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I just finished installing some green technology that pays for itself. Yes, I installed insulation in the ceiling of our house. In my case half of our electrical usage occurs in the months of December, January, and February so adding insulation should have an immediate impact on our electrical bill. In my case I could easily improve the existing insulation(R-15) in the ceiling by laying with a larger insulation blanket(R-30) on top of it. This would get us pretty close to the recommended value for this area of R-49. Installing insulation is a low risk, low reward project that almost any home owner can do. What I mean by low reward is that you will see a slightly lower annual electrical bill. The good news is that you will see these benefits for many years.  As an example I plotted our energy usage using data off of our bills and heating degree days from http://www.degreedays.net/. I included the degree day data so that I could identify significant differences in weather from one year to the next. From a heating and cooling view, 2010 and 2011 are very similar. Although I am missing my bills from early 2010 and the December bill will not be available for another 30 days we can see the impact of the insulation I installed last spring on my electrical consumption where it dropped between 150 to 300 KW-Hours. This amounts to only a $14 to $29 drop in the monthly electrical bill. Its not much but every little bit counts.

Here are some of my heirloom tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, and peppers. My garden provided me with tomatoes and peppers for about four weeks.

I was curious whether this Gizmodo article, How To Never Bust Through Your Smartphone’s Data Cap Again [Data Caps], would come up with the idea I came up with, turn your 2G/3G/4G data access off. Since most of my awake hours is spent in two places where I have Wi-Fi access the lack of over the air data access should not be much of a problem to me. This also explains why I did it. How can I go over my 200 MB limit when most of my data transfers should be over Wi-Fi? This problem seems to be occurring every month now.

Here are two sources for those trying to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement. Representing the left side of the political spectrum is the show by Charlie Rose with with journalist Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Charlie Rose – A discussion about Occupy Wall Street. Representing the right side of the political spectrum is this blog post from Heritage Foundation, The Conservative’s Guide to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protests.

When I read the post, A Deep Look At Revolving Credit, And What It Means For Consumer Spending, the graphs inspired me to try my hand at answering some questions I have been about the importance of consumer debt to our last economic expansion.  So the first thing I did was to create a graph using FRED of the revolving debt versus the S&P 500. To avoid issues with scaling and different units, I told FRED to scale the graph using the latest available data as 100. From the graph I could see that there was a strong relationship between the two lines but I had some other questions. How much of the increased debt was due to the increase in population and inflation? My solution was to create a per capita revolving credit estimate by dividing the revolving credit by the population of wage earners and scaling it to 100 and adding a separate line for the inflation index. Here is the final result.

Now this is an interesting graph. We can see that the S&P 500 and the per capita revolving credit have a close relationship up until the internet boom of 2000. Then things go haywire. We can also see that the per capita rate of revolving debt started to accelerate after 1983. It continued to increase at a rate greater than the inflation rate until 2007 when it started a decline despite a much larger number of wage earners and inflation. This leads me to conclude that the wage earner’s debt was maxed out in 2007.

The next question I had was where does the per capita revolving debt go from here? One way we can make an intelligent guess at the answer is to go from the premise that per capita revolving debt should have grown at the rate of inflation. Using a regressed line of the CPI to provide us with the slope of the line, we would expect that per capita revolving debt still needs to drop another 10% to reach the point that inflation rate would have predicted. Since the wage earner was probably maxed out in 2007 I think the wage earner is unlikely to add more debt any time soon. They are still close to their max debt load. If we assume that wage earner’s tolerance for debt and inflation rates does not change dramatically then it make take another year or two for the wage earner to pay down enough debt and establish enough distance from their max debt level. On the negative side if the wage earner gets panicky about the future of their job and the economy,  there might be some debt repayment overshoot. The logical conclusion is that this new normal for revolving debt will be bad news for the companies whose sales are dependent on revolving debt and make if very difficult for this economy to expand for the next two years.

I keep getting the sense that personal responsibility is pretty low on the protestors list of problems. Yea, I get the issue of a lack of good jobs. As a person who was unemployed for a long time after my attempt at running my own business failed, I understand the frustration and pain of the job search process. Despite having multiple degrees it took me awhile to figure out the problem. The problem was not banks, Federal government, or Corporate America. It was me. Although I had some good technical skills, some of the necessary skills I needed to run a small business were too weak. By the time I recognized my weaknesses it was too late. My key to success came when I decided that I was going to do what ever it takes to get the employment process moving. It might mean that I need to take a low paying, menial job but I was going to eat the humble pie I was served and restart my career. Fortunately for me I found a firm that needed my expertise. Actually they desperately needed my expertise. Some people might even say it was a match made in heaven.

As a person who had a slightly high PSA reading, my doctor and I were concerned and vowed to monitor the situation. Since my wife had a breast biopsy that resulted in a false positive, I vowed to do more research on how prevalent false positives in prostate cancer before agreeing to getting lit up in a cat scan or via a more invasive operation.

Men finally may be getting a clearer message about undergoing PSA screening for prostate cancer: Don’t do it.

New prostate cancer test advice overturns dogma – Yahoo! News

As a resident of Ohio and purchaser of individual health insurance, I am particularly interested in how Ohio is impacted by the Obamacare reforms. In a previous post this year I performed a simple price check of similar health care policies in Ohio and in Massachusetts using my family information. Massachusetts was chosen as a proxy for Obamacare. The policy in Ohio would cost me $305 a month and $1,296 if I lived in Massachusetts. I tried and failed to find an extra benefit offered in Massachusetts plan was necessary for my family. My conclusion was that the higher rates required in Massachusetts were an income redistribution scheme that resembled a tax more than a traditional insurance plan. The Milliman report linked below provides additional evidence that the expected individual policy rate hikes are more about bringing more money in to the insurance companies than providing benefits for policy holders. As a purchaser of health insurance for over 30 years, health insurance has gotten progressively worse in benefits for the cost as it has migrated to a more tax like system. The idea that we are trying to model our national health care after a state in which all of their  people paying $1,296 a month or higher for their health insurance is not rational since the rest of the world is paying half that amount. If $1,296 a month is the best Massachusetts can do, than we need to pick a different state to model our health care after. Health care as a tax is not working. If we assume that Obamacare will fail because of insurance rates that are too high, then our national health care plan should be modeled after the individual insurance policies offered in Ohio, essential services offered at a reasonable rate.

Americans knew the negative impact Obamacare would have on the nation before the law even passed. Millions of Americans will be added to Medicaid, which already provides low-quality coverage and patchy access to care. The new law will not result in universal coverage, despite its $1 trillion+ price tag. Premiums will go up. And Americans who like their current health plans will not be able to keep them.

Now, states are beginning to better understand the impact of Obamacare. Earlier this month, Gorman Actuarial and Jonathan Gruber reported on Wisconsin residents’ moving out of existing coverage and experiencing premium hikes.

Milliman, an independent consulting firm, recently released its findings on the law’s effects in Ohio.

Greater dependence on government coverage. The most striking finding of the study is the expansion of taxpayer-funded, public health care programs under the new law. Before Obamacare, enrollment in Ohio’s public health programs, including Medicaid, was a little more than 2 million. Now, Ohio (and federal) taxpayers will be picking up the tab to expand these public health programs by 52 percent. Of the more than 1 million state residents added to these programs, more than half had coverage before the law passed, and only 47 percent were uninsured in 2010.

Though Obamacare expanded Medicaid by as many as 25 million Americans and created a new health entitlement, millions of Americans will still go without coverage. In Ohio, only 53 percent of the uninsured will have coverage in 2017, when all the provisions of the law will be in effect. Real health care reform could expand coverage for those who are currently uninsured without these negative consequences, and with better success than Obamacare.

Escalating premiums. The Milliman study also shows across-the-board increases in premiums resulting from the new law, on top of customary growth due to medical inflation. Premiums will grow by 3 percent to 5 percent in the large group insurance market, 5 percent to 15 percent in the small group market, and a whopping 55 percent to 85 percent in the individual market. As the authors point out, these numbers represent the estimated average premium impact and will vary based on age and health status. According to the report, “In the individual market, a healthy young male…may experience a rate increase of between 90% and 130%.” At the same time, older and less healthy individuals could see a decrease.

Premium increases will result from a number of policies and effects of the new law. These include new benefit requirements, age rating, and other types of requirements placed on insurers. They also include shifting of costs by providers from publicly covered individuals to the privately insured; the authors warn that “The significant expansion of the Medicaid population may result in increased charges to commercial payors to account for low provider reimbursement under Medicaid.”

The impact of Obamacare on Ohio is clear: The huge expansion of government-run health care will raise costs for state residents by increasing taxpayer funding of government health care programs and by escalating health care costs. The Milliman study is the latest reminder of why Obamacare must be repealed.

New Study Shows Obamacare’s Impact on Ohio Coverage and Premiums
Kathryn Nix
Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:30:06 GMT

I was told of the importance of funding an emergency funds for most of my adult life but despite this sound advice, I did not an emergency fund one until about three years ago. It started when after many years, our farm starting to break even. So I started putting away money just in case we had problems again. During the time we had financial problems with the farm, we accumulated a lot of credit card debt. It took the help I got from a relative to get out of the hole and I vowed to my relative and to myself to never let us get in to that debt problem again. I learned my lesson the hard way and hope that others have to follow my path to enlightenment. From my hard learned lessons I find it amazing and disappointing that more people are not embracing emergency funds as a key part of their financial plan. Considering the expected returns in real estate and the stock market the best financial strategy for people with credit card debt is to pay it down and avoid accumulating any more credit card via emergency spending. Like our governments the biggest problem is controlling spending. It is easier said than done but that does not make it any less important.

According to a recent study from The National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), 33 percent of Americans do not have a savings account of at least $1,000 or more to cover emergency expenses.

The NFCC study surveyed 1,010 Americans to determine how much money they had set aside in the event of a financial emergency that could cost around $1,000.

Of the respondents surveyed, 64 percent claimed to possess emergency funds.

Those individuals without savings said that they would have to turn to an outside source to ask for money if they were faced by an unexpected expense.

In the words of Technorati:

Although the study might have been a bit biased in selecting its sample pool, the fact that such a high number of participants are lacking a relatively modest $1,000 in savings is still alarming. And is clearly something that should be addressed—for example, through better financial education.

This seems to be part of a wider picture of poor financial provision by households in the US. An earlier study by the NFCC found that 30 percent of Americans have zero dollars in non-retirement savings. A separate study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 50 percent of Americans would struggle to come up with $2,000 in a pinch.

And these are just a few of the alarming discoveries made in the NFCC’s annual report. Here are some others:

Today, more than 1 in 5 U.S. adults (22 percent) do not have a good idea of how much they spend on housing, food and entertainment. Although just over 2 in 5 Americans (43 percent) say they have a budget and track their expenses, more than half (56 percent) do not.

More than half do not budget? Well, that certainly explains what is going on in D.C.

Furthermore, more than 1 in 3 adults (36 percent) say they are now saving less than last year. And, in fact, 1 in 3 (33 percent) do not have any non-retirement savings. Although there had been a steady increase in the proportion of adults who have savings between 2008 (63 percent) and 2010 (67 percent), that proportion has now declined somewhat (to 64 percent in 2011).

One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the report is that there seems to be a prevalent attitude in American culture where not enough emphasis is put on self-reliance and personal financial freedom but instead too much has been put on the “gimme-gimme” mentality. That would certainly account for the multitudinous amounts of Americans in debt and the coinciding lack of personal financial responsibility.

View the full report here.

This post originally appeared at The Blaze.

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See Also:

• There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Investment Advice
• Generation Y’s $2 Million Retirement Price Tag
• Inside Mayor Bloomberg’s Extravagant New York And London Townhouses

Guess How Many Americans Don’t Have Enough Saved To Cover A $1000 Emergency
Becket Adams
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Let the election year scandals begin!

 

A top congressional investigator said on Tuesday that he believes more companies that benefitted from the stimulus bill’s renewable energy loan guarantee program will go bankrupt before all allotted funds are spent.

 

Congressional Investigator: More Solar Bankruptcies to Come
Lachlan Markay
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:49:16 GMT