Category: Insurance

Not just Florida: Consider the world when planning retirement

Living in North America offers access to an unprecedented standard of living, stable employment, safety, and entertainment.

But it comes at a high cost. What if you could retire in style at a fraction of the cost? Enter geo-arbitrage which means taking advantage of the cost of living in different locations.

To make retiring early feasible for the average individual, Business Insider points out that American dollars can buy a lot more in other countries than they can at home. As an example, most retirement calculators are based on about $40,000 per year in annual retirement income to compute their savings goals. This assumes that the person is using the standard 4 percent withdrawal rate from their retirement savings. To manage that number, a person would need $1 million in the bank to retire. This amount of money will require diligent saving and strong market performance to achieve.

Conversely, an individual might only need about $12,000 per year to live comfortably in a place like Guatemala. This means that they could retire with the same standard of living while only having $300,000. This could literally shave more than a decade off of a person’s working life. Sure, the standard might not be an exact apple-to-apple comparison, but many resources are available online that help to provide direction and information for would-be expatriates. Many from these groups are already living abroad and have helped pave the way for this trend to flourish.

Now, this type of lifestyle change might not be feasible for everyone, especially families with children still in school, but options exist outside of the traditional method of working until the age of 65. It would pay to take notes anytime someone is traveling abroad on how they might like to spend the rest of their lives in that location. For someone up for adventure and yearning for financial freedom, geo-arbitrage might just be their golden ticket.

Katherine Switzer became the first woman to run as a numbered participant in the Boston Marathon, April 19, 1967.

Switzer registered for the race as K.V. Switzer and was given a number, even though women were not invited to run.

When the error was discovered, one official tried to physically force her off the course. But Switzer’s boyfriend, also running, clobbered the official, sending him flying and they continued.

An unofficial woman runner, Bobbi Gibb, beat Switzer’s time by an hour.

Women were not officially welcome to the marathon until 1972. Interestingly, the official who pushed Switzer in 1967 was instrumental in making women part of the event in 1972.

Car insurance rates are going up and you can blame the smartphone.

Insurers expect rates to rise by 8 to 11 percent in 2017 as auto accidents rise along with distracted driving.

Auto insurers say distracted driving is so bad that they are beginning to see many auto accidents with no skid marks, according to the Wall Street Journal. The drivers literally never saw it coming.

Experts expected accidents to drop and rates to lower as car-makers adopted higher tech protections, but that has not happened.

According to Allstate Corp., the striking correlation between smartphone ownership and accidents is because people do more than talk on the phone when they are driving. Maybe talking was bad enough, but now drivers are making videos, texting and using the Internet.

The worst possible New Year’s decisions probably don’t seem so terrible at the time.

Drinking and driving — the safety scourge of New Year — gets a lot of press for good reason. That one decision can change your life or even end it.

However, a new spike in traffic related deaths tells experts something else is going on in cars these days. Something deadly: Technology.

In the first six months of 2016, highway deaths rose 10.4 percent, to 17,775, from the comparable period of 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“This is a crisis that needs to be addressed now,” Mark R. Rosekind, the head of the agency, told the New York Times.

Safety officials aren’t alone in their concern. The insurance industry is also convinced that using phones and apps on phones, tablets or laptops, is the biggest cause of the rise in road fatalities,

Robert Gordon, a senior vice president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said in an interview with the New York Times.

When the first examples of tech-distracted driving became obvious a decade ago, the problem was driving while trying to make phone calls or text on a phone.

Response to this problem was to make new cars Bluetooth friendly so that drivers would not have to take their hands off the wheel. Instead, their phones would work right from their cars.

And that has worked well. So well, that now there are a host of apps that also work very well through the car. Result? More Internet use than ever and, possibly, more distraction than ever, as drivers concentrate on podcasts, social media, navigation, and more.

Christmas in the US officially begins Nov. 30 when the 45,000 energy-saving LED lights on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree burst into a dazzling display.

The American event began in 1951 when only 9 percent of Americans owned a television. By the end of the decade 90 percent of Americans owned a television and the New York City Christmas celebration became a holiday tradition.

When NBC broadcasts the one-hour tree-lighting special every year, the cameras emphasize the tree, ice skating rink, and surrounding magical decorations. They don’t reveal the marvel of the Center itself.

Rockefeller Center itself is a complex of 19 commercial buildings, themselves icons soaring up on legendary streets with names such as Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue, and 30 Rockefeller Plaza, headquarters of NBC. The buildings take up 22 acres in Midtown Manhattan and they were part of the largest private building project of all times, a project of glamor wrought in gloomy times.

In 1928, John D. Rockefeller Jr., had already leased land from Columbia University to build a new facility for the Metropolitan Opera when the stock market crashed in 1929. With a global depression underway, the Opera board backed out of its commitment. Other financing fell through. Rockefeller knew if the Art Deco ‘city within a city’ would be built, he would have to finance it himself.

And he did. Although Rockefeller suffered losses himself on Black Tuesday, he pressed ahead with the project that became a symbol of success and hope for the future, a public space where New Yorkers could appreciate art, and a commercial boon for the city.