Search Results for “medical-costs-and-choices” — Page 5

Colorado Insurance Laws: Do you have the Right Coverage?

Car insurance is mandatory in Colorado. Colorado law on car insurance changed in 2003 when the state changed to a fault-based system from a no-fault system. Even more requirements were added in 2009 for drivers, namely, a mandatory $5,000 in medical payments coverage.

Many of the other changes made to Colorado car insurance requirements were made to help prevent claim abuses and reduce the cost of insurance premiums for drivers in the city. The ‘tort’ or fault-based system requires that fault must be established before a claim is paid by an insurance company.

According to data released by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the average cost of auto insurance in Colorado was $777. This is way below the national average of $841 and far below the most expensive state, New Jersey, which had an average expenditure of $1,254 in annual premiums.

Colorado Insurance requirements

The state requires all drivers to have liability coverage at the least. This ensures that the other party and their property will be compensated in an accident that is your fault. According to insurance-comparison site, CoverHound, the minimum coverage for car insurance in Colorado should include:

Bodily injury coverage of $25,000 for each person involved in the accident
Bodily injury coverage of at least $50,000 for each accident the motorist is involved in
Property damage coverage of $15,000 for each accident

Additional car insurance

Having insurance coverage meeting the minimum requirements of the law in Colorado will save you from being arrested for inadequate insurance. However, your insurance may not provide you with adequate coverage in case of an accident. Therefore, it’s important to consider the following car insurance options.

Uninsured/Underinsured motorist coverage

While car insurance is a mandatory in Colorado, several drivers still drive without auto insurance. Figures released by the Insurance Research Council estimate that 16.2 percent of motorists in the state are uninsured. This is slightly above the 12.6 percent national average. The scary thing about not having this coverage is you never know when you’re going to get in an accident, let alone an accident with someone who’s underinsured, or uninsured altogether. As you can probably guess, if someone isn’t willing to pay an insurance premium to protect their financial means, they probably don’t have much financial means to protect in the first place, thus leaving you destitute in the event of an accident, regardless of fault. Bottom line: uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage protects your expenses in this situation.

Medical Payments Coverage

Due to the aforementioned legislation passed in 2009, insurance providers are required to offer motorists $5,000 in med pay coverage as part of their insurance coverage. This is offered as part of every car insurance policy, and can be adjusted in $1,000 increments. You however, have the choice of opting out, but you have to send a rejection form. You can also choose to up your coverage to as much as $100,000.

Collision coverage

Liability coverage ensures that the other party’s expenses are covered in the event you cause an accident, but what about damage to your own car? Collision coverage takes care of any damages to your car regardless of who’s at fault. The insurance also covers you for damage caused by hitting other objects with your car, such as a tree, or streetlight.

Comprehensive cover

This ensures that you are covered for any damage that is caused to your car that doesn’t involve a collision (e.g. fire, falling objects, flood and hail). It also provides cover for the loss of your car through theft and other perils such as explosions.

If you purchase your car through a loan, your lender may require you to take out a comprehensive coverage policy. You can choose to have a higher deductible in order to reduce the cost of your premium.

Cost of violations

There are various penalties set by the state to ensure that motorists have adequate insurance. You may be penalized for failing to provide evidence of insurance or for purchasing inadequate insurance. Some of the penalties and fines include:

A minimum fine of $500 for violations
The addition of 4 points to your driver’s license
The suspension of your license for up to 8 months
Community service

It is important to understand your state laws and your own financial situation when choosing insurance. Your policy should not only meet state law requirements but your personal requirements as well. If it doesn’t, then what’s the point of having it in the first place?

This is a guest post.

3 Things Everyone Should Do Before the End of 2010

Finance

: Image via Wikipedia

New Year’s resolutions are great, but what are you doing the rest of the year? As we roll into summer and we see the year’s halfway point approaching, it’s important to look at our goals and our progress and see if we’re on track for where we want to be in our lives.

Financially, now is the time to start preparing for the new year. Don’t be like most people and wait until December to think about it.

Here’s a place to start:

Max out your 401(k). If you are under 50 years old, your maximum annual contribution is $16,500. If you haven’t contributed to your 401(k), yet, this means you will have to deposit $2358 per month to max it out. If you would have started at the beginning of the year it would only be $1375 per month. If those numbers are out of reach, at least contribute enough to get your employer’s match. If your company matches 50% of your contribution up to 5%, you need to be contributing 5%. If your gross paycheck is $1000, you should contribute $50. If you do so, your company will be giving you $25. That’s free money and a 2.5% raise! With a pre-tax contribution, you are also lowering your taxable wage, so the 5% contribution is not lowering your take-home pay by 5%. In some cases, it may even raise your take-home pay!
Know your money. Take some time to examine your income and your expenses. What are you having withheld? Will that leave you with a large tax bill next spring? Will it give you a huge tax refund, which is just an interest-free loan to the government? You withholding goal should be to pay nothing and receive nothing when you file your taxes in the spring. The less you withhold, the more you have for your daily expenses, but, if you withhold too much, you risk an unaffordable tax bill and possible penalties later. Look also at your expenses. Have you used your gym membership in the last few months? Cancel it. Do you know every cent you have to pay each month? Figure it out so you can plan the rest of your financial year. A budget is helpful here.

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Own your debt. “It’s not my fault.” “My ex stole my bank account.” “My dog ate the bill.” “My kidneys were stolen and I woke up in a bathtub full of ice and an invoice for services rendered.” “I lost my job.” “I have an X-Box addiction.” “I gave my credit card to a stripper, but we broke up. Go after the stripper.” Excuses. Here’s the thing: None of it matters. You owe the debt. Your choices are to pay the debt or file bankruptcy. Either way, you need to own the debt and take responsibility for whatever choices you made or debt you’ve accumulated. Denial is not a successful coping mechanism. Whatever you choose to do, know that it is your choice. You can’t hide from your bills or your $15/day “Venti Soy Hazelnut Vanilla Cinnamon White Mocha with extra White Mocha and caramel” habit.

What are your financial plans for the rest of the year?

Update: This post has been included in the Festival of Frugality.

Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research

Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how I do keyword research.

Properly done–unless you get lucky–this is the single most time-consuming part of making a niche site. If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results.

Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.

If you remember from the last installment, when we researched products to promote, we narrowed our choices down to a few products.

What I’ve done is create a spreadsheet to score the products. You can see the spreadsheet here. I’ll explain the columns as we populate them.

The first column contains the name of the product. Easy. We’ve got 10 products. I’m going to walk through scoring 1 product, then, through the magic of the internet, I’ll populate the rest, and you’ll get to see the results instantly. Wow.

The second column is the global search volume for the exact search term. I base my product niche sites primarily on the demand for a given product. Everything else is a secondary consideration.

To find the demand for a product, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In the “word or phrase” box, enter your product name, exactly. In this case, it’s “X-Pain Method”. When the search results come up, change the match type to “Exact”. You should have something like this:

Enter the global search volume in column 2. In this case, it’s 73. Keep this window open, because we’ll be coming back to it.

Column 3 is the search competition. Go to google and enter your product name, in quotes. In this case, “X-Pain Method”. Put the total number of search results in column 3: 223000.

Column 4 is the search competition, but only what appears in a page’s title. Your search query is intitle:”X-Pain Method”, which yields 4400 results.

The next column is for the average PageRank of the first page of search results. For this, I use Traffic Travis. I use the 4th edition, which is paid software, but you can get the free version of version 3, instead. I’ll use version 3 for this example. Open the software and click on “SEO Analysis” on the bottom left of the screen. Put your search term (“X-Pain Method”) in the “phrase to analyze” and set the “Analyze Top” to 10, then hit “Analyze”. When it’s done running, just add up all of the PRs and divide by 10. Ignore Travis’s difficulty rating.

Now, for the rest of the columns, we’re going to look at the keyword tool again. We’re going to pick 3 alternate search terms. Here are the criteria:

At least 1000 global monthly searches. We want terms that people are searching for.
Competition bar at medium or less. This bar is just a rough guess on competition, so it’s really an arbitrary exclusion factor, but it helps narrow down the choices.
A “buying” keyword is preferred, but not necessary. This is a term that indicates people are looking to spend money. “Back pain doctor” is a buying keyword, but it’s not an indicator that someone wants to buy a product, so we’ll skip it. A buying keyword isn’t absolutely necessary, because these will also be the terms we’ll use to generate content later.
It has to be related to our product.

Once we pick the keywords, we’ll throw them into google to get the competition, just like we did to populate column 2.

“Exercises for back pain” has medium competition and 1900 monthly searches. It also has an estimated cost-per-click of $3.02, which means people are paying for this.

“Lower back pain exercises” has 6600 searches and medium competition. It’s actually on the lower end of medium, so it looks really promising.

“Lower back” has 4400 searches and low competition, with a CPC of $6.24. This should be a good one. Scratch that. It has 40 million search results, but only 4400 searches. That’s a lot of competition for a small market.

Instead, I’m going to search for “cure back pain” in the keyword tool and see what I get. “Upper back pain” is better. Low competition, 18000 searches each month, and only 2000000 competing search results. Now, I’ll score it.

You really want at least 500 searches per month for the product name. More than 2500 is better. I’m going to assign 1 point per 500 monthly searches.

You also want a lower number of search results. Less than 10,000 is ideal. Less than 100,000 is still decent. More than 250,000, I’d walk. So, under 10,000 gets 5 points. Under 50,001 gets 4. Under 100,001 gets 3. Under 200,001 gets 2. Under 250,001 gets 1. Any higher gets 0.

The ideal intitle search will have less than 2000 results. More than 100,000 is too time-consuming to deal with. 0-2000: 5 points; 2001-10,000: 4 points; 10001-25000: 3 points; 25001-50000: 2 points; 50001 to 100000: 1 point.

The perfect product will have the first page of search result all with a PageRank of 0. That’s a 5 point product. I’ll knock off half a point for every point of average PR.

The related terms are more relaxed. They are what’s known as “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) terms. We will be creating articles to match those search terms, mostly to make our niche site look as natural and real as possible. Any actual traffic those pages drive is just gravy. Points for the related searches start at 10 and get 1 point knocked off for each 3 million results. We’ll be treating the 3 terms as one for this score.

That gives us a perfect score of about 25. There’s no actual upper limit, since the score for the search volume has no upper limit. X-Pain Method scored 18.22.

Now, excuse me a moment while I score the rest.

I’m back. Did you miss me?

I’ve finished scoring each of the products and sorted the results by score. The clear winner is the back pain product, but the lack of searches bothers me. The wedding guide looks much nicer, especially if I target the phrase “wedding planning guide” during the SEO phase of the project. That change alone brings the score almost to first place.

Frankly, I’d take either 2nd or 3rd place over the back pain product. The bare numbers don’t support it, but my judgement tells me they are better products to promote.

There is one final step before deciding on the product. I have to buy it. I can’t review the product without seeing it and I can’t promote it without approving of it.

That’s the secret to ethical niche marketing, you know. Only promote good products that you’ve personally read, watched, or used.

3 Worst Things About Being Financially Responsible

Finance

Everybody talks about all of the wonderful things that happen when you’re saving money and being responsible. I know I do. It’s true, good things do happen. There’s really nothing like the feeling that you’re suddenly not living paycheck to paycheck.

But what about the other side of the coin? What sucks about staying in the black?

1. You have to make choices. When you’re living on credit, you can buy a car, charge an expensive dinner every week, and go on vacation. If you’re not spending real money, then who cares? When you’re living for real, you have to prioritize. Do you buy groceries or video games? Do you buy sexy lingerie or a fancy dinner? Braces or college? You’re given a lot of choices, but you can only pick the ones you can actually afford.

2. You’re no longer the Joneses other people are trying to keep up with. The guy down the street, with the fancy car, big screen TV, and artificially perfect noses on his teenagers? You’re not him, anymore, but that’s okay, because he’s financing his lifestyle 9.9% at a time. Yes, a bit of incoming envy can give you a warm, tingly feeling, but it doesn’t put food on the table.

3. It’s boring. Taking a trip in a fast car and picking up an entourage for a 10-day party is fun. Balancing your checkbook and spending 6 months saving up for your kid’s braces is not. If you’ve been living like a rockstar, rolling back to a responsible standard of living is going to come as a shock, but it’s better than suddenly running out of money and having your world come crashing down around you.

Being responsible comes with a lot of downside, but it’s all superficial. The benefits are real, and long-lasting. What’s the worst thing you’ve had to deal with by being responsible?

How to Cut Costs on Legal Fees

Finance

Occasionally, life goes truly pear-shaped and you’re forced to enter the legal system.

Even if you’re not embroiled in a tawdry, tabloid-fodder divorce, there are still legal issues that everyone needs to address, without exception.

The problem? Or rather, one of many, if you’re having legal problems?

Lawyers are expensive.

Before I go any further:

If you are having criminal court issues, get a lawyer. Get the best possible lawyer. Really. The cost does not compare to a lifetime in jail, or even 10 years. If you’re facing jail, get the best dang attorney you can find.
I am not only not an attorney, but I’ve never even played one on TV. I have driven past a law school a couple of times, but never stopped in. I do know several attorney, carry the business cards of a couple and have a couple on my speed dial, just in case. If any of them thought I was giving legal advice, I’d be in trouble. To reiterate: I am not an attorney. This is not legal advice.
Don’t do a prenuptual agreement at home. A prenup will almost always be found unenforceable if both parties don’t have an attorney.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Lawyers are expensive, but there are ways to mitigate that.

There a couple of things you can handle yourself.

Small claims court, also known as conciliation court. Typical cases in conciliation court include cases involving sums under $7500(varies by state) that involve unpaid debts or wages, claims by tenants to get a security deposit, claims by landlords for property damage, or claims about possession or ownership of property. Fees and procedures vary by state, but generally cost less than $100 to file. The procedures for your state can be found by googling “small claims court” and the name of your state.

Small worker’s compensation cases can be handled yourself, if they don’t involve a demotion or termination related to the injury.

Apartment and car leases are usually simple and straightforward. Read them carefully, but you probably won’t need a lawyer.

You can probably handle your own estate planning and will writing with some decent software. I love Quicken Willmaker. It walked me through a detailed will that takes care of my kids, and gave me advice on financing their futures in the horrible event that I am tragically killed before my wonderousness can fully permeate the world. It also contains forms for promissory notes, bills of sale, health care directives and more. If you have extensive property, I’d still seek an attorney’s advice, but I’d bring the Willmaker will with me to save some time and money.

Purchase agreements. A few years ago, I sold a truck to a friend and accepted payments. I made a promissory note and payment schedule. When he quit paying or calling me, that paperwork was enough to get the state to accept the repossession when I took the truck back.

A simple no-fault divorce is actually pretty painless, on the scale of divorce pain. Again, the procedures vary heavily by state.

Other resources for finding legal information free or cheap include www.legalzoom.com and www.nolo.com.

Have you had to do any of your own legal work? How did it work out?

Cutting Costs While Cutting Hair

Finance

About once per quarter, my wife and I have a…I won’t call it a fight. It’s more like she-comes-home-looking-stunning-while-I-make-disapproving-grunting-sounds-while-giving-the-checkbook-dirty-looks.

I hate salons.

$80 for highlights, $30 for a haircut and $15 for eyebrow “shaping”. It’s an afternoon of chemicals and hot-wax torture, for the low, low price of $125 + tip. Frugal it’s not, but that’s an argument I lost long ago.

This weekend, she tried something new.

Beauty school.

For roughly the cost of materials, she got her eyebrows “shaped” and her hair highlighted and cut by a senior student at the beauty school, under the supervision of a licensed beautician/instructor.

It looks good, and she said she had more fun during her appointment than any other salon trip she’s had. I guess there’s something to be said for interacting with someone who isn’t burned out on interacting with the general public.

What does it cost? What normally runs $125 cost just $35. That’s for a $5 cut, $25 highlighting, and $5 wax. That’s a $90 savings or 72% off. Yay!

Other services they offer include:

Full color, cut and shampoo for $20.
A Perm for $25.
Mani/pedi for $24.
Full set of acrylic nails for $15.
Wax for $5. Have I ever mentioned that I am happy to be a guy?
Seaweed treatment for $10. I don’t even know what this is. A buffet, maybe?

They also have a “Princess” package that we’re going to use for brat #2’s birthday party next month. It’s an up-do, nail polish, make-up, and tiara for $10 per kid. We’ll take the girls out to get made up all pretty-like, then off to the dollar theater, for a $35 party.

The school my wife visited has more than 90 locations in 21 states, but I’d be willing to be every city big enough to support a Wal-Mart also has a beauty school nearby. They don’t tend to advertise their customer services, so you’ll have to call, but for a 70% discount, it worth spending a bit of time on the phone, isn’t it?

I have two questions for you, dear readers:

Would you consider going to a beautician trainee?
What the heck is a seaweed treatment?

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