Long-Term Care: What Now?

From the Wall Street Journal-Weekend Investor

Shopping for long-term-care insurance? You should expect higher costs and a tougher approval process as a growing number of household-name insurers quit selling the policies.

Prudential Financial PRU +0.63% said Wednesday it plans to stop taking applications as of March 30 for individual long-term-care policies, which help pay for nursing-home, assisted-living and home care. That will make it the 10th of the top 20 insurers by sales to announce that it is leaving that market in the past five years, according to Limra International, a research firm.

Prudential Financial plans to quit taking applications as of March 30 for individual long-term-care policies.

Others include MetLife, MET +1.07% which in 2010 said it was halting coverage, and Unum Group, UNM -0.98% which said last month it would stop selling the coverage through employers.
Prudential Vice President Malcolm Cheung says the company decided to stop selling long-term-care coverage to individuals because of the uncertainty surrounding future claims and persistently low interest rates. The insurer plans to continue offering group long-term-care coverage through employers. Read More.

The Goldberg Brothers - The Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner.

Here's a little factoid for automotive buffs or just to dazzle your friends.

The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram,
and Max, invented and developed the first automobile
air-conditioner. On July 17, 1948, the temperature in
Detroit was 97 degrees.

The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.

Henry was curious and invited them into his office.

They refused and instead asked that he come out to
the parking lot to their car.

They persuaded him to get into the car, which was
about 130 degrees, turned on the air conditioner, and
cooled the car off immediately.

The old man got very excited and invited them back
to the office, where he offered them $3 million for the
patent.

The brothers refused, saying they would settle for $2
million, but they wanted the recognition by having a
label, 'The Goldberg Air-Conditioner,' on the dashboard
of each car in which it was installed.

Now old man Ford was more than just a little anti-
Semitic, and there was no way he was going to put the
Goldberg's name on two million Fords.

They haggled back and forth for about two hours and
finally agreed on $4 million and that just their first
names would be shown.

And so to this day, all Ford air conditioners show --
Lo, Norm, Hi, and Max -- on the controls.

John LaBarca is back on the air in Bridgeport

The big man looks happy behind the microphone. Happy as in “I’m home.”

Longtime Bridgeport radio personality John LaBarca has returned to the Park City after a brief exile in Stamford, and the DJ (do we even have DJs anymore?) is happy to be home.
“It’s great to be back,” said LaBarca during a brief break from his new morning gig on WDJZ 1350-AM. “This is real radio; this is what real radio is all about. Local news, local conversation, serving the community; this is what Bridgeport needs and you’re not going to find it on any other radio station.” Read More.

Gold Is A Dumb Investment

This is Warren Buffett's take on owning gold.

Here is how he explains it in his letter to Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders:

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. 

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

But . . .
The cost of a year at Yale College – tuition, room and board – is roughly the same as it was a century ago when measured in gold.

Interesting, though the chart doesn't disprove Buffett's point. If you had put your year-at-Yale money into farmland and Standard Oil a century ago, you could probably fund an entire Ivy League education today.

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20 Tax Changes You Need To Know About

Several important tax changes took effect in 2011 that will impact federal income tax returns filed this April. While some of the changes are straightforward, such as the standard mileage rates, others, including the tax handling of foreign financial assets, may be more complicated. Following is a list of the tax law changes for 2011 Federal tax returns. Read More.

Eat Right, Live Well

Many people who start a weight loss program go into it thinking of all the foods they need to give up.  It becomes such a dreaded task that many can never follow through.  Learn to shift your thinking to help you create a positive weight loss lifestyle, rather than ride the roller coaster that is crash dieting.
Our expert contributors tell us how to make this transition and guide us towards making food our friend, not foe. Read More.

Why Doctors Die Differently

Careers in medicine have taught them the limits of treatment and the need to plan for the end

It's not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently. Read More.

A few exercise tips to keep in mind if you're living with high blood pressure.

High blood pressure is nothing to mess around with. Let it get out of control and you could be in for a world of hurt. However, if you learn to manage it well, you could find yourself steadily lowering your blood pressure and improving your overall quality of life. How can you make it happen? By adding a little exercise into your daily routine. Read More.