Pragmatic Finance

A couple of weeks ago I received an interesting telephone call the day before I was going to return from vacation.  I don’t recall the exact words said but the gist of it was that the apartment above mine flooded.  Of course this had to leak until it collapsed my ceiling, soaking my entire room.

I had my laptop with me so luckily that wasn’t damaged.  However, my mattress on my bed and a few other items were destroyed.  Most of the things damaged were clutter I really didn’t need but hadn’t thrown away.  Think that cd you never listen to or those books you had put up to read but never did.  I did have a few pictures that were messed up and probably some other items I will sooner or later look for and realize are gone.

I tend to avoid insurance unless it’s something I know I can’t afford.  I was really glad that my roommate has renter’s insurance for the entire place.  However, had my roommate not already had it when I moved in I doubt I would have purchased it on my own.  It would have been hard to justify due to me being a college student without many things of high monetary value.

Now that it’s been a few weeks I am able begin to digest the situation.  I have decided the best way to look at it is to take solace in the fact that I won’t have to spend a few days going through my stuff to throw it away.  I always hate doing that because you tend to find some reason to keep things when you know deep down you’re not going to use them.  Well, at least that’s the best spin I can put on it.

I have been wanting to learn more about the different health care options out there for awhile now. It has been on my list of things to do before I graduate and no longer covered by my parents. So when I was offered a free copy of Health Care on Less Than You Think to review I took up the offer.

It is written by Fred Brock and covers the health care system in America. It dicusses the different types of coverages and goes over ways to save money and maximize your coverage. It also talks a little about the problems of our current system and gives a few suggestions of wholesale changes for the future.

One of the most useful parts of the entire book is a section in the second chapter that lists some of the common terms and gives definitions for them. I finally know what HMO, PPO, and EOB mean and the difference between a copayment and coinsurance.

There are a lot of useful tips. Some are very practical such as getting higher dosage pills and splitting them since some prescriptions are the same cost no matter what size of dosage. Other tips are useful to know about but probably more limited in who they apply to. A good example of this was moving to a different state based on their coverage laws and costs.

I also thought the discussions on practical matters were good. He discusses the importance of checking your hospital bills because of the abundance of errors. Also, how to prepare yourself and fight when the insurance company denies your claim. Many claims are unnecessarily denied probably because the insurance companies know most people will simply accept it and pay the bill themselves.

It looks like a health care savings account, HSA, is probably the best bet for me once I finish college and start a new job. I am very healthy and should be able to take advantage of the tax benefits. It also goes good with my view of insurance as a protection against catastrophe, not something to cover all expenses. However, I think most families would probably benefit from an HMO plan if their employer offers a good one and they tend to use medical care a lot.

Overall, I think Health Care on Less than you Think offers a great overview of the health care system and how to utilize it. It is obvious after the first chapter of the author’s political point of view but I don’t think that detracts from the book too much. Its a great primer to get a broad picture of the health care system and how to save some money.

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving.  I’ll spare you the customary list of things I am thankful for.  I hope to get back into the swing of posting several times a week.  Lately I have been really busy and just haven’t had much time nor motivation to post much.  Anyway, enjoy the day and eat a lot.

I got sidetracked and forgot to post about this monday. AllFinancialMatters has set up a project involving the new book, The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. Each day a blogger will post a review of one of the chapters. I will be reviewing Chapter 14: Savvy Ways to Invest for College. A list of each chapter and the blogger who will cover it is on his site. I have seen book reviews but don’t remember seeing a community wide book review like this before. It should be interesting.

To give you some background info…John Bogle founded Vanguard, the mutual fund company. Bogleheads refers to some of the strong supporters and followers of John Bogle’s approach to investing. The book is three of the strongest supporters who manage the Vanguard Diehard’s forum on morningstar.com. I have just started reading it and so far I am really enjoying it.

Check back on Wednesday, October 18th to see my review on investing methods to save for college.

Tim at HelpYourMoney has a running series of interviews of personal finance bloggers. This past week he posted my interview. He is up to about 20 interviews now. They ask about 11 questions and all are interesting.

The Question of the Day Marathon is almost over, only a few days left. It has been really interesting reading all of the different responses. Here’s my question:

What factors affected the career you chose? Was it purely about the pay or were there other aspects that influenced the decision?

Feel free to give some background into the reasons, events, or decisions that led to your choice. Or if your still in school like me, share some things that shaped your choice of major and what has affected the types of jobs or internships you have tried to get so far.

I am finally back from my summer internship. I had alot of fun and kept pretty busy. I will probably write some more details about it later. I was extremely busy the last week or two so if you’ve noticed the limited number of posts thats why. I should be back to posting normally now.

This is a summer’s worth of credit card offers. Sadly, out of that big stack there is not one good 0% balance transfer offer. Well, there was some checks from Chase but they’ve expired. Perhaps having 90% utilization on some cards is affecting their willingness to give me good offers.

Flexo at Consumerism Commentary is offering to give free hosting to the first five personal finance bloggers who post in Get Away from BlogSpot. He has all the details there but I’ll try to provide the gist of it. First of all, this is a great opportunity. You can use typepad or wordpress on your new host and he will install it for you and provide 1GB of storage at Dreamhost. You would simply need to purchase your own domain name which shouldn’t cost more than $10/year.

I have played around with BlogSpot before trying out my own hosting with wordpress and I enjoyed the latter much, much more. There is alot more flexibility and I feel I have more control over my site. Plus I get a real web address instead of something.blogspot.com. There are still a few more spots left as I’m writing this so hurry and check it out.

There was speculation for awhile about Google’s new payment service with many referring to it as Gbuy, Google Payments, or even Google Wallet. Well, it appears that Google Checkout it now live. Interestingly, they struck a deal with Citibank to offer $5 bonus in dividend dollars or 1000 Thank You points if you enroll your card by Aug 1 and make a purchase with the card using Google Checkout by Sept 15.

Looking over the site it appears that its focused on buyers and merchants, allowing businesses to use it on their websites to accept credit card purchases. To be honest, I was hoping it would have all the features of Paypal and compete directly with them, even though they said it wasn’t aimed at challenging Paypal. Since I have been selling on Ebay recently, I have been getting eaten up by fees. Anything to add competition is always good. I guess there’s the chance that they will add these features later but I won’t hold my breath.

In case anyone out there does run a business that could utilize this, they are charging 2% + 20 cents per transaction and you get $10 discount off fees from sales for every $1 you spend on AdWords. Should have known they would tie those together. The NYTimes has a pretty good article discussing the details of Google Checkout (Use bugmenot for a login).

It looks like Emigrant Direct has raised their interest rate to 4.65% apy. I guess they are just trying to stay competitive. This still leaves presidential the leader in interest rates with gmac and citibank not far behind.