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Paying For Heart Surgery When You’re Not as Rich as Randy Travis

Travis performs "Three Wooden Crosses" — Travis performs “Three Wooden Crosses” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Very sad news broke this week about Randy Travis. The country crooner, whose hits ironically include a song titled “From the Hard Rock Bottom of my Heart,” was hospitalized with a life-threatening heart problem that arose from viral cardiomyopathy, a condition that is characterized by a weakening of the heart muscle due to a virus. The virus that caused this disease is usually pretty harmless, but in some patients, extremely dangerous complications can arise. For Travis, the complications weakened his heart, and he required hospitalization and emergency heart surgery.

Travis is pretty fortunate, financially. He is also pretty wealthy. Therefore, the costs associated with this problem are not likely to set him back financially like they would most Americans. How can people who are not rich like Randy Travis pay for heart surgery?

The easiest way to pay for a heart surgery is to let someone else pay for it. This tip may sound like a joke, but it is the way most people pay for heart surgery. Insurance is a risk management system in which many people pay premiums so that they do not have to bear the entire brunt of a financial loss. Some will come out ahead by paying less in premiums than the amount of the health benefits they will receive. Others will be on the opposite end of the stick. Health insurance can come from the private market or the public coffers through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. While there might be a copay for these procedures with insurance, the insured will not have to pay the whole tab.

Another way to pay for heart surgery is by raiding a retirement account. This is not really advisable in most instances, but desperate times can call for desperate measures. The money can then be paid back over time in the best-case scenario, and getting the doctors paid off will take a major burden off of the back of any heart patient.

Taking out a home equity loan can also be a way to pay for a heart surgery. Those who have some equity built up in their home can sometimes find enough to pay off some emergency bills. Of course, it usually takes years to build up this equity, so many will not have this option available to them.

One final way to pay off a heart surgery without being rich like Randy Travis would involve getting a second job. This might cut down on the amount of time available for cardiac rehab, but the doctor will want his or her cut. It is likely that the hospital will be even more serious about getting paid. This will especially be the case if the hospital is for-profit. It might take some time, but those who are able to survive the extra work should be able to eventually pay off their bills.

What is the financial prize for winning the Super Bowl?

Current Events

When you win the Super Bowl, you get a big ring and your team takes home a giant trophy. But for most guys out on the field, there’s a bigger prize waiting elsewhere. There are financial incentives associated with winning the big game. Some of them are direct, while others come later, in ways that most people will never see. The financial incentives are even different for coaches, players, and the owners who already have billions of dollars anyway. So how do the finances of the Super Bowl shake out?

A Direct Bonus

When Seahawks coach Pete Carroll threw away the Super Bowl, he cost his players and coaches a significant amount of money. Each player from the winning team receives $97,000 as a bonus. The losers are not left empty-handed, of course. They make off with a cool $49,000 each. Still Carroll’s mistake cost his players $48,000, as they had to settle for the consolation prize.

Endorsements Galore

Where things really get interesting is when one considers the marketing gains that players make when they become Super Bowl champions. The calculations are necessarily very indirect when talking about things like sponsorship value, but there is definitely some benefit to winning the big game. In the wake of winning the Super Bowl in 2014, Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman signed endorsement deals with Campbell’s, Nike, and Microsoft. Running back Marshawn Lynch used his Super Bowl win to propel him to a deal with Skittles.

It’s difficult to know just how value the Super Bowl win was to these players and their financial futures, but it’s clear that winning the big game elevates players in the marketing sense.

Ownership Rewards

Super Bowl wins work out well for owners, too. The New England Patriots have won four big games over the last 15 years. In doing so, Tom Brady and company have turned the franchise into one worth over $2 billion. In addition, the Patriots “brand value” alone is worth $350 million. Some of these gains would have happened without wins in the big game, but it’s clear that taking home trophies helped the franchise grow in value.
What’s in it for coaches?

Winning a Super Bowl is the brass ring for coaches, and they are often defined by their ability or inability to take home a ring. When Pete Carroll led the Seahawks to last year’s Super Bowl victory, he was signed to a five-year extension that made him the NFL’s highest paid head coach at around seven million bucks per year. While he might be the goat in this year’s Super Bowl for his horrific goal line call, he’s living proof that if you can win the Super Bowl at least once, you can cash in on financial rewards in a big way.

There’s something to be had for nearly everyone when a Super Bowl win is in the offing. This year, the Patriots will get to enjoy those rewards. Next year, it’s bound to be some other team, some other coach, and some other owner.

Get Age on your Side

Misc

One of the best ways in the early years of your career to provide for your long term future is to have a 401K for your retirement where your employer will match your own contributions up to a certain figure. Your contribution is pre-tax incidentally. Albert Einstein once said that compound interest was the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ and it is compound interest that will help even small amounts to grow into a substantial figure on retirement if savings begin in your 20s.

It is worth illustrating this with real figures. A figure of $4,000 a year saved between the ages of 25 and 35 with no further contributions after that will produce a larger final figure at 65 than someone starting at 35 and contributing $4,000 per annum for 30 years. The latter has invested three times as much as well. The factors that decide this are time and compound interest. The whole total of former is working for him or her for 30 years. A fair amount of the second example is only ‘working’ positively for a limited time. Start early!

An Illustration

It is worth looking at examples to see what size of fund is realistic. 8% is not an unreasonable sum to put away on a salary of $40,000 a year, a salary that grows at 2% per annum for 20 years. If the employer pays 3% in addition and growth is a modest 7%, the fund at the end of 20 years would be around $210,000. If you can put 10% in instead, or if you extend the saving period to 30 years the fund rockets to over $500,000! It’s time and compound interest again because in the example over 20 years you will have only put in just under $80,000 yourself to have a fund two and a half times bigger.

A Couple of Observations

Can there be a bigger argument for saving from an early age than that? Surely not! The question is how to manage your money well enough so that you can start to save in the early years of your career. You may well have a student loan to begin to pay off. Probably two of the most important things to do with realisticloans.com, or not to do depending how you look at it are:

Credit Cards. Avoid building up debts by buying things you cannot afford. The interest charged on outstanding balances is penal. If you have a balance, perhaps as a legacy of subsidizing your student life, take out a personal loan to clear it. It is much cheaper in terms of interest rate and repayable in monthly instalments over a fixed term
Resist the temptation of trying to impress with material things. Impress people by who you are and not a new car or the latest fashions.

Expenditure

There is no doubt that you may well have monthly expenditure you did not face before, especially if you have relocated to start work. Such expenditure is unavoidable but you should spend some time on researching whether you are getting the best deals. That applies to a number of significant things such as utilities, insurance and telephone. There are comparison websites that do a good deal of research for you and at least will provide you with a short list to look at further.

The aim is to create a regular surplus that can be transferred out of your checking account when your monthly pay comes in to work positively for you and your future. You will need to apply self-discipline to your finances but you can see from the example of ‘time and compound interest’ what they benefits are for being in control. It really is not much to sacrifice.

There will be times in the years to come when you have big financial decisions to make. Real estate comes to mind immediately and a long term mortgage can reasonably be regarded as positive debt because it should produce good growth over the term you have committed yourself to. With real estate often comes marriage and a family; and all the expense that involves. Yet that responsibility is yet another reason to start young in saving for the future, and your possible dependents.

How Much Should You Tip?

Finance

: Image by cemre via Flickr

This post from CNN Money has been making the rounds. I’m getting into the game today.

With the holiday season upon us, tipping the people you work with is a tradition in some cases and actually expected in others. Here’s what CNN came up with and my take:

Housekeeper. We don’t have one. I’d think $75-100 would make a nice tip/Christmas bonus. I seem to be more generous than average with my imaginary maid. Maybe that’s because of the outfits she wears.
Gardener. Once again, we don’t have one. Even if we did, I live in Minnesota and have close to a foot of snow over the patch of weeds I call my garden. If I did have a gardener, I wouldn’t have seen him for a few months by now, anyway. $0!
Mail carrier. I’ve only met my mail man a dozen times and I’ve never considered giving him a Christmas present. Do people really do that?
Barber. I don’t have one any more. My wife has started doing my hair for me. When I did, I tipped about 25%, but again, I wouldn’t think about a Christmas present. I only saw him quarterly. I don’t think my wife has a regular stylist either. She’s just got a shop she goes to and gets whoever is available. Is there holiday tipping protocol for that?
Garbage collector. No way. Really? I don’t know that I’ve seen the same guy twice. Am I supposed to give a present to the anonymous, interchangeable union guy that drives past my house every Friday?
Newspaper carrier. One night, twelve years ago, while my wife was still working graveyard shifts, she had a hard time sleeping on her nights off. That’s natural for 3rd shift workers. At about 4AM, she was watching TV and saw someone run past the window. Scared, she came to wake me up. I handed her the phone to call the police, while I grabbed the only thing I had for self-defense and went to investigate. I ran out on the front step–in my boxers, carrying a sword–and saw someone lurking in the neighbor’s yard across the street. I yelled, “Y0u don’t belong here!” only to hear “I’m delivering the paper!” That’s when I start tipping the newspaper carrier. I stopped when we canceled our subscription a few years later. Who needs a dead tree in the morning, when there are a million news sites on the internet?

If the majority of people are giving Christmas bonuses to that many people, and are as generous as the article suggests, then I fall far to the loutish end of the bell curve. I am planning to give my virtual assistant 1/12 of the pay he’s earned this year, so that should make up for some of it, but that is an ongoing business relationship.

How do you compare when it comes to holiday tipping?

Beat the Check

Finance

: Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever played a game of “Beat the Check”? Your rent is due tomorrow, but you don’t get paid until Friday, so you write the check today an, on payday, you run to the bank to get your paycheck deposited before it has a chance to clear. To stretch out the time, you write yourself a check from another account to cover the deficit, knowing that will take a few more days to clear. This is called “floating” a check.

Sound familiar?

I think most people who write checks have tried to rush a deposit in before a check clears.

In 2004, the Check 21 act went into effect, which turned the game on its head. This law gave check recipients an option to make a digital copy of a check, slashing processing time. Instead of boxes of checks being transported around the country, the check began getting scanned and instantly transferred, along with all of the encoding necessary to keep the digital checks organized. This dramatically cut the amount of time it took to clear a check. What was once a week was reduced to as little as 48 hours.

Now, as technology improves and banks update their infrastructure to match, the “float” time has been reduced even further. Many banks are using image control systems to instantly convert all incoming checks to digital format. Within a couple of hours, these images can be transmitted to the Federal Reserve, to be transmitted nearly instantly to the issuing bank. If both the issuing and the receiving banks are using modern image control systems, it is impossible to float a check. “Beat the Check” is a thing of the past. It’s like betting on purple at the roulette wheel.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the funds are instantly available. That would eliminate the banks being able make use of the funds during that time. Don’t expect the banks to make a habit of allowing you the use of your money before the federal regulations demand it.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-17

Misc

RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
@bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #

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