Lazy Man and Money

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Putting the “F IT” in Frugal-IT-y

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For years and years, I’ve been writing about saving money. Save money, invest money, say hello to financial freedom.

I still believe in all of that. The math checks out. People have done it.

When you put aside money and math, there’s this thing called life. As a personal finance blogger, I focus on writing about the money and math towards financial freedom.

Since you are reading this, I’m going to presume you focus on financial freedom too.

What if we took a break from the money and math? What if we focused on a different M-word… “moderation”?

Yesterday, Joe from Retire by 40 wrote about his expensive artwork. As I was reading it, I felt almost like he was being apologetic for his splurge years ago. It also felt like he was trying to justify it.

Maybe I read it wrong. Maybe I superimposed some of my own thoughts into the article.

Whatever the reason, it made me think, “Let’s look at the big picture here.”

If you are meeting most of your financial goals, perhaps it’s worth setting aside some money each year to create a “happiness fund.”

My “happiness fund” would be about no-questions-asked spending. The more frivolous the better (as long as it stays in the budget.)

Why not put a ball pit in your house?


My “happiness fund” this year went to buying a ridiculously expensive television. I’m not sure it was “ball pit happiness” but I do enjoy it. I’m certainly “happy” that I didn’t pay the $7,000 – $10,000 that it cost in the past.

“How much should I put in my happiness fund?”

I tried to come up with some kind of formula of what would be responsible. I couldn’t come up with a good guideline. At first, I thought it should be a percentage of your net worth, but then I figured it very small or even negative for some people. Then I thought it could be a percentage of your annual income. This is more promising, but it doesn’t edge cases like Joe who could make nothing this year and still be fine financially overall.

Finally, I realized that like most things in personal finance… a happiness fund is personal.

It doesn’t make sense for me to tell you how much to put in it any more than it does to tell you what to spend it on.

Instead, let’s flip this question around. Leave me a comment below about how much you put in your happiness fund and what you are spending it on. You might want to leave a good email address, because I plan on surprising at least one commenter with $25 towards that happiness fund.

The Ultimate Disney World Hacking Vacation?

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There are millions and millions of people who LOVE Disney.

I’m not one of them.

I’ve got nothing against Disney, but I don’t understand the big draw. What’s your memory of Mickey Mouse? Mine is the Christmas Carol remake and The Brave Little Tailor. If Apple still marketed itself with an Apple Newtown or an iMac desktop from 1998, you’d consider it strange, right?

Disney World Castle

I know some of you are saying those are fighting words. I actually do like a lot of Disney stuff, but it’s mostly all Pixar and Marvel, which isn’t the Disney that I grew up with.

To each their own, right?

Disney World is different than Disney itself. I went a couple of years for the first time since I was around 7 or 8. I gave a grade of mixed bag, especially since even Make-A-Wish kids had to wait three hours to get in just as we did. (Though some people tried to get them up towards the front of the blob of people as best as possible.)

Despite what I wrote above we’ll be bringing our 4 and 5 year old kids to Disney World for the 2nd time.

We did enjoy EPCOT Center though. There weren’t any crowds and there was a whole sustainability section of the park. Even my 2 and 3 year old (at the time) loved it. And the part where you travel from country to country sampling food and drink, well, that’s a lot more fun at 40 than it was at 7.

Why go back? The kids really did have a great time overall and it’s certainly worth a second shot. The park apologized for the 3 hours to get in and said it’s never like that. From a sampling of friends it seems like most of them agree.

Another key consideration… we are able to do Disney in-style and on the cheap.

Active Duty, Credit Cards, and Frugality For The Win!

Tickets

Due to my wife’s active duty status, Disney gives us a discount. It looks like they don’t make it public on their website, so I’m not sure I should publish the deal. That’s just as well, as my wife went to sleep and I’m writing this in hopes of publishing tomorrow. In other words, I don’t have exact pricing. What I can tell you is that I made a spreadsheet of costs a couple of years ago and it was $196 per ticket. I think that’s a 4-day Park Hopper Plus, silver-edition, with cherries. I honestly don’t know what it’s called these days, but I know the normal price was around $274 at the time.

I expect the prices have went up since then. So let’s call it $215 a ticket or $860 for the 4 of us.

Tickets: $860

Lodging

This is another active duty perk. However, before you shoot me, it’s probably cheaper to stay at other places. When we went to Disney a couple of years ago, we had a week of timeshare that was expiring, so we used that. (That’s also part of the reason why we brought a 2 and 3 year old to Disney World. The other reason is that we were meeting friends who lived in California.) There is a lot of cheap lodging in the area though.

The active duty perk allows us to stay in the park at a military resort called Shades of Green. The price is on par with the very cheapest places to stay in the park (such as the All-Star Sports Hotel), but the rooms are bigger and nicer, up there with some of the premium hotels on the park. In fact, from the Shades of Green FAQ:

How does Shades of Green compare to the other Walt Disney World hotels?

Shades of Green would be comparable to the Disney Deluxe Resorts such as Disney’s Polynesian Resort. We have the largest Standard Rooms on property, and a variety of restaurants, as well.

I’m not familiar with the Polynesian Resort, but Mouse Savers says it would be $649 a night for the time we going.

Staying in the park should be a big upgrade from a couple of years ago. Maybe our wait times to get in will only be a couple of hours? We might also be able to stay later. I heard this is a real thing, but we’ve been so busy that we haven’t done much research. I did some 6 months ago, but it’s long been purged from my memory.

You can look at this two ways: 1) a luxury upgrade from some of the cheapest places in the park or 2) a price discount from some of the most expensive places in the park. I think it’s probably a savings of around $150 a day if you take the later.

We’ll be staying only 5 days due to some other commitments my wife has in the area around the same time.

Lodging: $775 (included taxes)

Airfare

Fly to Orlando from Warwick, RI (PVD) was around $265 one way. I had signed up for a Southwest Credit Card last year and hit the minimum spent (due to some condo assessments) to get 60,000 miles. Southwest values their miles at a flat 1.5 cents per mile (I think). So it was 13,700 for each of us to fly down. So we cashed in 54,800 points to get there.

Southwest requires you to pay for certain flight taxes in cash, so we did have to fork out some money. You’d think I’d have a receipt in my email, but I don’t. I think it was probably about $100 in total.

On the flight back, we found a $190 fare from American. Me and the kids are flying back for $683.37 with taxes/fees. (Note: American gives much better email receipts.) My wife is flying to her next commitment before coming home. That’s partially a business expense, so it’s hard to put in here. However, we could easily presume that she would be coming back with us under normal circumstances. It seems fair to call it $1000… $683.70 + $190 + $37 wife’s American taxes + $100 Southwest taxes.

When it was just my wife and I traveling, things were much cheaper. This is one area where kids really double the cost.

Airfare: $1000

Food

This is one cost that’s difficult for us to dodge. However, it might not be impossible.

One of the great perks to staying at a timeshare was that we could shop at grocery stores and make a lot of our own food. However, we’ll be “trapped” in Disney without a rental car. Shades of Green does have a convenience-type store at the property. I haven’t seen a review of the prices and I’m a little worried that they might be sky high. Even so, it would be cheaper than eating every meal for 5 days. Everything is relative, right?

We might be able to go shopping before we check in, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to review our travel itinerary which is not very organized at this time. If we do have time to go shopping, we’ll have to plan what we buy carefully. The rooms at Shades of Green do have refrigerators, but the standard rooms don’t have microwaves.

I really didn’t know what to make of this. If we don’t shop, we could bring canned tuna and/or chicken, mayo, and make some sandwiches? We can (and probably will) also bring lots of mixed nuts. We could bring some cereal. Just for a fun exercise, if you wanted to be super frugal, what would you bring on a plane for food? Since we are flying there on Southwest, we’ve got plenty of checked luggage space, so that’s not a big concern.

If we do shop, we could buy some deli meats, cheese, milk. We wouldn’t need to think about packing food with us, because we could buy all the things above.

However, as I’m writing this article, I came across a game changer. I was reading this extensive Shades of Green review from my friend Ryan and he says:

“To save time and money, we brought breakfast items to eat in the room before we hit the parks for the day. Each morning I took some microwavable breakfast sandwiches up to the 3rd floor laundry room to heat up for breakfast. This allowed us to save quite a bit of money during our stay, and we were able to get out of the room more quickly in the mornings as opposed to sitting down at a restaurant for breakfast.”

With the possibility of a microwave, we can do canned soups and Easy Mac (kids’ favorite). It’s a mini-fridge, so frozen foods might not work out so well. However, I wonder how bad they’d go if they were still kept at refrigerator tempature and allowed to thaw a bit? It might change cooking times, but I don’t think it would cause a food safety issue, would it?

Here’s another fun question. What kinds of foods would you bring with you into the park? Presume that you aren’t going to bring a cooler to keep food cold.

Now we’ll certainly be eating some meals at the park. We aren’t going to try to pinch every penny. However, the more can we plan quick and easy meals, the more rides we can get on. Also, if I’m eating at a restaurant every meal of every day, I’d probably be sick by the 5th day. I think I’d just eat too much junk, fast food.

I don’t know what to put down for the cost of food. I’m going to go with $400. That’s $80 a day for the 4 of us. This isn’t really a budget, it’s just a guess. It will have to do.

Food: $400?

Adding it All Up

With $860 in Disney tickets, $775 in lodging, $1000 in airfare, and $400 in food, it looks like we’ll spend roughly $3015.

I didn’t include ground transportation because we won’t be renting a car while we are there… except to maybe get there and do the grocery shopping. If you are staying outside the park as we did last time, we had to pay car rental costs too. Those are somewhat reduced by the cheaper costs of the grocery shopping.

There are certainly going to be some extra costs, so it might be fair to add a couple hundred for miscellaneous stuff. I’m not going to try to be perfect, so

Total Disney Trip: $3015

How Does that Compare?

I decided to put together a table of what I thought we might pay if we didn’t hack the flight and/or couldn’t use our military connections. Here is our vacation next two possible vacations:

ExpenseOur CostEveryone Cost (All-Star)Everyone Cost (Polynesian)
Hotel$755$755$3,245
Park Tickets$860$1,184$1,184
Airfare$1,000$2,000$2,000
Food$400$750$750
Total$3,015$4,689$7,179

However, you don’t have to trust my assumptions, which admittedly may be less than perfect.

As fate would have it, Money Magazine reviewed 4 levels of Disney World vacations. They crunched the numbers for 4 nights, which is pretty close to the 5 nights that we are planning. I’ll let you read the article, but the conclusions were:

Bare-bones: $3,564
Value: $4,885
Average: $6,360
Deluxe: $9,781

* Note: Some of these are my categorizations of the levels. This was because they put them out of order and “cheaper” doesn’t make sense when the order is changed.

I would say that we are getting a vacation that is closer to Deluxe than the others. Like the Money article, ours is aiming to be 5 days at a premium-level hotel. We won’t be spending near the Deluxe food budget or the $800 on souvenirs and extras. At the end of the day, the Deluxe budget is is worth 3 separate vacation trips with our plan.

This highlights one of my biggest conundrums with Disney. It triggers ALL the happy feelings of saving thousands of dollars. At the same time, it triggers a few of the reality feelings of spending thousands of dollars over a few days. At the same time, I realize that spending money on experiences and family is a better use of my dollars in many, many areas.

Saving Money at Great Wolf Lodge (Fitchburg, MA Review)

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This past weekend, we made the 90 minute trek to Great Wolf Lodge in Fitchburg, MA. If you aren’t familiar with Great Wolf Lodge, it’s a nation chain of 13 hotel/in-door water parks geared to children.

We had been interested in going for some time, but we always put it off for “maybe next month.” We had plenty of local activities that were cheaper and still a lot of fun. However, my wife had a business meeting on Saturday morning in a neighboring town. So rather than have her drive 90 minutes we gave into fate and booked Friday night at Great Wolf Lodge. It was a last minute plan where all the pieces just fit into place.

I thought I’d share some tips and tricks that we learned. It’s probably nothing that you couldn’t get from TripAdvisor, but I’ll go into the financials more than most reviews would. We knew that we weren’t going to have a perfect plan on how to save money. As my wife put it, “You have to go once for recon.” This was our recon trip.

A special thanks goes to Jim at Wallet Hacks. His Great Wolf Lodge review helped us know what to expect.

A Rocky Start

Our 4-year old gets out of pre-school at 3PM, so we were aiming to pick up the 3-year old and get on the road soon after that. Both my wife and I got caught trying to fit in “one more email” before the weekend. We rushed to pack and still barely made it out the door by 4:30. We picked up our 3-year old and headed north around 5PM. By this time we had some traffic. It looked like we might get there by around 7PM. However, we had to stop for dinner.

I thought there was a McDonalds right there, but I was thinking of a different hotel in the area. We found a Subway and a Park Hill Pizza about 5 minutes away. The kids wanted pizza, so we waited while they baked a fresh pie. My wife and I split a meatball sub knowing that the kids wouldn’t finish a large pizza.

By the time we finished dinner, got to Great Wolf Lodge, and worked through the long check-in line, it was around 8:15. The water park closes at 9PM. We missed our opportunity, so we dropped off our stuff in our room and went to tour the hotel.

The Wolf’s Den

Great Wolf Lodge has standard hotel rooms, but for extra money you can get a specialty room. We had signed up for a regular room, but they dangled a carrot of an upgrade to the Wolf’s Den room for $70. The Wolf’s Den is a 3-sided enclosed area with bunk beds and its own television. The murals on the wall are of wolves doing fun playful things (because wolves are playful creatures naturally).

We thought the kids might be scared to stay in the Wolf’s Den, but they loved it. It was actually the highlight of the whole stay for our 4-year old. He shouldn’t have been sleeping on the top bunk (it’s for 6+), but he’d always been a very safe sleeper and never came close to falling out of bed. Plus there are sides are fairly high. He said he always wanted a ladder bed. We’ll have to file that away for the future.

We paid $253.64 for the room, but it came with a $50 hotel credit. A Friday night stay is more expensive, but it was unavoidable given the circumstances. We could have paid a little less for the room with our military discount. However, some preliminary research showed that we’d be spending money when we were there.

Great Wolf Lodge is a little unusual in that they charge you a line item of taxes and fees. My understanding is that resort fees are a large part of that. For example our room was $202.99 and the taxes and fees were $50.65. I think that if we stayed on a Tuesday in the offseason for around $99 (I think that was a promo), we’d still end up paying around $50 in taxes and fees. In the Fitchburg area, you can stay at a hotel very, very cheap. It felt to me like they were adding a resort fee onto a resort pricing.

After settling into our room, we ventured out for a tour of the hotel. That way we’d know what to expect on Saturday.

I was prepared for an upsell, but I thought there would be more free things to do. Here are some examples of things that cost additional money:

  • The Arcade – I would say about 50% of the Massachusetts Great Wolf Lodge is an arcade. You load up a card with Paw Points and swipe it like a credit card. It was approximately 25 cents per Paw Point. We used our $50 credit toward a Paw Point card which got us a few bonus points. In the big arcade, most of the games cost 8 Paw Points. In the small arcade, things generally were 4 Paw Points. We found a Batman wack-a-mole game that was only 2 Paw Points. We got a lot of use out of that one.

    Between the credit card and the point system, it didn’t feel like spending real money. I didn’t think about it until now, but we were spending around a buck or two on each swipe (except for Batman). The arcade near our house with many of the same games doesn’t have any kind of admission fee and I think the games are cheaper to play.

  • Howlin’ Timbers Play Park – This room has a ropes course ($10), climbing wall ($5), mining experience ($10), mini golf ($7), and a bowling alley ($6). You can buy a pass for all of them for $35. A family of four can easily blow $100 fairly quickly here.

    This room was also the one with the small arcade with the cheaper games.

  • MagiQuest – This is a role-playing game. I didn’t look into the costs because our kids were to young to understand it. It seemed like a scavenger hunt.
  • Clubhouse Crew – This is another interactive game. It seems you could play it for $10, but it is free if you spend $30 to create your own stuffed animal. After the kids disagreed for 15 minutes on which animal they should share, we decided to skip it entirely.
  • Locker Rental – We paid $10 for a locker rental. We had to check out by noon, but Great Wolf Lodge allows you to stay for the rest of the day. This is what we were counting on because we didn’t get to do much on Friday. With no room, it was either rent a locker or go out to the car in a wet bathing suit for stuff.
  • Kids Spa – I’m pretty happy we didn’t have girls right about now. I didn’t look into this, but I’m guessing that it isn’t cheap. I don’t think the boys will be into it.

And here’s a list of free things:

  • The Water Park – We went through everything a 3 and 4 year old could do in about an hour and a half. If they were older, they could have gone on some cool-looking water slides.
  • The Lower Ropes Course – There’s a free ropes course that was perfect for a 4 to 6 year old. My 3 year old had some problems, but with a little help he got the hang of it.
  • Story Time – They had a show at night where some mechanical bears sang a few songs and told some stories. My kids really enjoyed that.
  • Air – As best I can tell, they didn’t charge for breathing air, but one could argue that tied into the resort fee.

There was something else called a wolf walk that I think might have been free, but we didn’t get a chance to explore it. There might have also been other free things that we missed. I think my wife overheard someone talking about the lower ropes course being free, which is how we found out about it. It wasn’t like there was a sign that said, “Free!”

We got an offer for a free pizza and free locker if we checked out by 9:30AM. Next time we will probably take advantage of that.

Food and Drink

That’s a good transition to talk about food and drink.

I’m on the fence of whether the food was expensive or not. The reviews I had read said that it was expensive and that it wasn’t good. We avoided buying food as we brought a cooler and everything we need to make sandwiches.

I saw that the pizzas were about $15. A beer was $7. I thought that was a little expensive for beer when people could easily bring as much as they want to the room or a locker. I’m sure enough people are willing to pay for convenience.

I saw that wine was $20. It was ambiguous as to whether that was for a glass or a bottle. They had the bottles on display. I didn’t know if that was so that I could figure out what the choices were or if it was showing that you get the bottle. I asked my wife what she thought and she couldn’t figure it out either. If it was $20 for a plastic cup that’s really, really expensive. If it was for the bottle, that’s a great bargain compared to the beer. What would make the most sense price-wise, is if it was for 375ml, but that didn’t seem to be an option.

Conclusion

I cut deeply into Great Wolf Lodge for the upsell and pricing. In fairness, the kids had a ton of fun. They LOVED it and want to go back for their birthday. When the kids are having fun, my wife and I are having fun. It’s contagious.

I think that in the future, we could use Great Wolf Lodge to teach our kids about budgeting money. In my opinion, it screams for the envelope budgeting system. That will make them have to make hard choices about what their money will buy.

I might even try to teach them to save by matching some contributions (almost like paying interest).

Have you been to Great Wolf Lodge? What tips or tricks do you have to save money?

Let’s Fix Healthcare!

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Today’s article is a little different. While Lazy Man and Money is almost always focused on personal finance, I have an interest in fixing broken systems. That’s probably the computer science nerd in me. It’s why I often write about MLM scams.

Healthcare seems to be one of the biggest problems that most of American can agree on. They can’t necessarily agree on the solutions, but they agree it is a problem. I think that’s why it has become a big political issue. People feel they are paying too much for it and they are right to feel that way. Long before the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), I had friends complaining about skyrocketing health insurance premiums at work. I couldn’t find exact numbers, but it felt like they were nearly doubling every year… and doubling from high starting point.

Here are just a few examples of what I consider a broken system:

  • I’ve written about people paying for a $629 bandage at an ER that was unnecessary and fell off on the way home.

  • I’ve also written about how a $30 TDAP shot at CVS was billed at $365 by my doctor… and how my insurance paid $169 for it.

  • I never finished (or published) the EpiPen article I was working on simply because the news never ended. Fortunately, all that news coverage resulted in much more affordable options. People who were paying as much as $600 may be able to get an Epi auto-injector for as little as $10 at CVS.

There are hundreds of examples of problems, but if I tried to write about them, I’d never finish this article.

My focus will be to reduce the costs of rising insurance premiums, which I feel is the pain-point for most Americans. If we could access to great care at a reasonable price, we’d be happy right?

Some Personal Background

Our healthcare is covered by TriCare, which is the military’s healthcare. It’s generally great healthcare and I honestly couldn’t tell you much about the premiums as they come off my wife’s paycheck. I suspect that the premiums are very reasonable and greatly subsidized by the government. In fact, I just did a quick search and found that The mysterious $30, $169, $365 TDAP shot

Why did my doctor bill $369 for something that CVS does for $30? I don’t believe I was given better care. I don’t even think I saw my doctor that day, but instead an assistant. I suspect that the doctor knows that the insurance is going to lop off 50-60% and consider it a bookkeeping win (“we saved 60%!”). So I think she billed at an artificially higher price with that in mind.

However, that ends with insurance paying more than 400% than it had to. If they simply suggested that I went to CVS in the first place. Instead my insurance said that I wouldn’t be covered at CVS (if I recall) and that I had to go through my primary care physician.

I was happy to use insurance as I paid $0. My doctor’s office was happy as it got $169 for around ten minutes. The insurance company looks to be the loser, but they raise the premiums on employers and other people who buy insurance, so they aren’t left holding the bad.

It seems to me that the loser is the employer or someone paying premiums for health insurance… the two cogs in the system that can’t really do anything about it. People need health insurance for disastrous stuff so they have to pay the expensive premiums. It’s not like employers are suddenly going to stop offering health insurance and I don’t see them fighting back with the insurance companies.

Proposed Fix: For routine requests like this TDAP, doctors’ offices (or insurances) can quickly/easily electronically refer the patient to the low-cost provider or accept the same rate. Insurers will pay that accepted low-cost rate no matter who does it.

I apologize to all doctors in advance for losing out on $139 ($169 – $30) for each TDAP vaccine performed, but $30 isn’t really bad, when it’s done by some assistant in 10 minutes.

Why it works: Insurers are able to lower premiums significantly. Will they actually do that? I think we need a watchdog to make sure that they do, but that’s a different problem. At this stage we want to make it economically possible for insurers to lower prices on premiums.

I’m sure that TDAP vaccines alone aren’t a huge problem, but I think the example could be spread to a lot of routine care.

The United States MUST negotiate drug prices like other countries

Vox explained the real reason of sky-high prescription drug prices through a stick figure story. If stick figures aren’t your thing (and why not!) the Wall Street Journal explained it in more prose.

Here’s my takeaway from the Vox article, essentially the government (via Medicare) enables pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever it wants for every accepted drug. Other countries work together to negotiate lower rates. As the WSJ article stated: “The upshot is Americans fund much of the global drug industry’s earnings, and its efforts to find new medicines.”

Proposed Fix: Government creates a law that allows for negotiation of Medicare. Medicare creates a policy that they’ll pay the average of what the top 15 countries (or something like that) or it go with another drug. Pharmaceutical companies would have to pitch the cost-benefit of the drug vs. other drugs with similar profiles.

We’ll need a fix for private insurers, but fixing Medicare’s cost of drugs would save dozens of billions, maybe even hundreds of billions.

I apologize to Big Pharma executives and their profits… maybe it is time to raise the prices on the other countries. My understanding is that politicians don’t like this fix because Big Pharma funds their campaigns. I suggest only voting for politicians who are willing to stand up against Big Pharma on high drug prices.

I also apologize to the world, as Americans will not be able to subsidize the creation of cool new medicine. We should work on the system first

Why it works: It works for every other country and it simply makes sense. No need to overthink it.

Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)

I can’t understand why anyone is against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) often referred to as ObamaCare. I had to research it and this LA Times article gives two explanations. One explanation is that most people simply don’t realize that how successful it has been in lower rates of uninsured people. The other explanation is that a political party has been vocally against it suggesting that the costs are too high or that it “doesn’t work.”

This goal of this article is come up with solutions, not get stuck in a partisan fight war of words. Any objective information I’ve found has shown the ACA to be a great success. Even the opposition who can’t seem to put together an alternative seem to agree that it is great for everyone to have access to health insurance and it should cover pre-existing conditions. So we’ve got a great starting point from the ACA.

So why should we get rid of the ACA? It has never been more popular according t this NBC News article. And getting rid of it would raise insurance premiums which exasperates the problem we’re trying reduce.

If cost is a problem that can easily be tweaked. I’ve already outlined a couple of ways to do that and there are more coming. There are probably quite a few other fixes that can be made. For example, why is Justin from Root of Good paying $16 a month for healthcare? He has a 1.5 million-ish net worth. I tip my hat to him (and consider him a virtual friend), but as he wrote, “If this is evil commie government health care I’d like some more, please.”

Proposed Fix: Look into ways to create a more competitive marketplace. For example, don’t let Aetna pull out of the exchanges as a political tool. They wouldn’t need to leave if we were successful in reducing costs as explained elsewhere.

Why it works: Because it was already working in many ways. The ways that it appears to not have been working are addressed elsewhere. There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Borrow Cuba and Other Countries

It seems that Cuba has a great healthcare system that works extraordinary well. Here’s a detailed Huffington Post on that, but I prefer this article from The Atlantic.

As the later article notes:

“Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty… the rate of infant mortality in Cuba has been lower than in the Boston neighborhood of his own prestigious hospital, Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s.

All of this despite Cuba spending just $813 per person annually on health care compared with America’s $9,403.

In Cuba, health care is protected under the constitution as a fundamental human right. As a poor country, Cuba can’t afford to equivocate and waste money upholding that. This pressure seems to have created efficiency. Instead of pouring money into advanced medical technology, the system is forced to keep people healthy.”

There’s a lot more information about how Cuba’s system works, but it makes a lot of sense. We don’t have to take everything that Cuba does, but it shows how throwing more money at the problem isn’t the fix.

Why it works: By economic necessity Cuba has had to adopt a system that works efficiently. We can expand on this more in the comments, but this article is getting long and I have a lot cover still.

Incentivize People to Eat Healthy and be Active

There’s zero immediate monetary incentive for preventing health problems by being healthy. If I log a ton of walking on my Fitbit this month, it’s just a number. If I balloon up to 400 pounds, it’s just another number.

Is it possible for your health insurance to give you money back for meeting certain guidelines like walking steps or maintaining a healthy BMI (not the most ideal metric, but it’s at least a starting point)? We have safe driving incentives for car insurance? Can we apply that to healthcare to give people an economic reason to make healthier decisions?

Additionally, the most unhealthy foods are often easiest to access and the cheapest… just compare the cost 200 calories of a (dressing free) salad at McDonalds and a McDouble. Sugar is very cheap and we know it isn’t healthy. Can we apply things like a soda tax to subsidize the healthier food?

Why it works: It can be hard for people to take interest in their health. Sometimes they don’t have the time for the gym. Sometimes they don’t want to spend $5 on a salad vs. a McDouble (I’m guilty of this). If people are given an immediately visual benefit to be healthy maybe we can reduce the amount of healthcare we need in general.

Required Vaccines for All

Why it works: Because it does.

Crack Down on Supplements

They’ve been exhaustively proven not to help with the exception of a few very specific conditions that your doctor can work with you on.

Americans aren’t educated to understand that Dr. Oz is an entertainer. As that article points out, “The FTC told Elizabeth Cohen, CNN senior medical correspondent, that there are just ‘too many’ weight loss products using deceptive advertising to sue them all. But consumers should be wary of certain phrases that are most certainly false, the FTC said, including any that claim to help you lose weight without diet and exercise.”

Big Supplement has lobbied congress to make it easy for them to put such products out:



And one of the things I’ve found is that when a supplement is tied to Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), it can cost consumers thousands of dollars. Truth in Advertising found “that 97 percent of DSA member companies selling nutritional supplements have distributors marketing their products with illegal health claims”.

Maybe with the right education, consumer protection, and law enforcement, we could divert these billions of wasted out-of-pocket consumer costs to real healthcare. It can be something as simple as a gym membership or eating healthier food in the first place.

Finally, this article points out such misleading information undermines the trust in doctors and healthcare. When people choose quackery over medicine, it can create further health risks, and for our purposes expenses, down the road.

Why it works: Because people making smart, informed decisions about their health is much better than buying likely-illegal hype from a carny.

“Health Care is a Business”

At nearly 2500 words now, I’m going to wrap this up. I had quite a few more notes that didn’t make the cutting room floor and I don’t have the energy to put together a pretty image. (Ironically to the subject at hand, there’s been a bad stomach bug passed around our town and family.) There’s a lot of things that I couldn’t touch here like in the $629 bandage article which covers facility fees of emergency rooms.

I’d like to leave you with something that I’ve read in quite a few places: Healthcare is a Business. I understand that it is, but I don’t think it should be. I think that’s where the system breaks down. It seems that everyone is trying to push to create the greatest profit for themselves, which is generally not a terrible thing. With the system we it seems to push all the expenses to higher insurance premiums with everyone taking a cut along the way.

Eventually it is the employers and consumers who are left footing the bill for all those people.

It’s a lot like Parkinson’s Law that says, “work expands to fill the time available.” In this case, the costs expand to fill the budget available… but the budget is effectively unlimited.

Maybe it’s because I often view things through a personal finance lens of cost-benefit analysis, but I feel like some kind of comptroller is necessary to step in and say, “Whoa! Let’s go with the frugal option with this.”

Starting A Stock Portfolio? There Are Apps For That

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The following guest post on investing methods was written by Jim Cooper. Jim is a part-time freelance blogger who covers lifestyle, finance, and similar topics.

“Step 1: Open a brokerage account if you have several thousand dollars.”

This is the first line I saw when, some time ago, I somewhat-embarrassingly started googling things like “How do I open a stock portfolio?” Literally speaking, it’s a pretty logical first line in describing the process. But where I was concerned, it was immediately overwhelming. Full disclosure: I wasn’t sure what opening a brokerage account entailed, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit “several thousand dollars” when I was really just looking to get my feet wet.

Let me back up a little bit. I think for the average young person, investing can seem pretty complicated. Not so for this lucky writer. I grew up in a household in which it seemed about as simple as could be. My mother was, for much of my life, a day trader who would sit in her home office listening to people yelling at her on CNBC and glancing at a few different computer monitors making snap buy or sell decisions. To me, it looked pretty straightforward: buy low, sell high, look for recognizable patterns in charts, and hope that the little number showing the change in the overall account for the day is green instead of red.

As it turns out, the average young person’s understanding is far more accurate than my warped and simplified one. Sure, the trading process is more or less what I saw it to be once you’re up and rolling with everything set up. But the part I never really witnessed (or, frankly, thought about) before I started to look into setting up my own portfolio was the logistical side of things. You have to choose a brokerage, set up your trading software, pay fees for transactions, and go about managing all kinds of other not-so-fun details as you go.

Perhaps it was silly of me to only see what was on the surface for all those years watching my mother, but then think about it with regard to other professions. If your parent is a lawyer, do you see the meetings and stacks of paperwork, or do you wonder how he or she went about obtaining PLLC status and renting out office space? If your parent is a teacher, do you envision the actual teaching and grading, or do you picture in-depth lesson planning and meetings with faculty and administrative people to outline a year’s worth of education? I digress. But my point is these things can look a little simpler when you’re close to them but not actually in them yourself.

The point is, I wasn’t quite prepared for the involved process of setting up a trading portfolio through an online broker, even if it’s something that millions of people learn how to deal with. And it turns out I’m not the only one. Having done a little bit more research on the topic, I’ve learned that a lot of so-called “millennials” (yes, I’m one of them) are weary of traditional investments.

What I also discovered is that my fellow millennials have gravitated toward alternatives more suitable to our general preferences as a generation. In a post specifically about how young people are approaching forex, it was mentioned that the availability of financial resources has surged as a result of companies developing new tech-based platforms to appeal to new audiences. In other words, financial apps are getting more popular because they speak the millennial language.

stashscreenshot_1

The first app I came across was Acorns, a clever tool that invites its users to experience “micro-investing.” To be perfectly frank, it was the image and interface of the app that drew me in first. Like Monument Valley in gaming, Acorns stood out as a particularly beautiful app that I’d actually enjoy using. Make no mistake, in the age of instant gratification, you can judge a book by its cover; something that looks nice has a better shot at grabbing a young person’s attention, and Acorns looks terrific.

As for what it actually does, it’s kind of like a digital piggy bank that knows how to invest. This app links up to your cards to take small amounts of money (rounding up to the nearest dollar when you make a payment) and then place them into a portfolio that’s already been compiled and is managed by professionals. You can choose from a few different portfolios by risk level and then simply watch your account generate income from your spare change. It’s not going to double your bank account or anything, but it’s completely effortless.

Two other apps that also popped up in my searches were Stash and Robinhood, which do largely the same thing. Basically, these are more hands-on mobile investing tools that actually challenge you to make your own buy and sell decisions. The fun part is that they don’t charge fees for transactions and they’re just a whole lot simpler than going the online broker route. Like Acorns, both are very attractive in a minimalist way, and both are simple to use. Robinhood and Stash offer real and active investing in addition to various tips and tools that can help you to analyze your own performance and learn on the go. So far I’m going with Robinhood, but it’s only because I like the look of it a tiny bit more. Both apps have generated some really positive attention and strong reviews.

Overall, I’d file apps like these under the category of “life hacks” for anyone else, like me, who looks at traditional stock trading and sees something far more complex than it needs to be.