How to save and invest your first $1,000

The more I learn the more I realize how naive I am. One of my favorite proverbs I have ever heard is a Haitian saying "What you don't know is bigger than you." When it comes to saving and investing nothing comes more close to that saying. I highly doubt anyone truly know every option available in the open market. There are tens of thousands of mutual funds, ETFs, bonds, stocks, etc that it becomes way too overwhelming. So where do you start?

I took the advice of a great speaker named Ramit Sethi and figured out how to save my first $1000 in an investment. I went online to a discount brokerage Schwab.com and opened up an account. It was just like creating an account anywhere else. I then tried to figure out how to add my bank account information to start transferring money from my bank account to the Schwab account. Since my goal was to start automatically saving, I searched for the section under mutual funds and automatic investing. Finding a good fund can be difficult, so I chose a very low cost fund that ties itself to the S&P 500 and is called an Index fund. There are a lot of index funds available and all they do is mimic the general overall market. There is no guess of what is going on every day and whether or not the company is doing good or bad. There is also no guess as to whether or not the fund is beating the market, because the fund is mimicking the market. If you hear on the news or go online and it shows the market went up 1% today your investments probably went up 1% as well.

Once I told the system to buy by index fund every month I couldn't figure out how to make it actually take the money from my bank account every month. I actually had to communicate with Schwab. I think this is why it is good to have some kind of human helping you such as an advisor or representative. They set up my automatic investing and I was set. Every month on the same day $100 exits my bank account then a couple days later a few shares of the mutual fund is purchased. Simple as that. The minimum you can do with automatic investing is $100, so it will only take you roughly 10 months and you will have your first $1,000.

Dental Insurance

I never knew there was a season for dental work and dental insurance but it seems like Spring is the time! Calls have increased and claims have started rolling in like crazy.
I actually dislike dental insurance. The purpose of buying insurance is to help you with the risk of possible losses. By having many people buy the insurance and have just a few actually make claims, helps keep costs low and makes insurance companies money. Since people typically don't go shopping for dental insurance until their teeth are hurting or they find out they are need of a lot of work, it makes the sale quite difficult. Insurance companies aren't in the business to lose money and they know that people who get cleanings done regularly and that purchase insurance ahead of time typically won't give them large claims, so they institute waiting periods. Group dental insurance plans don't use these when the group is large enough because they know for every one or two people who need work done right away there will be 2-5 people who don't need the work. When you are buying on your own, it is just you and the risk for the insurance company is too great. You will typically see 6 months for minor work and 12 months on major services. Dental Insurance DOES NOT cover implants, so don't even ask. There are a few carriers who will pay a small portion for services from day or year 1, but when they do that that give you small increments each year beyond that.
Dental HMO plans give you access to smaller dentist lists and they give the chance to participate in their low fee schedules. Due to the fact the insurance company isn't really on the line for any other costs, they don't have waiting periods, because you are paying out of pocket for the expenses.
If you need work done now, look into a discount program. If your dentists is a good friend, ask for a cash discount or work out payment plans. When you get insurance know you will wait, but know that you have the protection when you need it in the future.

Are you saving?

In my recent conversations with clients and friends I have been trying to ask the question, "Are you saving your money?" Of all the financial gurus and financial programs I have studied I have learned one common thread that ties them all together: Save money.
I think some people are naturally born with this insight and others are taught it very young. For the rest of us it is just against our nature. The reason we have money is to buy things and since it feels like our resources are so low, when we get anything extra, we spoil ourselves with fun. Saving that money doesn't seem very fun, because it doesn't yield any instant gratification.
I have learned that in order to make saving fun I had to start doing it in a unique way. Just sticking extra money in a bank account or setting it aside doesn't work well for me. I can still see it there and it just sits, never growing or moving, just sits there as worthless cash. So instead of having the money be boring, why not start investing it? You don't have to have a lot of money to start investing. It really isn't all that difficult either. Most people tend to think they need financial advisors or lots of money to start investing. That couldn't be further from the truth. I wouldn't even bother hiring an advisor unless I had a ton of money, because their fees are way too high.
You can open a simple thing called a brokerage account from your favorite on line fund manager like etrade or schwab or Fidelity. You can start by choosing your favorite company where you spend a lot of your moey already and just buy a share or more of their stock. now you have "Saved" your money and purchased something that can be fun to watch. You can watch as your money fluctuates every day and know you own a part of that company you frequent often. If you are willing to set aside regular amounts of $100 or more a month you can just invest in an indexed mutual fund that mimics the stock market. When the market goes up or down for the day you can rest assured your money has done the same thing. When you get bored or want more excitement you can sell those stocks or mutual funds and buy something different. It seems like every rich person I have heard about started out in the stock market doing something similar to that- just buying a few stocks. I think by starting to buy small stocks they got more interested in what was going on. As they got smarter and smarter about the markets they made more and more money.
Sometimes stocks don't grow and you lose money. The good news is you probably won't ever lose all of it. If you hadn't invested you wouldn't have anything left over anyways and probably would much sadder had you done nothing at all. You also gained a lot of experience and can start earning more later.

Affordable Care Act

http://www.exchangenevada.com/blog

Sal Morales, went from paying $560 month in Cobra insurance to about $145 a month through the Affordable Care Act. He also has a network deductible of $500. Here’s how he breaks it down: “There’s one party, the hospital who provides the service. There’s a second party, the patient, who receives the service. And there’s a third party, the insurance, who pays for the service.” What happened with Mr. Morale’s case is that the insurer negotiates a lessor amount for various plans, with a variety of hospitals through multiple agreements for the same hospitals or doctors.

Doctors are paid differently even if two patients have the same insurance company, if the plans are different in any way. To make this simple there are as many price tags for a hypertension checkup as there are insurers and providers.

The question that should be asked is how much is your doctor getting paid, to determine the best deals for coverage. If you have the history of medical procedures from lasts years doctors treatment the insurance company can provide a better assessment as opposed to shopping around to be told the price is more to cover you for the same procedures as last year.

“We’re identifying the procedure, we’re identifying the provider, the date of service and then making sure the amount, the member responsibility has to be in there,” Monzon says.

To get a clearer sense of what health care costs, someone would have to collect enough of those statements from patients at all different hospitals with all different insurance.

There are companies and crowdsourcing projects trying to do just that around the country. And Massachusetts has a law that says insurers have to disclose some of these prices in a way that is accessible to patients.

This story is part of a partnership that includes WLRN, the Miami Herald, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Nevada Health Link Re-Enroll Email

Yesterday afternoon, Nevada Health Link sent out an email to all users stating that they MUST re-enroll in health insurance for next year or they will lose their subsidies. http://info.nevadahealthlink.com/re-enroll/ It will be a big deal if on January 1 you wake up and see that your current insurance company is sending you a bill for the full amount of the insurance that was being subsidized by the federal government before.
We have already started calling our current clients and informing people of this change and have begun the process to re enroll everyone for 2015. We want this to happen smoothly for each one of our clients and not make them go through the headache on their own. We were successful last year at getting people coverage through Nevada Health Link and we will do it again. It can be a nightmare trying to correct someone else's mistake on the websites. It is extremely important to make sure the information is accurate and that you understand why the questions they are asking are being asked. The first application I did last year was a dummy one I did for myself and I honestly was a little confused and annoyed. I have now done hundreds of these and I have a lot more knowledge and experience to get these done correctly.

We are putting on 2 events in October in Las Vegas to help people understand the changes and make life better for those who attend. Mark your calendar for October 18 and 25th at the YMCA off N Durango at 10am. I think it is a such a blessing to be able to have us work for you and get these done so you don't have to stress. The second best part is having a second person to be on your side in case things don't go 100% smoothly either. I have seen some of the worst technological issues with the website get fixed because we intervened and worked on the case. I know for a fact if those clients were on their own, they would be in the same boat today with no repercussion.

What is your reason?

Recently, a client of ours took out life insurance.  She just turned 50 and had nothing in place.  A huge reason why they made this decision now is because two close friends of theirs just passed.  I can't imagine how they must have felt having not one but two deaths to process.  This client has a family and is the main source of income for them.  I had mentioned it to them last year.  It was something they wanted to do but hadn't gotten around to it.  After losing friends so close to them they had no other choice but to secure the future of their family.  Nobody likes to talk about, "what if I die?" However, this is a question we need to take the time to ask ourselves.  Please talk it over with your family.   

2015 Nevada Health Insurance update

The department of Insurance has released the proposed rates for next year for individuals and small groups. I have put them together into our easy to use spreadsheets and are looking forward to being able to quote new policies soon. There seems to be some interesting trends. Anthem has decided to decrease their rates and offer totally new products, including an actual PPO product this next year. Sierra Health is staying with their product line up with relatively low increases and they are even introducing some lower cost alternative plan options. Assurant health, who last year was a big player has decided to join Humana at higher than market rates with increases as high as 30%+. Golden Rule is also putting their hat into the ring again this next year with rates equivalent to Assurant and Humana. Aetna has decided to stop offering Coventry plans, but they have kept the same kind of rates amongst the new Aetna plans that were similar to Coventry offerings with very strong low rates in the Bronze and Silver levels. Humana has also decided to increase their product offerings to expand into Platinum and Gold, but rates are still slightly higher than the lower priced Anthem, Sierra Health, and Nevada Health Coop Products. The Nevada Health Coop has introduced a whole lot of new offerings. They have expanded their Southern Simple and neighborhood plans to include platinum coverage and are introducing a whole new set of plans. Their rates are still amongst the least expensive.
Some big news for people who shop for coverage with subsidies is Assurant is going to be offering the first true PPOs on our exchange. This is good news to people who want more freedom and more choices f doctors. We are still yet to hear what provider network these plans will be using, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the Aetna Signature Administrators network they used mostly last year.
As we get more updates about how our new federally facilitated marketplace will work, I hope to port more about those changes and hopefully we will be seeing some fixes to some of the biggest headaches we have been dealing with.