Posts Tagged ‘ healthcare ’

5 Ways to Cut Your Health Insurance

By Kevin M

Last week we examined 11 Ways to Cut Your Car Insurance–this week we’ll flip it around and take a look at what we can do to lower our health insurance costs. This one is even bigger—in many households, health insurance costs are second only to housing as the top expense. And many times the difference between housing and health insurance isn’t all that much.

Raise your deductible and co-pays

Raising your deductible and cutting co-payments is the most common and probably the most effective way to cut your health insurance. In fact you can reduce your monthly premium by hundreds of dollars with just this one step.

As an example that I’m pulling from one of my own recent posts on this site:

“…coverage for a family of four living in Georgia (male, 40, female, 39, two children, non-smokers) with a deductible of $2,000 and $35 co-pays for doctor visits will be $863 per month (via Assurant). If the deductible is increased to $10,000 and the $35 doctor visit co-pay is eliminated, the monthly premium falls to $295.”

Increasing the deductible from $2,000 to $10,000 is admittedly extreme, but it illustrates the point clearly—the premium falls by nearly 70%. You can achieve significant savings even with smaller increases in your deductible. This is something you might consider doing if you are in good health and not a frequent user of healthcare. If you have health issues and regularly use healthcare, you’d be better off staying with the low deductible.

If you do raise you’re deductible, you can offset the risk with one or more of the following:
Read more »

Are “Stealth” Expenses Killing Your Budget?

By Kevin M

Do you ever find yourself wondering—perhaps when you look at your paycheck or even your W2–I make a good living, why don’t I have more money saved up?

You might look at your income and your regular expenses and think that you should be saving more, but somehow it all seems to just disappear, almost as if there are termites gnawing away at both your wallet and your checking account. And perhaps there are a few termites infesting your finances. Call them “stealth expenses”—stealth because we usually underestimate them—if we even notice them–expenses because that’s just what they are.

We all have fixed expenses that we know only too well—house payments, car payments, student loan and credit card payments. There are also day-to-day survival expenses, like groceries and gas. We’re very familiar with all of these, but it’s those others, the variables, that slowly suck the life out of a budget. Those are the stealth expenses, the ones that aren’t always so easy to measure or even to prepare for.

”Where does all my money go?”

How to Buy Health Insurance Without Paying Too Much

By Art Forrest

The recent (and ongoing) health care debate has illustrated how expensive health care is, regardless of whether it’s financed by insurance premiums, higher taxes by the government, or cash out of your pocket. It’s important, then, for both individuals and small & large businesses to choose the most appropriate and cost effective coverage for their needs. Here are a few general comments and things to think about…

Health INSURANCE vs. Health Care FINANCING

Most health insurance plans are health care “financing,” NOT health care “insurance.” Insurance is, by definition, the pooling of risk for an unexpected financial loss–like your house catching fire or a tree falling on your car during a tornado, or, health-wise, having heart surgery for $145,000.

Save Money By Taking Better Care of Yourself

Kevin M

Expense Reduction Strategies Forum–We’re taking on this weekly forum as a way of exchanging ideas to help lower the cost of living. This includes expense reduction and elimination, but goes beyond, even to include lifestyle changes that may bring savings on a number of fronts. Ideas on ways to cut personal, household or business expenses are welcome!

On July 20th in this space we talked about using a diet as a way to save some money (Is Now A Good Time To Go On A Diet?). As most of us understand, typical diet plans are expensive, requiring membership in the diet program, the purchase of healthier but more expensive foods, or even the purchase of food and meals directly from the diet sponsor. But our plan actually saved money and was infinitely more basic: diet by eating less food!

In this week’s edition of the Expense Reduction Strategies Forum, I’d like to take the health/expense reduction connection to the next level. We can save money and improve health by eating less, but even greater payoffs, both financial and in the quality of our lives, can be had by going even farther, by realizing a reduction in living expenses by taking better care of our overall health.

Pages