Financial Insurance Quotes

Satanists are encouraged to indulge in the seven deadly sins, as they need hurt no one; they were only invented by the Christian Church to insure guilt on the part of its followers. The Christian Church knows that it is impossible for anyone to avoid committing these sins, as they are all things which we, being human, most naturally do. After inevitably committing these sins financial offerings to the church in order to "pay off" God are employed as a sop to the parishioner's conscience!

Life Insurance is a mitigation to the risk of your life Financial Freedom is a mitigation to the risk of living your life !! Choice has always been yours.

Oil companies start every war around the world, insurance companies, the medical field, pharmaceutical companies are partners in crime. Financial institution collect all that the little man earned in the past 10 years and the AI will end humanity once and for all

the emergency fund is not an investment; it’s insurance—and insurance costs you money.

Don't underestimate the value of your life insurance. That's the value of your life to your family. If you need to increase your coverage, do it now, while you are still healthy.

[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.

As my wife saw it—as most people would see it, I imagine—an unwritten book was hardly a financial plan. “In other words,” she said, “you’ve got some magic beans in your pocket. That’s what you’re telling me. You have some magic beans, and you’re going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you’ll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?” “Something like that,” I said. Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn’t. “This is it, Barack,” Michelle said. “One last time. But don’t expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.” — AS A KID, I had sometimes watched as my salesman grandfather tried to sell life insurance policies over the phone, his face registering misery as he made cold calls in the evening from our tenth-floor apartment in a Honolulu high-rise. During the early months of 2003, I found myself thinking of him often as I sat at my desk in the sparsely furnished headquarters of my newly launched Senate campaign

Financial organizations are looking into how blockchain technology could benefit the settlement, clearing, and insurance sectors.

Many people in Nixon’s camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn’t designed to fail, but it wasn’t designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

The motivation for taking on debt is to buy assets or claims rising in price. Over the past half-century the aim of financial investment has been less to earn profits on tangible capital investment than to generate “capital” gains (most of which take the form of debt-leveraged land prices, not industrial capital). Annual price gains for property, stocks and bonds far outstrip the reported real estate rents, corporate profits and disposable personal income after paying for essential non-discretionary spending, headed by FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate]-sector charges.

I like to refer to this tool as a personal bank on steroids, an unparalleled place to stockpile cash, and a financial bunker for tough times… ...but it is better known as cash value life insurance.

an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.

The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of their bodies and the products of their forced labor would help make Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance, and trading sector, and New York City a financial capital of the world.13

In the 1960's, some old-timers on Wall Street-the men who remembered the trauma of the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression-gave me a warning: "When we fade from this business, something will be lost. That is the memory of 1929." Because of that personal recollection, they said, they acted with more caution, than they otherwise might. Collectively, their generation provided an in-built brake on the wildest form of speculation, an insurance policy against financial excess and consequent catastrophe. Their memories provided a practical form of long-term dependence in the financial markets. Is it any wonder that in 1987 when most of those men were gone and their wisdom forgotten, the market encountered its first crash in nearly sixty years? Or that, two decades later, we would see the biggest bull market, and the worst bear market, in generations? Yet standard financial theory holds that, in modeling markets, all that matters is today's news and the expectations of tomorrow's news.

Instead of buying a Mercedes, you can buy a Toyota; and then use the extra money that you would have spent every month, for about five years, on the installment, fuel, and insurance to buy shares in the company that owns Mercedes … or the one that owns Rolls Royce.

After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.

I suggest a Money Market account with no penalties and full check-writing privileges for your emergency fund. We have a large emergency fund for our household in a mutual-fund company Money Market account. Wherever you get your mutual funds, look at the website to find Money Market accounts that pay interest equal to one-year CDs. I haven’t found bank Money Market accounts to be competitive. The FDIC does not insure the mutual-fund Money Market accounts, but I keep mine there anyway because I’ve never known one to fail. Keep in mind that the interest earned is not the main thing. The main thing is that the money is available to cover emergencies. Your wealth building is not going to happen in this account; that will come later, in other places. This account is more like insurance against rainy days than it is investing.

seldom list my formal academic credentials because, honestly, I don’t think they are important. I have met so many broke people with financial credentials that I almost think it discredits me to have had formal training. Yes, I have a degree in finance. Yes, I have been or am licensed in real estate, insurance, and investments. Yes, I do have many of the stupid letters to put after my name. But the thing that qualifies me most to teach about money is that I have done stupid things with zeros on the end. I have been there, done that. I have a PhD in D-U-M-B.

The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.

But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.

His doctor had treated two cases of falciparum malaria prior to treating Elon—both patients died.” Thiel remembers that he had a morbid conversation with the HR director after learning that Musk had taken out, on behalf of the company, a key-man life insurance policy for $100 million. “If he had died,” Thiel says, “all of our financial problems were going to be solved.

Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.76

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created

I wonder what would happen if I tried the same reasoning on you. 'I have received your insurance premium invoice. My conclusion is this fee is not financially appropriate for you. It is my decision that you should be paid in bags of rocks deposited directly on your testicles. You may appeal this decision by screaming and hitting your head against a brick wall until you get tired, then read this letter again because I'm not fucking listening.

Satanists are encouraged to indulge in the seven deadly sins, as they need hurt no one; they are only invented by the Christian Church to insure guilt on the part of its followers. The Christian Church knows that it is impossible for anyone to avoid committing these sins, as they are all things which we, being human, most naturally do. After inevitably committing these sins financial offerings to the church in order to "pay off" God are employed as a sop to the parishioner's conscience!

Here’s the bottom line: The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363.[36] Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families.

Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs. In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production. Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal. Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness. Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.' Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature. Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.

The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did. The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them. The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.

Declan Lynch was a liar. He'd been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He's an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He's in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can't Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who'd stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, 'cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great. At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, Secrets. He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers. Well. More often he simply didn't tell his brothers the truth.

If we sold insurance or financial products: * Most families need insurance. * Most insurance is too expensive. * Most people don’t have extra money to invest. * Most people want their money to work hard for them. * Most people hate risky investments. * Most people would love to have their savings pay for their insurance. * Most families don’t have time to become investment experts. * Most company retirement plans aren’t enough. * Most people want a financial counselor to help them with their finances. * Most people need insurance, but can’t afford it. * Most people want to protect themselves from emergencies.

As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent—and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.

THE BRANCH OF ECONOMICS concerned with issues like inflation, recessions, and financial shocks is known as macroeconomics. When the economy is going well, macroeconomists are lauded as heroes; when it turns sour, as it did recently, they catch a lot of the blame. In either case, the headlines go to the macroeconomists. We hope that after reading this book, you’ll realize there is a whole different breed of economist out there—microeconomists—lurking in the shadows. They seek to understand the choices that individuals make, not just in terms of what they buy but also how often they wash their hands and whether they become terrorists.

While I was researching this book, an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.

For financial services: * Well, you know how it is almost impossible to save money now with the cost of living so high? Well, I show people how to use tax advantages to fund all their savings. * Well, you know how insurance is so expensive, but we need it? Well, I show families how to get inexpensive insurance so that they still have money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how hard it is to get out of debt? Well, I show people how to pay off their debts quickly so that they have more money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how we are all going to die? Well, I show people how to manage their money so that they can party and have a great time before they die. (Okay, am I going too far yet?)

The key trait of a Sperm Pirate is that she is not driven by desperation. Escaping poverty or hardship is not her motive. She usually has a good education and access to the same opportunities as the man she tries to trap. However, she understands that it is more efficient to enjoy a lavish lifestyle through the sweat of another’s labour. But the Sperm Pirate is acutely aware that the infatuation of a hormonal man has a brief shelf life. This poor collateral must be cashed in before it expires. A pregnancy is the best way to convert this volatile resource into a stable asset. Babies are reliable insurance policies. They create legal obligations for financial support, even when the sweet milk of passion turns sour.

Another person posted this to the group Hashimoto’s 411: I can’t do this any more, I am beside myself and can’t stop crying. Today, I received a disability denial letter from Social Security stating that my condition is not severe enough to qualify. . . . I don’t know what to do, I feel like I am no longer living but just existing and miserable because I feel so sick. My unemployment extended benefits are going to run out and then we’ll be in big trouble if we can’t pay our bills, which include lots of medical bills because I don’t have insurance. I just don’t want to be here any more, and think my husband would be better off not having to deal with me, and with my life insurance he would be much better off financially.

The Clinton administration’s Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) of 1999, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act, is probably the most illustrious example of this deregulatory frenzy: this repealed the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking and is widely credited with giving the United States 50 crisis-free years of financial stability. With the passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies were once again allowed to consolidate. Today, many consider the repeal (followed in 2004 by the lifting of the leverage cap on US investment banks) to be an important cause of the late 2000s financial crisis.

The U.S. government stepped in during economic crises all the time. Less than five years earlier, the United States had used billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks during the 2008 financial crisis. During the Great Depression the government had prohibited U.S. citizens from owning gold: in 1933, President Roosevelt had signed executive order 6102, requiring citizens to turn in their gold for cash. It wasn’t until 1975, when President Ford repealed this order, that it was again legal for Americans to own gold that wasn’t jewelry or coins. And all bank deposits were only insured to the tune of $250,000. “More than twenty thousand account holders at Laika, the second largest bank in Cyprus, are going to have half of their savings taken away,

first. In a financial system that was rapidly generating complicated risks, AIG FP became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure events extremely unlikely to occur, as it was. Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re FP, Swiss Re FP, Credit Suisse FP, Gen Re FP. (“Re” stands for Reinsurance.) All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them, the new risks being created would have had no place to hide and would have remained in full view of bank regulators. All of these places, when the crisis came, would be washed away by the general nausea felt in the presence of complicated financial risks, but there was a moment when their existence seemed cartographically necessary to the financial world. AIG FP was the model for them all.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

employment attorney review your severance letter of agreement before you sign it. “Even if you decide not to negotiate your financial package, you may want to negotiate other things, like health insurance and references for your next job,” she explains. Go in with the expectation that you won’t get everything you ask for, but you will get more than what they originally offered. Weinberg recommends an often-used formula to calculate severance: number of years at the company multiplied by two weeks’ pay = severance total. Request back pay for unused vacation days, plus a portion of the bonus you were expected to receive at the end of the year. Request a written letter of recommendation and assurance that it will be upheld if a prospective employer calls for references, and ask for a written agreement that any noncompete clause in your original offer is at this point null and void.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

Inefficiency. A centralized financial system has many inefficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious example is the credit card interchange rate that causes consumers and small businesses to lose up to 3 percent of a transaction's value with every swipe due to the payment network oligopoly's pricing power. Remittance fees are 5–7 percent. Time is also wasted in the two days it takes to “settle” a stock transaction (officially transfer ownership). In the Internet age, this seems utterly implausible. Other inefficiencies include costly (and slow) transfer of funds, direct and indirect brokerage fees, lack of security, and the inability to conduct microtransactions, many of which are not obvious to users. In the current banking system, deposit interest rates remain very low and loan rates high because banks need to cover their brick-and-mortar costs. The insurance industry provides another example.

Bank-friendly writers and lobbyists fostered a myth that the economy needed its investment banks to remain solvent to keep the economy functioning. But many former officials, including Bair, SIGTARP‘s Neil Barofsky, and Reagan Administration budget director David Stockman, rejected the claims that public guarantees for reckless bank loans was needed to protect insured depositors. Retail savings and checking accounts were never threatened by the bad gambles that banks made. But this myth had to be promoted in order for Paulson, Geithner Bernanke and other bank protectors to persuade Congress to overrule Bair and make government (“taxpayers”) pay. Their aim was to save the banks from being nationalized, and to protect bankers from being prosecuted for fraud or reining in the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they had given themselves. No attempt was made to change the system that had led to the crash. If

Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

• Auto and Homeowner Insurance—Choose higher deductibles in order to save on premiums. With high liability limits, these are the best buys in the insurance world. • Life Insurance—Purchase twenty-year level term insurance equal to about ten times your income. Term insurance is cheap and the only way to go; never use life insurance as a place to save money. • Long-Term Disability—If you are thirty-two years old, you are twelve times more likely to become disabled than to die by age sixty-five. The best place to buy disability insurance is through work at a fraction of the cost. You can usually get coverage that equals from 50 to 70 percent of your income. • Health Insurance—The number one cause of bankruptcy today is medical bills; number two is credit cards. One way to control costs is to look for large deductibles to lower your premium. The HSA (Health Savings Account) is a great way to save on premiums. The high deductible creates a much lower premium, and this plan allows you to save for medical expenses in a tax-free savings account.

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it" Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk of financial loss due to illness. But somebody has to pay for all that high-quality, ready-when-you-need-it care--and the patients, so far, have not been willing to do so. As a result, the major health insurance funds are all operating at a deficit, and the costs of the health care system are increasing significantly faster than the economy as a whole. That's why the doctors keep striking and the sickness funds keep negotiating and the government keeps going back to the drawing board, with a new 'major health care reform' every few years. So far, the saving grace for France's system has been the high level of efficiency, as exemplified by the 'carte vitale,' that keeps administrative costs low--much lower than in the United States.

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.

Smart Sexy Money is About Your Money As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution. In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully. Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal. Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies. Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options. Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal. Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.” Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.

Kim was twenty-three, single, on her own, and at a job making $27,000 per year. She had recently started her Total Money Makeover. She was behind on credit cards, not on a budget, and barely making her rent because her spending was out of control. She let her car insurance drop because she “couldn’t afford it.” She did her first budget and two days later was in a car wreck. Since it wasn’t bad, the damage to the other guy’s car was only about $550. As Kim looked at me through panicked tears, that $550 might as well have been $55,000. She hadn’t even started Baby Step One. She was trying to get current, and now she had one more hurdle to clear before she even started. This was a huge emergency. Seven years ago George and Sally were in the same place. They were broke with new babies, and George’s career was sputtering. George and Sally fought and scraped through a Total Money Makeover. Today they are debt-free, even their $85,000 home. They have a $12,000 emergency fund, retirement in Roth IRAs, and even the kids’ college is funded. George has grown personally, his career has blossomed, and he now makes $75,000 per year while Sally stays home with the kids. One day a piece of trash flew out of the back of George’s pickup and hit a car behind him on the interstate. The damage was about $550. I think you can see that George and Sally probably adjusted one month’s budget and paid the repairs, while Kim dealt with her wreck for months. The point is that as you get in better shape, it takes a lot more to rock your world. When the accidents occurred, George’s heart rate didn’t even change, but Kim needed a Valium sandwich to calm down. Those true stories illustrate the fact that as you progress through your Total Money Makeover, the definition of an emergency that is worthy to be covered by the emergency fund changes. As you have better health insurance, disability insurance, more room in your budget, and better cars, you will have fewer things that qualify as emergency-fund emergencies. What used to be a huge, life-altering event will become a mere inconvenience.

If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement. During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk. For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe. The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became. Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations. Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.

Some of the world’s biggest banks and investor groups have swung behind a pledge to raise $200bn by the end of next year to combat climate change. In a move the UN said was unprecedented, leading insurers, pension funds and banks have joined forces to help channel the money to projects that will help poorer countries deal with the effect of global warming and cut reliance on fossil fuels. The announcement came at the start of a UN climate summit in New York aimed at bolstering momentum for a global agreement to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions due to be signed in Paris at the end of 2015. “Change is in the air,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. “Today’s climate summit has shown an entirely new, co-operative global approach to climate change.” The summit opened with business and government pledges to make cities greener, create a renewable energy “corridor” in Africa and rein in the clearing of forests for palm oil plantations. The private sector’s contributions marked a “major departure” from past climate summits, the UN said, adding in a statement that financial groups “had never previously acted together on climate change at such a large scale”. One obstacle to the Paris agreement is developing countries’ insistence that richer nations must fulfil pledges made nearly five years ago to raise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate action.

Your breakthrough agency should have six specialized customer-facing departments: personal lines, commercial lines, life and health, front office and claims concierge, financial services, and marketing.

Life insurance is meant to provide financial protection for those who are dependent on you at a point in your life when you have yet to build up other assets. Once you have accumulated assets that your dependents can fall back on—say, a sizable retirement fund or other significant investments—you no longer need life insurance.

After all, as I walked down the aisle, I knew there was a very excellent chance of divorce. You did, too. We wear our seat belts and buy life insurance for far less risky propositions, and don bike helmets and cook meat to 160 degrees to be safe. Similarly, it is reasonable to expect everyone in a marriage to protect themselves financially in the likelihood of divorce.

Dale Soutas began his financial services career in San Jose California in 1985. He moved to the Central Valley and opened his own Company "Soutas Financial and Insurance Solutions Inc". Dale is enthusiastic about helping families on their street to retirement.

Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted ... that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance ... which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men.... Under our system of issuing and distributing corporate securities the investing public does not buy directly from the corporation. The securities travel from the issuing house through middlemen to the investor. It is only the great banks or bankers with access to the mainsprings of the concentrated resources made up of other people's money, in the banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies, and with control of the machinery for creating markets and distributing securities, who have had the power to underwrite or guarantee the sale of large-scale security issues. The men who through their control over the funds of our railroad and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept, and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people's money are the ones who are in a position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes which they do not approve.... When we consider, also, in this connection that into these reservoirs of money and credit there flow a large part of the reserves of the banks of the country, that they are also the agents and correspondents of the out-of-town banks in the loaning of their surplus funds in the only public money market of the country, and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.3 Such was the nature of the wealth and power represented by those six men who gathered in secret that night and travelled in the luxury of Senator Aldrich's private car.

Contrary to popular opinion, a home is not an asset for creating real wealth, it is a liability.22 Your home does not generate any income; it is a Money Pit. You have to pay the mortgage, utilities, maintenance, property taxes that continue to go up each year, and, insurance that tends to also increase annually. After so many years, kitchens need remodeling, carpets & flooring replaced, and, painting and decorating requiring new furniture to match the updated changes. And, the larger the home the more furniture that is needed to fill it up.

If a systemic crisis occurs, the FDIC may rescue a bank in the non-least-cost-way—for example, by paying off creditors who are not covered by deposit insurance or keeping a bank temporarily alive when it is insolvent—when nonpayment of creditors or the bank’s failure would threaten the system.

Retirement Lifestyle Planning There are four (4) major financial questions that you must be able to answer in order to know if your current or future plan will work for you. What rate of return do you have to earn on your savings and investment dollars to be able to retire at your current standard of living and have your money last through your life expectancy? How much do you need to save on a monthly or annual basis to be able to retire at your current standard of living and your money last your life expectancy? Doing what you are currently doing, how long will you have to work to be able to retire and live your current lifestyle till life expectancy? If you don’t do anything different than you are doing today, how much will you have to reduce your standard of livingat retirement for your money to last your life expectancy? Motto for Retirement Lifestyle Planning A solid financial plan is a powerful possession that offers a sense of peace and freedom. Our process allows us to determine appropriate strategies and help you understand how to achieve your goals and live your dreams. Our process stresses informed financial decision making. We encourage you to review all decisions with your team of tax and legal professionals. For the record, we are not tax or legal professionals and this information is not intended as tax or legal advice. Now we’d like to remind you that a well-executed financial plan requires diverse knowledge and utilizes some or all of the following strategies and services: -Retirement Lifestyle Planning Making the most of your employer-sponsored retirement plans and IRAs. Determining how much you need to retire comfortably. Managing assets before and during retirement including Social Security analysis. -Estate Planning Referring you to qualified Estate Attorneys to review your wills and trusts to help preserve your estate for your intended heirs by helping with beneficiary designations. Reducing exposure to estate taxes and probate costs. Coordinating with your tax and legal advisors. -Tax Management Helping to reduce your current and future tax burden by considering multiple strategies for review by your tax professional.Also, referring you to qualified tax specialists if needed. -Legacy Planning/Charitable Planning Creating a solid future for generations to come by ensuring that your legacy will live on through those you love or causes you care deeply about. -Risk Management Reviewing existing insurance policies. Recommending policy changes when appropriate. Finding the best policy for your individual wants and needs. -Investment Planning Determining your asset allocation needs. Helping you understand your risk tolerance. Recommending the appropriate investment vehicles to help you reach and exceed your goals.

Business Owner Planning Business owners have additional and complex Retirement Planning needs. Counting only on the sale of your business requires tremendous luck and success. If business owners consider the business as simply one asset among many, then they should seriously consider additional assets such as: -Executive Bonus Arrangements -Nonqualified deferred compensation plans -Qualified retirement plans -General investment portfolio Motto for Business Owner Planning As I look back on thirteen years of entrepreneurship, I can see that the best and smartest thing to do is to have a plan with the end in mind and you in mind. The time still goes by and time is expensive. That sentence is really a whole book and you should or will understand sooner than later, hopefully. That would have looked like business succession planning. Proper business succession planning requires sound preparation in order to have a smooth and equitable transition. Financial, tax and legal planning are all necessary for a success.

Your Personal Economic Model One tool we use when discussing the best course of action to secure your financial future is the Personal Economic Model®. Just as a medical doctor would use an anatomical model to convey medical concepts, we use the following model to convey financial concepts. This model offers a visual representation of the way money flows through your hands. On the left, you will notice the Lifetime Capital Potential tank, which illustrates that the amount of money you will control during your lifetime is both large, as well as finite. Most people are shocked to see how much money can flow through their hands in their lifetime. Once earned, your money flows directly to the Tax Filter where the state and federal governments take tax dollars owed from your paycheck. The after tax dollars are then directed to either your Current Lifestyle or your Future Lifestyle. Your management of the Lifestyle Regulator determines where these dollars go. Regulating the cash flow between your current lifestyle desires and your future lifestyle requirements may be the most important financial decision you will ever make. Here’s why. Each and every dollar that is allowed to flow through to your Current Lifestyle is consumed and gone forever. The goal is to accumulate enough money in the Savings and Investment tanks so that when you retire, the dollars in those tanks can be used to pay for your future lifestyle requirements. Retirement planning seems hard for most people to do but it is not rocket science. The best position, position A, would be to have enough in the tanks so that you can live in the future like you live today adjusted for inflation and have your money last at least to your life expectancy. That’s a win, but the icing on the cake would be to accomplish that with little to no impact on your present standard of living, and that is exactly what we strive to help our clients to do. Working with us can help you with the following: Optimize the balance between your Current and Future Lifestyles Identify inefficiencies in your current personal economic model (where are you losing money) Design, implement, and execute a plan to secure your financial future Limit the impact on your Current Lifestyle dollars (maintain your current standard of living)

Zero Line Spender, Saver, Wealth Creator Your financial personality type determines your financial position in life. Let’s say there is a zero financial line that represents a position where you owe nothing and have nothing. Perhaps you can remember those days getting started on your own. So, let us assume you just graduated from college and you’re one of the lucky few who graduated at the zero line, you owe nothing. Pretty amazing considering that in 2013, the debt on student loans exceeded all credit card debt owed in America. But fortunately, you made it out free and clear to the zero line. You’re a “Spender” so you go to the showroom and pick one out. With your job and the car as collateral, you get a car loan and you drop below the zero line. You lifestyle gets more and more expensive and since you are a ‘Spender” you probably take on credit card debt to help finance your lifestyle desires. You are constantly working your way back to becoming a zero, financially speaking. Then, you get married and now there are two in debt working their way back to zero. Eventually, children come along, and the odds of being able to put away enough money to pay your debt and interest and live on the top side of the zero line are becoming virtually impossible. Unfortunately, many Americans live in this position with little or no chance of ever living debt free. When something comes along that requires their savings, they must deplete their funds in order to avoid paying interest and then they must start saving again for their next expense. They are constantly returning to the zero line. The money they have accumulated is compounding interest, giving them uninterrupted growth. Having access to capital allows them to negotiate more favorable loans by collateralizing against their accounts rather than depleting them. They make payments to the lending institution with dollars from their current cash flow, protecting the growth of the money they have saved and invested for their future. Saving and investing with uninterrupted compounding is an important wealth concept for moving further and further away from the zero line.

Tax-Deferred does not mean Tax-Free It never ceases to amaze me when I meet with people who do not know that tax-deferred does not mean tax-free. You mean I have to pay taxes when I take this money!? This is not all mine!? These are common remarks I hear as we are looking at their most recent retirement account statement. Somehow this consideration was missed when they enrolled in the savings plan and each year when they postponed the tax when filing their tax return. I am not a tax professional but I can understand how an accountant or tax preparer wouldn’t think to make sure the client understands that they are postponing taxes and the tax calculation during their working years. I met an accountant that expressed how difficult it is when he gets the client that believed they were ready to leave work only to find out that because of taxes they are coming up a little or a lot short. This happened to one of my relatives that worked at least 30 years as an x-ray technician and then supervisor at a very large hospital. While working, they always had the nice houses, the nice cars, and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, nothing fancy. After he retired and even though his wife still worked as a school principal, he had to take a sales clerk job at a nearby liquor store so that his family could maintain their lifestyle. I will never forget other relatives joking and laughing about him miscalculating his retirement. I’m certain that his unsuccessful retirement and that of other relatives influenced my interest in retirement planning if for no one else but me. With a limited amount of retirement income, most retirees would prefer to keep their dollars rather than give them to Uncle Sam. Even those with an unlimited source of funds don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary. Fortunately, there are some ways to decrease your tax burden once you’ve done the obvious work of ensuring you’ve taken all the deductions and credits to which you’re entitled when you file your taxes.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.

A counterargument is that nonfunctional autistics who could benefit from a treatment and a cure but elect not to pursue either of them, are a financial burden on society, and on the healthcare system. Since things such as social services are paid for through taxes exacted on everyone, and since insurance premiums for all may be based on the spread out costs of treatments that are necessary for a select few, “normal” tax-paying people who may or may not have insurance policies ultimately pay a large percentage of the bill for the care of non-functional autistics even though they receive little or no benefit from this outflow of cash. At

We get paid much more to keep someone on dialysis than to keep them off of it. If we don’t achieve dialysis metrics—like avoiding dialysis catheters or providing a certain dose of dialysis—known to best result in long-term benefits, we are financially penalized. But create a fistula in a little old lady that usually requires interventions to make it work and keep it working and make her stay on the dialysis machine as long as it takes for the numbers to look right, then essentially get a bonus. If we see an in-center hemodialysis patient four times in a month, we stand to make 50 percent more money than if we only saw her once. And the nephrologist really only has to see the patient once each month—if a physician assistant sees the patient the other times, we still get paid. We would have to document a comprehensive medical history and examination over the better part of an hour with a patient returning to clinic twice to see the same money—and good luck trying to justify why that was clinically necessary to do. The second, third, and fourth in-center hemodialysis patient visits can be more like drive-bys—a simple documentation that we (or the physician assistant) “saw” the patient, with no notation of time required. Private insurance companies and the Medicare ESRD program pay top dollar for dialysis care, not clinic visits. It’s profitable to build another dialysis center, but we haven’t figured out how to build comprehensive outpatient palliative care services.

blockchain technology records financial transactions made with digital currencies such as Bitcoin, it will in the future serve as a registrar for things as different as birth and death certificates, titles of ownership, marriage licenses, educational degrees, insurance claims, medical procedures and votes

Both the medical insurers and drug companies make and hold on to as much of the money as they can. They have, to a large extent, subverted the efforts of hospitals and other providers to care for the sick. The sick have been converted into financial instruments whereby large amounts of money are transferred from one corporation to another. The business opportunities presented by sickness and the threat of sickness have cast into outer darkness the opportunity for medical practioners to be of help and service.

J.D. Power, which measures customer satisfaction: JDPower.com (look at the “Awards & Ratings” dropdown menu), and •​AM Best Company, which rates insurance companies on financial strength: AMBest.com.

Nazarbayev had learned that Westerners could be just as adept as he was in turning money into power and power back into money. Some, like Dick Evans and Jonathan Aitken, went about it from positions at the top of business and government. Others had to wait until they had left office to monetise their access and influence. They had to get theirs from what they called ‘consultancy’. Blair was said to have made $1 million from Ivan Glasenberg’s Glencore for three hours spent talking the Qatari prime minister out of blocking its merger with a mining company. JP Morgan, the Wall Street bank that had won the financial crisis, retained him too, as did a Swiss insurance company, the government of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi’s investment fund. Some days he was a business consultant, others a philanthropist, or a governance guru, or a peacemaker. His money sat in a web of companies that almost rivalled the complexity and opacity Nazarbayev’s Swiss bankers had devised. By one estimate, less than a decade after he resigned as prime minister, his fortune stood at $90 million.

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Disability insurance provides a portion of your income if you can't work because of an illness or non-job-related injury. To me, being over 50 doesn't lessen the need for it. On the contrary, it may increase it. Many people in their fifties are in their peak earning years and building their retirement nest egg. An extended disability at this time of life could completely derail their financial future.

In Boston the financial high ground was held by a dozen banks, insurance companies, and utilities, notably the State Street Bank and Trust, the National Shawmut Bank, the First National Bank of Boston, Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates, and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. In the late 1950s leaders of these institutions, along with the presidents of major retail stores, including Jordan Marsh and Filene’s, had formed a “Coordinating Committee” ostensibly to link Yankee commerce and the rough-and-tumble world of Boston politics. The committee members held their meetings in the boardroom of the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Secrecy and discretion were valued above all else; absent members could not send replacements and no minutes were ever kept. The group’s penchant for secrecy and choice of venue for meetings earned them the sobriquet “the Vault” in the local press.

You are one sickness away from poverty when you don't have life insurance that can help you with financial security.

Life insurance can help your family recover from a devastating loss.

Financial planning without life insurance (risk management plan) is a weak financial plan. It will not stand the test of time.

No financial vehicle is as useful as whole life for emergencies, opportunities, investments, for providing your own financing, permanent protection for your earning capability, or for your peace of mind.

This systemic risk problem is what drew Blythe Masters, one of the key figures behind blockchain innovation on Wall Street, into digital ledger technology; she joined Digital Asset Holdings, a blockchain service provider for the financial system’s back-office processing tasks, as CEO in 2014. Masters is best known for one of the most contentious financial innovations of our time, the credit default swap (CDS), a financial derivative contract in which one institution agrees to pay another if a particular bond or loan goes into default. At the age of just twenty-five, and as part of a crack team at J.P. Morgan, she conceived of CDSs as a way for investors to buy insurance against the risk they bear on their balance sheets—and thus to unlock capital hitherto tied up against that risk—as well as for other investors, the banks, and other institutions that issue the CDS to place a bet on the underlying asset without actually owning it.

Goldman started buying up protection in the form of credit default swaps—insurance—against the possibility that AIG would fail.

living in Recife. Brazilian Jewry numbered about 1,500; Amsterdam Jewry, 1,200. Working together as financiers, brokers, shippers, importers, and insurers, they dominated commerce between the two nations.

about dropping our whole plan in favor of his insurance idea.

They insisted that we not only include the authority for insurance in the bill, but that we put an actual plan in place.

We didn’t think the insurance idea was terrible, per se. It had just not been thought through.

Paul Angerame Financial organizations are looking into how blockchain technology could benefit the settlement, clearing, and insurance sectors.

Prepaid expenses are expenditures that have already been made for benefits that the company will receive in the near future. Examples of prepaid expenses are advances for insurance policies, rent, and taxes. Prepaid expenses are classified as current assets, not because they can be turned into cash, but because if they had not been prepaid, that cash would have to be spent within 12 months. Some prepaid expenses also result in cost savings, such as paying insurance premiums annually instead of monthly.

Operating Expenses Operating expenses are the costs required to keep the business going from day to day. They include salaries, benefits, and insurance costs, among a host of other items. Operating expenses are listed on the income statement and are subtracted from revenue to determine profit.

Even insurers who had helped stoke the opioid boom by refusing to pay for other kinds of pain treatment began to have second thoughts, though these were likely attributable to financial concerns rather than worries about patient welfare. It turns out that the opioid-driven approach to pain was costing them far more than they imagined, in terms of both patient care and addiction treatment.

Neither is the cost of government deposit insurance deducted from the “value-add” by the banks. (Actually, technically, that is perhaps right, as banks don’t pay this cost and such insurance doesn’t really exist, but it depends how you want to look at the illusion).

For example, if the healthcare industry is a good fit for you, seek out markets within that industry. These might include pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, equipment manufacturers, insurance companies (which can fit both healthcare and the financial services industry), uniform providers, and so on.

In the future, banks will have to pay for deposit insurance. Loans to finance asset purchases or for proprietary activities will be required to be capitalised separately; banks will no longer be able to use customer deposits + free government insurance to finance these activities.