Dig deep to fly high

Parents of college kids who haven’t yet booked their flights back to school: You’re in for a world of hurt. Financial hurt, that is.

The days of recessionary come-on fares may not be over, but they’re not happening over this holiday season. Travel experts say holiday airfares are up 17 percent from last year, with no price drops expected anytime soon.

Searching Bing.com for a Jan. 2 flight to Los Angeles, for example, yields a $720 one-way ticket as its best offering. And that’s a red-eye flight with a four-hour layover in Las Vegas. (Other sites improve on that result, but only slightly.) If you can hold off for a midweek flight, it gets better still: $500 or so for that one-way fare.

Of course, if the kid can make a killing on the slots while waiting in the Vegas airport, it could all pay off. But not likely.

Lifestyles of the rich …

For the third year in a row, Hawaii is tops in the country for the number of millionaire households per capita, according to the Phoenix Affluent Marketing Service.

That does not include real estate, so the islands’ expensive home values do not come into play. Instead, says David Thompson, the company’s managing director, the repeat top four states, including Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut, "all share some important distinctions: They are small states with large concentrations of highly educated professionals and business owners, which are key ingredients to growing wealth."

The chart shows that Hawaii has 30,793 millionaires, 6.93 percent of the state’s 444,202 households.