I was talking with a friend the other day and I mentioned how I now work at home. He said I was “living the dream.” Someone forgot to tell me that rationing your Ramen is living the dream.
While on the topic of living frugally, Golbguru is about to experience some lifestyle deflation. I’ve been living that for the last 4 months and it’s quite stressful.
I’d like to send a “gung hay fat choy” to Sun. I hope that means what I think it does. It looks like he got the same letter I did about Ohio’s 529 Plan. Our low cost investment just got a little lower.
Generation X Finance shows off his new new site design with a 15 ways to improve your Fico Score.
The Digerati Life writes why to love to a down market – you get buy low. Unfortunately, this isn’t a silver lining for me as I don’t currently have the cash to invest.
Ben at Money Smart Life has free long distance phone calls. I thought everyone had that five years ago with cell phones and Internet phones like Vonage.
No Credit Needed has found an annual discount on the Dish network. The question is, is it worth it? Click through to find out why.
Free Money Finance asks Should Unhealthy People Pay More for Medical Insurance? My answer is simply yes. I know that unsafe drivers pay more driver’s insurance, what’s the difference?
Mighty Bargain Hunter asks how strong your piggy bank is. Mine is paper-mache and I love it.
I was featured in a few carnivals this week. You can read them here:
There are drawbacks to working at home, and it may not always be “living the dream” for some people, but if most Americans could choose, virtually everyone would rather work at home than in an office.
First, I’m curious how you would quantify healthy vs. unhealthy. I’m sure smokers and the obese would top you list, the problem with that is the data on health care spending does not support your thesis. A study just came out that said it is more expensive to treat HEALTH people (http://www.slate.com/id/2184475/). Even if you could define some characteristics that made a person “unhealthy” you are still missing out on a lot of people who are unhealthy but doesn’t fit your metric. What about the skinny people who don’t eat any fruits or veggies. What about the people who live under power lines, have lead paint on their walls, or skip preventative medical treatments. My point is that you can never know who is likely to burden the system and who is not. We do not understand disease enough and can not quantify the risks, and if we could should we?
How much should a person pay for being unhealthy? 10% more, 20% more, or whatever an actuary determines? Should there be a cap at all? No insurance for those who are too sick or at risk of being sick. That would save all of the healthy people money, until you find that you or someone in your family was unlucky enough to be one of those people. Insurance is about shared risk. If you happen to be the person that works hard to stay healthy you may life longer and be more productive, but should you get to opt out of the risk pool because you of it? I say no.
Think about it for a while and do some reading before jumping at the knee jerk reaction.