April 10, 2018

Video: Kids Say the Darndest Things

The children in this video have a delightful take on our cultural attitudes and mores about money – what it is, what it can do, and whether to share it.

The interviewer borrowed the format Art Linkletter used when asking kids questions on his Emmy Award-winning television show, “Art Linkletter’s House Party,” which aired between 1952 and 1969 – as boomers and their parents will remember.

The new video about kids and money is posted on the American Financial Services Association Education Foundation’s website.  The foundation’s mission is to educate people about responsible money management, starting with young children and teenagers.

The adorable factor makes this 6-minute video fly by.Learn More

February 22, 2018

What’s a Geriatric Care Manager Anyway?

Staging your parent’s 90^th birthday party, accompanying him or her to a doctor’s appointment, or finding the best long-term care facility for the right price – geriatric care managers do all this and much more.

Geriatric care managers come into the profession with expertise ranging from gerontology and nursing to social work and psychology, and they bring a unique perspective to caring for the elderly. Their first loyalty is to your parent and her well-being, though they want to work closely with everyone involved – parent and adult children – to meet the parent’s wishes.

Suzanne Modigliani, an aging life care specialist near Boston, handles “all spheres of an individual’s life – physical, cognitive social, emotional, financial, community and family.”  She’ll even make referrals to geriatric care managers for a parent living in a different city.

An elderly person’s top choice for a caregiver is, logically, their spouse – daughters are typically next. And credentialed geriatric care managers are not cheap: they charge anywhere from $100 to $200 per hour, depending in part on an area’s cost of living – hourly charges can be $400 in Manhattan.

So how do adult children know if their parent could benefit from having a geriatric care manager? Modigliani advises them to be on the lookout for unusual behaviors such as growing difficulty with routine financial matters that the parent has always handled, or a bare refrigerator at mom’s house during holiday gatherings.

Unfortunately, it’s often a medical or other crisis that suddenly alerts siblings to problems that have been developing for a while.  Waiting until a crisis, when tensions are high, is usually the worst time to deal with emotional issues – including finding a good care manager. Geriatric care managers have experience and can help smooth over these situations. …Learn More

November 7, 2017

Portlandia Trashes “Instant Garbage”

Hilarious examples of “instant garbage” are offered up in this Portlandia clip by the show’s characters, Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman (played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein).

The price point for an unwanted consumer product that becomes instant garbage is $4.99.  “We found the exact point between price and hassle that guarantees you won’t bother returning” the product, Eversman explains in the video below.

Is the following theory a stretch? There seems to be a direct line between Americans’ relentless buying of stuff we do not need and our inadequate attempts at saving money.

Try walking into a craft superstore or browsing Target’s $1 shelf and suddenly imagining the stuff all piled up at its ultimate destination, the local landfill.

Then walk back out and save the money for retirement.

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September 5, 2017

Senior Hunger in Decline but Still High

While hunger has eased among older Americans, millions still worry about having enough to eat from day to day.

A new report by two non-profits – Feeding America and the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger – found that food insecurity among people 60 and older declined by a meaningful amount between 2014 and 2015, the latest year of data available. This marked the first decline since the Great Recession.

Nevertheless, the percentage of the older population fitting the various definitions of being food insecure used in the report is much higher than in 2001.  In 2015, 15 percent of older Americans felt threatened by hunger – the broadest definition – compared with 11 percent in 2001.  And hunger is not isolated to the poor, said James P. Ziliak, founding director of the Center for Poverty at the University of Kentucky and co-author of the new report.

A big reason for rising food insecurity among seniors is that only 40 percent of those with low incomes who are eligible for federal food stamp assistance are actually enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, he said.  This compares with 80 percent of the eligible population as a whole enrolled in SNAP. …Learn More

June 20, 2017

Autopay Ends Credit Card Late Fees

Credit card companies usually set small-dollar minimum payments, so there’s really no excuse for incurring fees for late card payments.

Yet many consumers fail to pay on time. In a new study, British researchers found a no-brainer solution that is highly effective: setting up automatic payments of our credit cards.

The researchers started out with a different premise: that customers might learn, over time, to prevent maddening late fees after having to pay them numerous times. The researchers roundly rejected this after following nearly 250,000 U.K. credit card holders over two years.  When it comes to late fees, we do not learn from our mistakes.

What they noticed, however, was a clear distinction between card holders who incur late fees regularly and those who don’t or who stopped incurring the fees.   Setting up autopay “all but eliminates the likelihood of future [late] fees,” while the probability remains “persistently high” (about one in five) among people who did not, they said.

Further, a seemingly obvious explanation for chronic late fees didn’t hold water: that people don’t have the cash to make their minimum payments.  Payers of late fees “do not appear to be liquidity constrained,” the study found. Apparently, most people simply forget to pay those pesky credit card bills. …Learn More

May 2, 2017

Online Goblins Want Your Money

No longer simply a convenience for shoppers, the internet has come into its own: it is now an ingenious tool for squeezing money out of our wallets.

This realization first struck me last year while helping my brother and his wife in Chicago with a flight to visit our mom in Orlando. The reason I was on the case is that he’s a bit of a technophobe. But it turned out that his technical skills weren’t the issue – the airline’s website was the issue.

To flyers’ chagrin, most airlines are now a la carte operations, charging separate fees for everything from baggage to potato chips. This makes it difficult to compare fares online – one way we might wind up paying more. But things went wildly astray for my brother when he clicked on one airline’s website icon to pay his and his wife’s baggage fees a few days before flying.

He was hurled off to a webpage beseeching him to join some type of $200 promotional program that included “free” baggage.  The same thing happened when I tried the next day.  It took all of my online ingenuity to figure out how to avoid the promotion and pay only their $30 per bag fees. I wondered whether other flyers had been sucked into paying for this promotion.

These website diversions are different from what has become routine: advertisements popping up that try to get you to take the plunge and buy the consumer product you were researching online yesterday. It’s difficult to ascertain which diversions are cynical marketing ploys and which ones are innocent technical glitches. But all of them have the potential to be costly to unwary consumers.

During a brunch on Easter Sunday, two friends confirmed my concerns that this isn’t just an issue for older people – one of my friends who complained about online trickery is 95 years old but the other is a tech-savvy college freshman.

All web crawlers are familiar with offers of free subscription trials. These are also dangerous. …Learn More

January 31, 2017

Good Health Insurance is What Counts

Having health insurance is no guarantee that medical care is affordable.

Some families, despite being covered by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or employer policies, say that high premiums and deductibles mean they can’t afford to see a doctor. This distinction – between having insurance and receiving care – will be crucial as Congress considers proposals for ACA’s replacement.

One comprehensive 2003 study demonstrates how individual medical decisions change when they receive one longstanding, and what the researchers called “generous,” type of insurance: Medicare. Their study focused on changes in the use of the health care system – more so than improved health – by comparing people who’ve recently gone on Medicare with people a couple years away from turning 65 and becoming eligible. The analysis adjusts for the fact that some, though not all, people under 65 have employer coverage and that many people also retire around this age, sometimes receiving special retiree health benefits.

Once people turn 65 and are on Medicare, the researchers found that:

• The probability of seeing a doctor at least once a year increased, based on data from the National Health Interview Surveys, which track the frequency of routine medical care.
• Medicare eligibility led to a “surprisingly large” 5-10 percent increase in hospitalizations in California and Florida, particularly among white Americans. The increase was driven by elective surgeries such as joint replacements and heart bypass surgeries.
• There were large increases in preventive care for less-educated whites, such as getting flu shots and cholesterol tests, based on analyses of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which tracks preventive care use.
• Minorities, who are at much higher risk of untreated high blood pressure, were more likely to receive this diagnosis after going on Medicare. …

Learn More

tags healthcare|​spending