Financial Samurai

I spoke to my father yesterday and curiously asked him about his thoughts on assisted living facilities.  “Absolutely depressing!“, he said.  I couldn’t agree more that assisted living programs are depressing given it reminds us everyday about our mortality.

Who wouldn’t want to stay put in a home they’ve lived in for years instead?  I know I would.  Home is a special place that makes us feel comfortable and warm.  Ideally, you own your home outright in retirement and no longer have payments.  However, this is a topic for another post.

We can only hope that we remain healthy for the rest of our lives, but we’ll eventually need some help thanks to injuries or illnesses.  Some of us will have the financial strength to comfortably pay for our healthcare in retirement.  Others might have wealthy children to rely on.  But what if you do not want to burden anybody, and don’t have that much money to last?

Buying long-term care could be an ideal solution for your retirement years.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LONG-TERM CARE Read more…

If you haven’t done so already, calculate your net worth to assess how you did this past year.  Hopefully, you’ve grown your net worth, despite the stagnant stock markets through aggressive savings, retirement company matches, a diversified investment portfolio, rental property cash-flow, and an increase in your start-up’s value.

Wait, all you have is your savings?  Then you better start diversifying your income stream so you’re always moving forward, no matter how rough the economy.  Once you’ve calculated your net worth, make sure your life insurance levels equals this amount, especially if you have dependents, or a spouse who makes much less than you.  If you die, and want your loved ones to maintain a similar standard of living, consider matching your life insurance amount with your family’s net worth amount.

Some might not agree with this life insurance guideline and wonder whether it would be better to have insurance that equals a family’s debt level only.  Having enough life insurance to pay off all of your family’s debt is better than no life insurance at all.

If you’re single and have no dependents, do you really need life insurance?  Probably not.  If you die with a million bucks in debt, you’re living large!

Consider the Robinson family in San Francisco with two children ages 8 & 7: Read more…

It’s been two weeks since I found out I was being scammed by my insurance company. I sent in my 8 month old house appraisal to Tricky Dick, who is trying to raise my home insurance premium by 45% since their inspection 7 months ago.  Their shady inspector made my house 50% larger than it really is, so they could raise my premiums by a similar magnitude.  It’s so easy to prove what my house’s square footage is, it’s not even funny.  It’s like saying Lebron James is 10 feet 5 inches instead of just 6 feet 8 inches tall.  Utterly ludicrous.

The recent appraisal I sent in contains perfectly drawn outlines of my house’s layout and square footage.  It matches up to within 50 square feet of what the SF County Assessor’s has on record.  I’ve had two other appraisals in the past 7 years, and both are also within 50 square feet of the real size.  Clearly, this case is as slam dunk as convicting Elliot Spitzer for messing around!  Not so!

If you’re curious, here’s the e-mail exchange I had with them with names, figures, and dollar amounts changed that mimic the same percentages.  All of this takes precious time.  In this post, you will learn what the tricky “Home Protector Insurance” product is.  You’ll also learn whether the rebuild cost premium you pay trumps the square footage size they have in their documents, and what you get to rebuild if your house blows up.

FIGHTING IT OUT WITH TRICKY DICK INSURANCE CO Read more…

I’m somewhat obsessed with physical fitness right now.  It’s surprising, because the new year’s health push usually dissipates by February!  Just yesterday I thought, “What’s the point of being thin if I don’t have four pack abs?“  And then I started thinking what kind of person thinks about these types of questions?  Pretty unproductive and pointless if you ask me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those with the highest self-esteem are the least fit and most indebted people on Earth.  Meanwhile, those who constantly think about their looks, and who are always at the gym exercising and pumping iron have the lowest self-esteem.  They are constantly checking themselves in the mirror to admire their physiques, even though they already know they look fine.

Think about the extreme case of anorexia.  Despite being thinner than the average person, the person who is inflicted with this disease doesn’t have the self-esteem to recognize their own beauty and stop punishing themselves.  Now think about the morbidly obese person.  Is this also a disease as well?  The person doesn’t really care what you think of him or her.

YOU ARE WHO YOU WANT TO BE Read more…

I’ve always trusted my insurance company, which I’ll call TRICKY DICK in this article, to do the right thing. After all, I’ve been a client of theirs for almost 20 years. They’ve benefited from my growth in assets and I now have auto insurance, homeowner’s insurance, valuable personal property insurance and an umbrella policy with them.  Furthermore, I’ve got a relatively large chunk of change in CDs deposited with them as well.

I had a unwelcomed change in my credit card the other day and had to call Tricky Dick to cancel my existing card on file and add a new one. Imagine my surprise when looking over my previous statement that they were billing me 45% more a month in premiums!  What the hell, I thought to myself.  Clearly there must be a mistake.  Oh how wrong I was.

HOW I GOT SCAMMED Read more…

I can’t help it.  I just have to wake up by 6:15am every morning because life just feels too darn exciting!  In fact, I woke up this morning at 4:30am, but that was thanks to my thumping pet rabbit.  Do you remember the feeling during Christmas eve as a kid, when you were so excited you couldn’t sleep?  As a result, you’d sneak down and wait in the middle of the night to see if Santa is coming?  You even tried getting a sneak peak by pealing back a corner of the present to see what you’ve got!  That was me growing up, the constant rascal.

Somewhere in the middle of adolescence and adult hood, I lost that excitement.  Perhaps it was the constant pressure of trying to get good grades so I could get a real job and not have to go back to McDonald’s.  I recall dreading my 8am multi-variable Calculus class during college.  Surprise, surprise, I dropped the class and signed up for Golf III (advanced level baby) instead!  That was when I began to rekindle my excitement as a kid again.  I was learning something I just loved, and couldn’t get enough.

FINDING THAT DESIRE Read more…

It’s open enrollment time again for insurance and benefits for the following year.  With all this talk about health insurance costs going up and benefits going down, I’m surprised to see my total insurance and benefits costs hover the same at around $150 a month for an individual.  I looked carefully at each line item and compared it to the previous year, and the costs are only about $5 dollars a month higher.

Your company benefits have real value that is calculated as part of your total compensation, so pay attention and maximize these benefits to your full advantage.  The deadline to enroll is usually by mid-December, otherwise what you have now *might* get carried forward to the next year except for some discretionary flex spending decisions, which reset to zero.  You don’t want to die an expensive death for your loved ones just because you forgot to enroll and didn’t understand what the term “excess liability insurance” means!  Get thinking and get cracking!

THE INSURANCE AND BENEFITS CHECK LIST Read more…

Yesterday was one of those perfect gastronomic days.  For breakfast, there was all you can eat fruit and pastries.  For lunch, some deliciously “low calorie” Greek baked spaghetti with garlic bread you see to the left.  To top off the evening, a bone-in filet mignon, with baked potato with the works, blue cheese wedge salad, and a couple glasses of pinot noir from Napa Valley.

All told, I probably consumed some 5,500 calories worth of food!  I didn’t feel incredibly sick to my stomach (OK, maybe a little bit!) because I made sure I played an hour and a half of tennis before dinner.  It was actually a wonderful experience since I normally eat half as much.  When I was in the cab ride home, I had an epiphany.

Perhaps the reason why there are so many large folks in America is because people purposefully gorge themselves in order to lose weight!  Eating great food is such a wonderful pleasure that it’s irrational not to.  It trumps any negative feels about packing on weight otherwise we wouldn’t let ourselves go.  Furthermore, the reason why there are so many people in debt is because it’s just so rocking fun to spend money you don’t have!  Finally, it feels great once you pay back that debt!  Double pleasure going both ways is why there is such a correlation.

GAINING WEIGHT IS THE PERFECT SOLUTION Read more…