.13B ($79.12 per share)

If Mark Cuban had to start a new business today, it would revolve around artificial intelligence, he has said. The billionaire investor is confident that embracing AI is the key to success for any business going forward. Those that don't move forward with the technology are likely to get left behind, just like companies that didn't adapt to computers and the internet decades ago, Cuban recently told former U.S. senator Jeff Flake during a discussion at Arizona State University. "There's going to be two types of companies in this world: Those who are great at AI, and everybody else that they put out of business," Cuban predicted at the event.

Many people consider roughly $1.5 million the "magic number" for retirement savings, according to a Northwestern Mutual survey of 4,588 Americans. But how long that much money lasts depends on where you live. In addition to Social Security payments, $1.5 million would last a household just 17 years in Hawaii, likely falling short of a full retirement for someone leaving the workforce at 65, according to a new GOBankingRates analysis. In contrast, retirees in West Virginia could stretch the same amount for 54 years — the longest of any state. GOBankingRates based its analysis on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2023 Consumer Expenditure Survey, which looks at how much retirees typically spend each year on essentials such as groceries, housing, utilities, transportation and health care. The data was then adjusted for each state using the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center's cost-of-living index.