By SIMON CONSTABLE

When the financial world looks upside down—and news out of Europe and Washington suggests it is that bad—maybe it’s time to follow suit and turn your money habits topsy-turvy as well.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are some regular money moves that are better done at the beginning of the year rather than the end.

Here are five big ones:

1. Tap your flex-spend account early

Opticians routinely urge you to spend your unused medical flexible-spending account in December.

That’s backward. Start the year with a trip to the eyeglass store for a new pair of spectacles or two.

Your FSA is provided by your employer but funded with your pretax dollars. You elect an amount for the whole year (say, $2,400), but it’s funded through equal payroll contributions throughout the calendar year ($200 a month).

The bonus is that you get to start spending the whole amount (in this case, $2,400) on Jan. 1 as long as it is for eligible medical expenses, like eyeglasses and prescriptions.

If you spend it all by February, then it’s better than a low-interest loan. It’s a no-interest loan and there’s a chance you may not have to “pay it back.” If you get fired or quit before year-end, in general your employer has lost out, not you. (That’s the way the government set up the rules.)

2. Make your charitable donations now

Some people wait until December to make charitable donations. The idea is that you have a better handle on how much money you can spare.

That’s upside down.

If giving to charity is important to you, why wait? Write your check now and feel satisfied. If you are worried whether you will have enough money to live on during the year, then write a smaller check or cut back on other expenses. I’ve never heard of anyone going broke because he gave too much to charity.

You’ll get the same tax deduction making a donation early in the year as you would later, but the charity benefits by having the money sooner.

3. Contribute to your IRA in the spring

It can be tempting to wait and see what money you have left after Christmas before committing anything to an individual retirement account. Don’t wait. Do it as soon as you can.

If you fund the account early, you will find a way to make your remaining dollars stretch. What’s more, the funds in the account will grow tax free. Any interest you earn outside the IRA will be taxed, so the sooner you get your contribution done the better.

If, like many people, you wait until mid-April to contribute to last year’s plan, then this year make a change. Double down by contributing to both this year’s and last year’s accounts at the same time. You’ll get an extra year of earnings inside your plan.

4. Don’t wait for your fitness reimbursement

If your employer is generous enough to reimburse all, or part, of your gym membership (and many do), don’t wait until the end of the year to claim your money. In the first place you might forget, and that’s just throwing away money.

In addition, since everyone else mails claims at year-end, it’s more likely that yours will be lost or delayed.

What you should do instead is start the year with an annual fitness membership. You should pay the full amount upfront rather than monthly. Then you should get it all reimbursed.

In the winter gyms often offer sales, so you may get a discount as well. And if you get fired before the membership expires, you’ll still have a (paid for) place to exercise.

5. Don’t wait to take investment losses

Around Christmas time you often hear people talk of the need to make so-called “tax-loss sales” of stocks. The idea is to lock in the loss before year-end so that it can be used to offset taxable investment gains.

It’s a dumb idea.

The time to ditch a losing investment is when the reasons you originally got into it are no longer valid. For example: You might feel like you made a bad investment if you bought Tiffany last year. Perhaps at the time you thought shoppers would go nuts for luxury goods. Now you could be thinking another stock makes more sense in these austere times, like Wal-Mart.

Well, if that’s what you think, then get out. Take your loss, and use what’s left to choose a better investment.

Email: simon.constable@wsj.com

By JUSTIN LAHART

MAYS LANDING, N.J.—Training and education are said to be the best route to a better job, but Cynthia Motte is still waiting to see if that’s true.

Ms. Motte and millions of other jobless workers across the country are discovering that new skills can take you only so far when jobs are scarce.

In February last year the 47-year-old was laid off from her job selling time-shares at the Seaview Marriott in Galloway, N.J. In July, she enrolled in an office-technology program at nearby Atlantic Cape Community College hoping it would quickly land her a new position. She finished that program—and a four-week internship in December—but is still hunting for work.

Ms. Motte still thinks the training will help her get hired. “The fact that I have the computer skills will put me on par with someone who’s younger,” she says. She reckons that, along with 25 years of experience as a salesperson and manager, will make her an attractive prospect for any job that comes up.

Economists agree that retraining pays off, eventually.

“The labor market just isn’t doing a lot of hiring right now, but there are obviously long-run payoffs” to retraining, says Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. He says that’s especially true for skills that can be applied to a variety of jobs.

But while retraining may improve unemployed workers’ long-term prospects, in the shorter term many are struggling to find work. Job losses across the country have hurt blue- and white-collar workers alike and left few industries unscathed. That has created a deep pool of workers competing for the positions available.

Labor Department figures show there was one job opening for every 5.4 unemployed workers seeking work in January. That compares with about one opening for every two job seekers before the recession. As of February, 6.1 million Americans had been out of work for 27 weeks or more.

In southern New Jersey’s Cape May and Atlantic counties, which Atlantic Cape Community College serves, the problem is particularly acute. Casinos offered stable employment for years, but with gambling revenue down 20% over the past two years, that is no longer true. Resort areas along the coast are languishing and the housing sector has gone bust. Last year, the area’s average unemployment rate was 11.9%, compared with 9.3% nationally.

Atlantic Cape Community College seeks to identify what areas offer the best employment prospects, but because the downturn hit so many vital parts of the local economy, options are limited.

“The best we can do is stay in touch with the business community and what’s happening,” says economist Richard Perniciaro, director of the college’s Center for Regional and Business Research.

The college has emphasized courses such as computer-network administration, where more jobs are available.

Even so, placing students has become far more difficult than in the past. Before September 2008, when the recession gathered steam, 90% of the students who finished its career-training classes found work, usually within six months of graduation. Since then, the placement rate has fallen to 30% to 40%.

It’s the same story across the country: In Milpitas, Calif., Virginia Fermin, 58, is also looking for work and finding that new skills aren’t a silver bullet.

She spent 30 years at a semiconductor-chip factory until Hitachi Ltd. shut it down in February 2009. A nonprofit Silicon Valley retraining program steered her to BioHealth College, in San Jose, where she spent seven months training as a medical assistant, finishing with an internship in December.

“I changed my career because I think the medical field, it’s going to continue to be in demand no matter what,” she says.

But she doesn’t have a job yet. Indeed, even though health care has been one of the few industries where payrolls have been growing, that fact has made it a magnet for hordes of job seekers. In February, there were 1.2 million workers seeking employment in the broad education and health-services sector, according to the Labor Department, up from 521,000 in December 2007. In January, there were 0.6 openings per job seeker in the field, compared with 1.4 openings per job seeker in December 2007.

For many workers, training opens doors—but it doesn’t necessarily shorten the job search at a time of high unemployment.

Nancy Eade, 55, of Charlotte, N.C., was laid off as a marketing program manager at IBM Corp. in December 2008. She then took courses at management-consulting firm Right Management, and then studied to get project-management certification at the nonprofit Project Management Institute.

Early this year, Ms. Eade started taking classes in business analysis and quality control at Central Piedmont Community College. Finally, last month she landed a job as a project manager at Bank of America Corp. “I did everything right and it still took me 14 months,” she says.

Back in New Jersey, applications keep piling up on the desks of prospective employers. Before the downturn, AtlantiCare, which runs two hospital campuses in southeastern New Jersey, would get about 2,500 job applications a month. Now it gets 4,000 to 5,000.

“That’s one of the challenges people who go through retraining have—they’re in a numbers game,” says Richard Lovering, who leads human resources and organizational development at AtlantiCare.

But, he adds, the previous work experience of recent Atlantic Cape students doing internships at AtlantiCare has made them strong candidates. “Ultimately, it is going to turn; employment is going to come back and these folks are going to be much better situated,” he says.

Write to Justin Lahart at justin.lahart@wsj.com

By EVAN RAMSTAD

In 2005, Moon Kook-jin was in the U.S. running his small manufacturing firm when his father asked him to return to his native South Korea to solve problems at the small conglomerate his father had started but left others to run.

For Mr. Moon, his return involved more than familial duty. His father, the Rev. Moon Sun-myung, is the founder of the Unification Church and one of the most recognized Koreans in the world.

After decades in which he and his associates ran the businesses more as charities than as for-profit organizations, Rev. Moon realized they were becoming a major drag on both the finances and reputation of the church.

His son was in his mid-30s, a point, the younger Mr. Moon says, “when I was willing to do something to help my community out.”

As chairman of the Tong-il Foundation, which operates the Unification Church’s businesses, Mr. Moon has pared the number of businesses to 12 from just over 30 via a series of asset sales and mergers. All now produce an operating profit and contribute to the charitable work of the church, instead of drawing money from it.

It has been a wrenching process, Mr. Moon said in a recent interview with Evan Ramstad at his office in Seoul. Mixing business and religion is always difficult, but especially so when one’s father is a world-wide celebrity. Excerpts from the discussion:

WSJ: What is the basic structure of the Tong-il Foundation or, in English, Unification Foundation?

Mr. Moon: I’m the chairman of the Unification Foundation here in Korea. That’s a nonprofit. It’s actually a religious institution by its corporate form. It’s a supporting institution to the Unification Church. And our foundation owns a business group. We are different than other business groups in that other business groups operate to make profit for their shareholders. We operate to make profit in our business group for our church.

We have a church hierarchy. I’m not at the top of the hierarchy. My father is the leader of the church. My function is more like a chief operating officer. He actually decides where the major direction for our group investment is, which industries we’re going to be operating in, and then I’m executing the strategy and trying to make it work.

WSJ: What was the basic problem you encountered when you arrived in 2005?

Mr. Moon: We had a very challenging situation because we had over 30 businesses and we had quite a lot of losses in the group. And the accounting and management was less than adequate for the size of the companies we were running. We started investing in businesses [in the 1960s] because a lot of our members needed jobs. It was kind of like a jobs program initially. We were a new church and a new religion and we weren’t really very well accepted in society. Our members weren’t really given job opportunities. As a result, the management of the companies was not fully professional and they didn’t operate efficiently.

WSJ: What was the first thing you did?

Mr. Moon: Within the first week I interviewed everyone at the foundation headquarters and the conclusion I came to was, if I’m going to fix this problem, it’s not going to be with this staff. So this is where I first focused on changing personnel. I re-staffed the entire headquarters. I focused on bringing in a lot of professionals, CPAs, attorneys, seasoned managers and then we contracted with several consulting firms to help us start the process of reform. We spent a lot of time sorting out the group portfolio. We tried to scale down the size of the problem to make it more manageable. We got rid of the ones we didn’t want to spend time on and made time for the business we wanted to fix.

WSJ: Would you describe some of the moves you made?

Mr. Moon: We had this business called INP, a shipbuilding business that was acquired by our group after our group restructured in the 1997 IMF crisis period. When we looked at the business, at the capability of that business, and the prospects going forward, we thought it was not possible to operate profitably for the foreseeable future. We got rid of that shipbuilding business and then another smaller shipbuilding business. Then we had a number of small manufacturing businesses, about eight of them. I worked very hard to change them and we turned them into one company called TIC. And it has viability now. They’re in three major lines of businesses: automotive parts, grinding machines and ball screws. Now the business is viable. That process of integration was largely successful and that’s a businesses we could expand through M&A.

WSJ: Was it essentially your goal to get the businesses to make money for the church?

Mr. Moon: What was happening in the past was that the foundation received church donations from around the world and a lot of those monies were being used to subsidize the businesses we owned. That’s the reverse of the [current] model, though you can’t say it’s the complete reverse because the businesses were actually like welfare programs for church members. The difference now is, since all the businesses are profitable, the flow of money from church members to businesses has stopped. And now, the foundation receives money from the businesses and provides it to the church and its mission activities.

WSJ: What is your father’s role on the business side?

Mr. Moon: I basically present recommendations from a professional point of view. The nonprofit aspect is up to my father to decide. Based on his direction and perspective, we proceed. My father has never really been interested in the details of the business. He’s more interested in the overall direction. The actual detailed operations he doesn’t really get so involved.

WSJ: Was it harder to let people go than in a normal business setting because many of the people were connected to the church?

Mr. Moon: It’s been much more difficult to restructure this business than if it was just a normal business group that didn’t have the religious component. You had a lot of cross-pollination from people who work in the ministry working in the businesses. But they weren’t businesspeople by background. As a result, they really didn’t know what to do or how to do things properly and there were a lot of mistakes made.

Well, it worked, but it was a very painful process. Whenever you do restructuring, you always have your standard demonstrations and hate mail. I had those. But because it involved the church, it was also a lot more personal. That was the most difficult aspect of it. I had lots of back-seat drivers.

Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com

By LAURA KUSISTO

In a New York real-estate fantasy come true, young foodies driven from the East Village by rising apartment rents are seeing some of their old restaurant favorites appear in their new neighborhood, Williamsburg.

Lower East Side and East Village favorites, including Vanessa’s Dumpling House, Mama’s Food Shop, Momofuku and Caracas Arepa Bar, have all opened new locations in Williamsburg recently. For foodies it’s like living the dream: taking their favorite restaurants and transplanting them to a cheaper neighborhood.

“Walking down Bedford is really similar to walking down the Lower East Side any given night,” said Brian Whitton, a 27-year-old who runs a marketing agency. “It is actually a better time than the Lower East Side because the river keeps out the Meatpacking crowd,” he said.

Mr. Whitton lived on the Lower East Side for a couple of years before moving recently to Greenpoint, where he often journeys to nearby Williamsburg for cuisine.

He concedes the move has required culinary sacrifices, but the loss of some of his favorite restaurants was partially offset when one of his Lower East Side mainstays, the Meatball Shop, opened a location on Bedford Avenue in July.

In fact he says he likes the new spot better. On the Lower East Side, “it is a madhouse and you can never get a table. This one is 2½ times the size and I’ve got a table a couple of times,” Mr. Whitton said.

Michael Chernow, a Meatball Shop co-owner, said the decision to expand into Williamsburg was simple. “We live out there [and] we love the neighborhood,” he said.

The trend was highlighted this week when Max, an East Village favorite for hearty pasta and other Italian dishes, rented space at Driggs Avenue and South Second Street.

Luigi Iasilli, an owner, wrote in an email that he plans to close the East Village location as the neighborhood is getting “slow.”

“I finally found what I believe I was looking for,” he said of his Williamsburg site. “For me, [it is] going back to the roots, small space, $3,000 rent, a small yard, a mixed ethnic neighborhood with only a bodega across the street.”

Peter Levitan, a broker with Lee & Associates NYC, said retail rents are significantly lower, ranging from $30 to $80 a square foot, compared with $100 to $150 a square foot.

For other longtime Manhattan restaurateurs, the cheaper rents allow them to experiment with new concepts with less risk involved. Owners who made their mark in the East Village have opened places in Williamsburg, such as Betto and Isa.

Alla Lapushchik, who helped open village night-life favorite Death & Co., struck out on her own with Post Office on Havemeyer Street, which serves 100 kinds of whiskey.

“The rent is a little more forgiving,” said Ms. Lapushchik. “When you’re not super stressed because your rent is $10,000 a month, you can focus on the parts that you like.”

As Williamsburg’s warehouses have made way for luxury condos, some locals have decried the neighborhood’s transformation into a more mainstream, family-friendly place.

An influx of Manhattan restaurants could be taken as more evidence of the loss of Williamsburg’s unique flavor.

But Mr. Whitton, the recent Lower East Side transplant, welcomes the addition of familiar spots.

“If I knew a place I recognized, I would probably go there because I knew it and I trusted it and I’ve been there before,” he said.

$1.525 million

A one-bedroom condo in a loft space with industrial detail

Property Plus:  The apartment has oversized industrial windows and 12-foot ceilings.

Property Minus: In a part of Williamsburg that has yet to shed its gritty, industrial past

Listing Agents: Evan F Church, Kate Church and Chris Cavorti of Corcoran Group, 718-422-2506

$1,795,000

A three-bedroom condo with a loft-like living room and Manhattan views

Property Plus: The condo’s price was reduced by $130,000 about nine weeks ago.

Property Minus: The price is still at high end for the neighborhood.

Listing Agents: Stefanie Barlow, Deborah Rieders and Sarah Shuken of Corcoran Group, 718-422-2514

$649,000

This two-bedroom condo is situated in a complex of four connected brick townhouses

Property Plus: Elevator stops in apartment foyer

Property Minus: The building is about eight blocks from the nearest subway stop.

Listing Agents: Sonya Spitznas and Jessica Pfeiffer of aptsandlofts.com, 718-384-5304

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A22