Financial Samurai

Slicing Through Money's Mysteries

Things To Do Before And During A Second Lockdown

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Due to to a surge in COVID-19 cases across America, a second lockdown is an inevitability. Even though the coastal states are fairing better than the heartland states for now, the virus will spread everywhere again.

Los Angeles is back on lockdown for a month. And San Francisco has closed all outdoor zoos and aquariums given the city has been downgraded to the “purple” tier.

I feel bad for businesses who spent money to open up and now have to close. It is also disappointing that our freedoms will once again be taken away as curfews are implemented, at the very least.

When the first lockdown was implemented, we didn’t have much time to prepare. After more than 10 months, at least we’re all lockdown veterans now!

To prepare for the inevitable, let’s first discuss some things we should do before the second lockdown occurs. Then let’s discuss some things to do during the second lockdown.

For 2021, most of the country is under a second lockdown. However, many citizens are not following the latest stay-at-home orders. We are sick and tired of government officials telling us what to do while they go eat at fancy establishments like The French Laundry!



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Getting Your Money’s Worth For The Health Care Premiums You Pay

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Ever since publishing, How To Get Health Care Subsidies Under The Affordable Care Act, I’ve been feeling a little left out. In order to help others get health care subsidies, my family has been paying our full health care costs.

It is an honor to help others, so I don’t mind. However, after not visiting a doctor for five years and paying about $100,000 in health care insurance premiums, I decided to see if I could get my money’s worth.

For three months, I tried to get more health care coverage per month than what I was paying. But I fell short. This failure to get my money’s worth is one of the reasons why I’ve decided to downgrade my plan to Gold from Platinum.



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How To Compare Health Insurance Plans And Save Money

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One of the downsides about early retirement is the expensive cost of healthcare in America. Without an employer subsidy, the average cost for a family healthcare insurance plan is about $21,000 in 2020. This post is about how to compare health insurance plans and save money.

The extreme cost of healthcare is one of the main reasons why many employees will work at a job for longer than they really want. If you retire early, unless you earn less than 400% the Federal Poverty Limit (FPL), you will have to pay the full cost of your healthcare premiums. But if you do earn less than 400% of FPL, do you really have enough to retire?

Even if you were eligible for healthcare insurance subsidies, it may feel weird taking advantage of the system. After all, we’ve all been taught it’s always better to give than to receive.

The high cost of healthcare is why you sometimes see one spouse continue to work long after the other spouse has retired. It’s kind of sad that due to expensive healthcare, many couples aren’t able to live their retirement dreams together.

Because I still haven’t been able to convince my wife to go back to work so we can get subsidized healthcare insurance, I’ve asked her to put together some helpful tips on how to compare health insurance plans. We just went through the process and it is quite mind-numbing without a guide.



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Is It Worth Having A High Deductible Health Plan To Be Eligible For A Health Savings Account?

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Is It Worth Having A High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) To Be Eligible For A Health Savings Account (HSA)?

Everywhere I go, I hear the benefits of the Health Savings Account, or HSA for short. People say it’s one of the best ways to save for retirement and pay for inevitable medical expenses given the tax benefits.

Not wanting to miss out on an obvious financial benefit, I did what most lazy husbands do and asked my wife about it. She is, after all, the CFO and COO of our online business. As such, she is also in charge of our healthcare plan.

She told me we aren’t eligible for Health Savings Accounts because we don’t have a High Deductible Health Plan. Hmrph. Well that doesn’t seem right. Based on what I heard, everybody is eligible, otherwise, that would be discrimination!

But then I realized the government consistently discriminates against some of us all the time. For example, if you make over a certain income threshold, you cannot contribute to a traditional IRA or Roth IRA. What’s up with that? We should all be allowed to save for our financial future.

In the past, if you made over $75,000 as a single filer or $110,000 as a joint filer, you couldn’t receive a child tax credit. Children are already expensive and stressful enough. Why was the government incentivizing lower-income households to have more children and disincentivizing higher income households to have fewer children?

Maybe they were looking to increase the divorce rate due to powerful lobbyists in the legal community.

Luckily, the child tax credit income threshold is now a more reasonable and logical $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for joint filers in 2020. Why the government thought 1+1=1.5 in the past made no sense. Same thing with the marriage penalty tax that has since been abolished with the passage of the Tax Cut And Jobs Act.

Slowly, we are heading towards equal treatment of all American citizens. But not yet when it comes to healthcare.



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The Secret To Weight Loss: Losing Your Way To More Money

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The secret to weight loss is not more exercise. The secret to weight loss is eating less. In the process of eating less, you’ll also save more money. I wrote this post on July 25, 2009, and wanted to revisit it 11 years later. I was 165 – 167 lbs back then. Today I’m 168 – 170 lbs with two young kids.

At the beginning of every year, I tell myself that I’m going to eat better and exercise more. Yet, every December, I look and weigh exactly the same and get frustrated until the New Year, when the cycle starts anew.

My theory on weight is simply that we all have a weight range we fluctuate in, and every 5 years that band increases towards the heavier side! That was my excuse for my lack of improvement.

I used to also think that our weight was 70% hereditary and 30% diet and exercise until I saw the show “The Biggest Loser!” Now I think the ratios are the complete opposite. If you really want to get motivated and cry at the same time, you’ve got to watch the show.

The show’s concept is simple. After 3 months of boot camp, whoever loses the most weight wins gobs of money! The results are astonishing. Season 7’s winner, Helen lost an amazing 140lbs from her original 255lbs start weight. Go Helen!

The Biggest Loser show demonstrates that with enough motivation and discipline we can lose a lot of undesired weight. In fact, for 7 seasons in a row each of the winners have lost over 100lbs!



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The Biggest Downside To Daycare And Preschool Is Not The Cost

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The Biggest Downside To Preschool Is Not The Cost

Let’s talk about the biggest downside to daycare and preschool. The downside has become extremely apparent post pandemic.

When it comes to analyzing the downside for daycare and preschool, most parents think about cost as the biggest downside. Then there is the societal pressures that come with sending your kids to daycare (not so much preschool).

Are you considered rich if you can afford childcare? After all, childcare for one child can cost between $1,500 – $2,500 a month, depending on where you live.

Or are you considered poor if you have to pay for childcare because you cannot afford to stay at home and take care of your own kids?

What an interesting conundrum to consider! This debate, just like politics, will surely rile people up on both sides.

For most, I believe any family who can afford $18,000 – $30,000 a year in childcare costs a year per child should be considered more well off than the family who has a stay-at-home parent. Mind you, these are after-tax dollars.

I, for one, would not be comfortable spending such an amount after tax. Given we live in San Francisco, the cost of childcare is closer to $30,000 a year. We would probably need to make over 20X the cost of annual childcare or $600,000 to not feel the pinch.

Ironically, because both my wife and I were unemployed well before we had kids, we can more easily afford to stay home and raise them.

Staying home and raising our son has probably saved us $75,000 over a 2.5 year time frame. At least one of us plans to stay at home and care for our daughter for at least 2.5 years as well.



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Paying For Height Is A Waste Of Money: The Many Benefits Of Being Short

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The Benefits Of Being Short: Spending $300K For 3 Inches Is Ridiculous

There are many benefits of being short I’d like to discuss in this post. I firmly believe being tall is overrated. Unless you are a basketball player, volleyball player, wide receiver, or tennis player, there’s not much benefit to being tall.

I’m 5’10”, the average height in America. If I played in the NBA, I’d probably be listed at 6′. When I was growing up in Kuala Lumpur and attending middle school, I would sometimes get comments about how tall I was. It was nice to hear, but I didn’t think much of it until I stopped growing in the 8th grade.

My Tall Father

I clearly remember my dad making me feel bad for not being taller. At the time, he was 6′ 3″. Today he’s closer to 6’1″. In another 20 years, maybe we’ll be the same height so long as I continue to stretch. Haha.

Perhaps he was mad at my height because I didn’t eat my entire lunch one Saturday before playing with my friends. I remember telling my two friends how my dad thought I was too short. So they did what any good friends would do and pulled me like a tug-of-war rope to see if they could stretch me out!

To my father, my height was a disappointment. He made me think I was the one to blame. As a result, I ate as much as I could to grow taller. But it did not matter.

As a father to a son now, I find this whole height obsession strange. I’d never make my son feel bad about his appearance. After all, height is mostly genetically determined. The way our son looks is because of me and my wife!

We might have the ability to grow taller by an inch or so based on our diet, but that’s about it. Further, it wasn’t my fault that I grew up in Asia, where fatty foods and diary products were not common.



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The Healthiest Foods To Make You Fit And Rich

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Well now, it looks like some people weren’t very happy with my defense of people who like to eat out to win business or order food delivery to save time and their marriages.

I’m not sure whether the true anger lies in going against the food preparing norm or highlighting the truth about how we can all be doing more for our health and our finances.

I don’t shout angrily on the internet when I disagree with something. Nor do I insult people with different beliefs. Instead, I like to listen carefully to feedback and adopt any good ideas to improve my life. And I’ve got a good one that could really make a difference!

In the near future, I plan to drop my writing frequency from 3X a week to once a week and stop podcasting once a week in order to cook more for my family and to save money.

I calculate by cooking at home, I’ll save between $500 – $1,000 a month, equivalent to the monthly cash flow savings I’ve earned from refinancing my mortgage. Not bad! Although I might also suffer revenue loss 10X greater, that is neither here nor there. All good things are worth the initial sacrifice.

Further, I’ve been looking for a good reason to give up my posting cadence after reaching the 10 year mark. I’m tired and want to mix things up. After the second year of writing, I started consistently getting thank you e-mails or comments every week from readers saying how XYZ article helped them. As a result, I started feeling guilty that if I didn’t post regularly, I would be letting people down.

Thanks to reader feedback, it’s time to make a change for health and wealth!



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Subsidy Amounts By Income For The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

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The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a way to help lower-income individuals and individuals without health care afford health care. Although health care is still extremely expensive, the Affordable Care Act provides subsidies. This article will look at the subsidy amounts by income for the the Affordable Care Act.

I’m a supporter of ACA despite the trappings of ever bigger government running our lives. Disease and accidents do not discriminate between the rich or poor. In a nation as rich as ours, nobody should die or get stuck in a permanent loop of poverty just because they can’t afford medical treatment.

The two most common reasons why people don’t retire earlier are: 1) Lack of money and 2) Uncertainty regarding health care access and costs. Soaring medical costs is also consistently a top-3 reason why Americans file for bankruptcy.

As an early retiree in 2012 with a full 30 years to go before being eligible for Medicare benefits, I was worried about health care. That is, until I did hours upon hours of research on the ACA and cheaper health care alternatives.

Now that I’ve spent a good amount of time studying what healthcare.gov has to offer, I’m no longe as worried about health care benefits. For those with low-enough income, I’m thrilled for the potentially millions of other people who don’t have health care or who have no desire to work into their 60s for health care benefits.

I’ve also discovered that even millionaires will be eligible for health care subsidies. The reason why even millionaires can get health care subsidies is because the subsidy amounts are based off income, not net worth.



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The Average Cost Of Family Health Insurance Is Now Outrageously High

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According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average cost of family health insurance offered by companies is now a whopping $20,576 a year, or $1,714.66 a month. Employers paid for 71% of that cost on average.

Meanwhile, the average premium for single workers was $7,188 a year, or $599 a month. Employers covered 83% of that cost on average.

The KFF surveyed over 2,000 companies.

If they had asked us what we paid, we would have brought up the average because our health insurance cost is jumping by 7% to $23,131.38 a year, or $1,927.64 a month for a family of three! Previously, we were paying “only” $21,788.88 a year, or $1,815.74 a month.

With one child we have a PPO Platinum plan with a $250/$500 deductible (single/family), a $3,200/$6,400 out-of-pocket max (single/family) and 80% co-pay insurance.

The Average Cost For Healthcare Soars


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