April is financial literacy month, and there is all sorts of advice out there on how to take control of your financial life. But where to start? Here are five easy, concrete steps to put financial advice into practice.

1. Schedule a financial appointment with yourself.

You might regularly put off making a budget, but what if you treated the task like an appointment? In studies of chronic procrastinators published in Psychological Science, researchers found that people who scheduled appointments or deadlines for tasks were more likely to complete them. Appointments scheduled by other people were even more effective for keeping procrastinators in check. Known as “pre-commitment,” this strategy works by understanding our natural instincts and working to fight them. There are lots of ways to implement pre-commitment, including websites like stickK.com that let you set a goal and the stakes and then keep track of your progress to reward yourself with your wager.

2. Set small goals.

As with running a marathon or losing weight, the journey to financial well-being begins with a first step. So set small, achievable goals and expect to meet them: Track your spending for one week. Set up a simple budget using one of these personal finance tools. Stop simply fantasizing about your perfect financial life, and start taking steps to make it real.

3. Talk to a friend about your goal.

Living on a budget can be a real drag. You may have to forego a fancy dinner and drinks one night in exchange for leftovers and a DVD, or politely decline an invitation to shop till you drop. That’s why telling your friends and family about your goals can avoid awkward situations (“Why don’t they ever want to hang out?”) and build a support network to keep you accountable. Plus, you may have a positive influence on your friends’ habits, too.

According to a poll last year by the American Institute of CPAs, 78 percent of 25 to 34 year olds look at their friends’ financial habits to determine their own. If your friends don’t have admirable financial habits or aren’t much help in keeping you accountable, seek the help of a professional financial advisor.

4. Make an appointment with your office’s 401(k) representative.

Though it might seem like retirement is a long way off, it’s important to start saving early. Most of today’s college grads, given their high levels of debt, won’t be able to retire until age 73, according to a 2013 NerdWallet study. But that doesn’t have to be you, especially if your employer offers a 401(k) savings plan, which allows you to withhold a portion of your pay before taxes and invest it in a retirement savings account. These funds can be beneficial because your investment is tax-deferred, so the money in your account grows more quickly.

Set up a meeting with your office representative, and make sure you understand all the fees and terms of the plan. Does your employer offer to match your contribution? Make sure you get the full amount. Are you in your 20s? Invest aggressively. In your 50s? Invest more conservatively. Most importantly, start a conversation.

5. Understand how your brain works when faced with a financial decision.

We like to think our brains help us make decisions by weighing all the relevant factors to make the best choice. Unfortunately, according to research in behavioral economics, that just isn’t true. If left unchecked, our brains can lead us down a path of illogical financial decision-making by being overconfident about future performance.

We’ve all been there: It’s Jan. 1, and we decide to join a gym. But instead of buying the 10-class pass, we sign a contract for a monthly membership because we are sure we’ll go more than 10 times. However, in a study published in the American Economic Review, people with a monthly membership went to the gym only 4.3 times per month, spending upward of $17 per class, which over the course of the membership contract added up to $600 in additional costs.

The study found that people overestimated how often they’d go the gym and their likelihood of quitting the gym, which ultimately cost them extra money. Knowing about overestimation, and other tricks our brains play, can help compensate for your logical shortcomings when it comes to spending.

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Call Connie Dello Buono to help you budget and save for retirement. 408-854-1883 motherhealth@gmail.com

Use a trainer and gym for learning the right way to exercise and use gym equipments and with confidence find ways to do it yourself if you can to save.

You need to read this so you protect you. Every other blog in this series is about an important change you can make to keep the actual age of your body, your RealAge, younger. And every now and then the choice of blog topics is influenced by events you can’t control, but that affect you in a major way. I write about how you can stay young in face of these changes. Today, that focuses on the changes in the healthcare system that are and would occur due to cost pressures and transparency so big that even President Obama and the ACAPPA (aka Obamacare) can’t make it easy for you.

That’s why his phrases: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan!” have proven to be false for so many. Even in the most powerful executive office in the U.S., Obama couldn’t ensure that. But the errors in his statements simply reflect that the changes American medicine is undergoing are bigger than Obamacare — and were occurring without Obamacare. Yes. Obamacare is shaping them, and maybe accelerating them, but these changes alter what you need to do to get care.

[Read: How Wellness Is Pushing the U.S. to Prosperity .]

Let’s look at this from how the most major payers of healthcare costs are responding — the insurance companies and the U.S. government (through Medicare, Medicaid and payment for insurance for government employees) is responding. How is that changing your doctors’ and hospitals’ income statements? And then, what can you as an individual do for you and yours until these changes shake out? While finances often seem boring, it’s probably causing your local hospital trustees’ blood to boil, and we’ll try to make it that exciting for you, too.

Hospitals are seeing lower reimbursements now due to declining admissions — and greater transparency and lower payment rates. I’ll take the hypothetical example of a for-profit system, although the exact same logic goes in spades for a not-for profit academic system. This hypothetical but realistic hospital system currently bills about $3 billion for medical services and collects around $1 billion. That’s right — the institution, through insurance contracts and payment of fractions of bills by the government, gets 33 cents for every dollar it bills. It costs such a system around $900 million to provide all the services, and thus they are able to have a profit and invest $100 million in plant and equipment maintenance, as well as new equipment at their facilities. And this hospital system was exceptional, as many community hospitals function on margins below this 10 percent figure — like 5 percent.

A system like this one gets this revenue by collecting about $0.23 on the dollar billed from Medicare; about $0.18 on the dollar billed from Medicaid; and about $0.38 on the dollar billed for the aggregate of commercially insured patients. We are sure this seems bizarre to someone from outside the U.S., and actually it does to us, too, but it’s the way the system has evolved.

[Read: How You Can and Should Protect Yourself From Health Care Reform .]

But now, insurance exchanges are helping more people chose policies that pay Medicaid rates — nearer 18 cents for each dollar billed — and it isn’t just the uninsured that are choosing these policies, but those who work for small companies that do not cover health insurance for their employees. Eight million people have chosen these policies so far. That is increasing outpatient demand and reducing reimbursements — going from a policy that paid 38 cents to one that pays 18 cents per dollar billed seems (from what I can learn from friends) to be hitting many hospitals and even academic health systems hard. That’s right, being paid 20 cents less on each dollar billed on just 20 percent of the 3 billion you bill reduces our hospital system’s income from 1 billion to 880 million, or a net loss of 20 million versus a profit of 100 million (remember it cost 900 million to provide the care the hospital provided). What would you do if you ran that hospital system? You’d cut every non-essential service you could, and darn fast. Your grass would get cut less often. And those decreases mean less money for everyone selling services to that hospital — but let’s leave that for another blog.

Now couple that with reference pricing: An article in Health Affairs indicates that in California, the CALPERS system — the largest state-run health insurance provider — has gone to reference pricing in some areas. CALPERS gives employees $30,000 for a total hip or total knee replacement and lists the hospitals that charge less than that. Virtually all academic medical centers (those that provide care for the sickest, and those that train our future doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dieticians, etc.) fall into the high-cost group, and their share of the CALPERS patient population that has hip or knee replacements went from 54 to 35 percent, while the share for low-cost hospitals has climbed from 46 to 65 percent in less than two years. (Only one high-priced group hospital in California converted to a low-cost group hospital in the past three years. These trends have accelerated since 2012, we are told.)

[Read: How to Find the Right Doctor.]

Many other states will soon adopt reference pricing, where you’ll be guided to hospitals that charge less for a service (and maybe try to not take patients with conditions that increase cost). This means there will be less dollars for the hospitals that have taken the sickest patients to continue to do so in transfer from the lower priced hospitals, as well as less dollars to train doctors. And doctors are seeing less revenue as more of their patients are paid for at or near the Medicaid rate of 18 cents per dollar billed, versus the private or even Medicare rates of 38 and 23 cents on the dollar billed. So it’s not just the for-profit hospitals that are seeing less revenue, but all health providers.

How long will the pain last for the hospitals and health service providers till we remodel the system so all practitioners practice at the limit of their license and only the sickest get nursing or physician care? We don’t know how this will settle out. This change was tried twice in the U.S. and once in several Canadian provinces in my job lifetime, but each time political pressure — “I want a great neurosurgeon when I want one, not when my back pain has lasted 10 weeks” — forced reversion to something close to the prior system. But this time seems different. And for you to avoid a shortage of providers or find out that your doctor has dropped out of accepting your specific insurance here are four tips:

No.1: Hug your doctor and your doctor’s office manager, and do whatever you need to make sure your doctor is willing to make an exception for you and yours to be covered by her — even if she takes no one else from that network.

No. 2: Hug your company HR director and CEO, and hope they provide insurance coverage and a plan that allows you to keep your doctor. It isn’t the ACA or Obamacare that changed this; it is your company or their insurance plan. Also hope that they’ll include the academic center nearest you — in case you or yours need complex care. And tell these folks how much your company’s health insurance plan means to you and your productivity.

No. 3: Get preventive care now. Do whatever you can to avoid toxins such as tobacco, secondhand smoke and the five food felons, and learn to love physical activity and manage stress.

No. 4: Take your do-over, and stay as well as you can for three to five years until this all shakes out.

For the past week, as many as 30,000 workers have been on strike, disrupting work at plants in the southern China that make shoes for Nike, Adidas, and Puma. Their grievances are the same as those of many workers across the country: they’ve spent decades working for manufacturing plants and now that they want to retire, they don’t have enough money.

Free trip to Europe in 2015, a $15,000 luxury value trip for two with cash and lux.

For the 80 million Americans, social security is their only retirement income.

Women who take antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy may be at an increased risk of having a child with autism spectrum disorder, according to a recent study Fox News reported.

Researchers found that children who were exposed to SSRIs the most had the highest incidence of autism, Fox News reported.

“We found prenatal SSRI exposure was almost three times as likely in boys with autism spectrum disorders relative to typical development, with the greatest risk when exposure is during the first trimester,” study co-author Li-Ching Lee, an associate scientist in the department of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland, told Counsel and Heal.

http://www.universityherald.com/

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Connie’s comments: The baby’s skull is not fully fused yet until even after a year old that any meds month before pregnancy, during pregnancy, during childbirth and during breastfeeding can affect the baby. 

For the study, researchers collected data from 966 mother and child pairs to better understand how SSRIs affect pregnancy outcomes.  Of the children studied, 800 were boys. Nearly 500 children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, 154 had some form of developmental delay and 320 had developed typically.

 The SSRIs examined in the study were Celexa, Lezapro, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft.

Researchers found that in the autism group, 5.9 percent of the pregnancies were exposed to SSRIs. In the delayed developmental group, 5.2 percent of the pregnancies were exposed to SSRIs.  They also found that exposure rate in the typically developing children group was 3.4 percent.

Investigators said that in terms of gender, boys were three times more likely to have autism if they were exposed to the antidepressants during the first trimester.

Given their findings, researchers said they hope expecting mothers consult with their doctors before taking antidepressants during pregnancy.

“It’s a complex decision whether to treat or not treat depression with medications during pregnancy,” Lee said. “There are so many factors to consider. We didn’t intend for our study to be used as a basis for clinical treatment decisions. Women should talk with their doctors about SSRI treatments.”

People with successful retirements, filled with abundance and options, almost all have the following things in common:

• They carry very little, if any, personal debt.
• They have stable, secure income from multiple sources that they can set their watch by every month.
• Starting about 10 years before they retire, they begin shifting their assets from riskier investments to low- or no-risk income assets.

A mortgage is generally the biggest debt most of us have. Many argue that you should never pay off your house because the equity you put into it is tied up and not making you money. They might recommend borrowing as much as you can now because interest rates are low. I say you can have the best of both worlds. First, pay off your mortgage before you retire. By adding small amounts directed to your principle every month, you will take months, even years off your payoff date.

When your house is paid off, get the biggest equity line of credit you can. This way, if you see an attractive investment opportunity, you can put your equity to use, and if you don’t, you have removed the pressure of a big mortgage payment in retirement. If you can pay off your mortgage while you are working, why not now shift that payment over to a solid savings or income product? This could work out to tens of thousands of extra dollars producing monthly income for when you retire.

An abundant retirement is about strong positive cash flow that you can count on for years to come.

• Do you have any idea how much money you need to retire every month?
• Do you know where you can get that income from?
• Do you have enough money for home health care or long-term care?
• Are you protected from big market downturns during your retirement years?
• How much will inflation eat into that monthly income needed? Can You Answer These Questions?

All these questions must be part of an income plan. We calculate these for clients all over the country. First, know how much income you and your spouse will receive from Social Security when you retire. You can get an estimate from the Social Security Administration. If you believe that number is at risk because of issues with Social Security, you better start putting more away and growing it safely.

If you need $5,000 per month to retire and the Social Security for you and your spouse is only $3,500, then you have a $1,500 shortfall. Do you have a pension? How much will that be when you begin to draw it?

Do you have a 401(k) or Individual Retirement Account? How long could that account last if you need to draw $1,500 a month — $18,000 in a year? Will you have to pay taxes on what you take out? If you have a 401(k) or traditional IRA, the answer is yes. If you lose 50 percent of your capital to a bear market, how long will you be able to get $18,000 per year? As you get to be in what we call the “retirement danger zone,” which is 10 years before your projected retirement, you need to start shifting assets away from market risk and over to guaranteed products. A solid fixed indexed annuity with a long-term income rider might be a very good call. I wrote an article about the different types of annuities and how to purchase one that fits your needs.

A lifetime income rider (state and product variations exist) will guarantee that you have a certain amount of income (depending on how much you have in your annuity and at what age you start withdrawing) for you and your spouse’s life. If you live to be very old, your normal retirement funds might run out, but a lifetime income rider guarantees that income stream regardless of what happens to the underlying cash in the account. Also if you have five to 10 years, you have time for that income rider to grow.

Many income riders offer 6 percent and more guaranteed growth every year. When you purchase a $200,000 annuity, many companies might offer a 10 percent bonus on your initial purchase price so your starting amount would be $220,000. When you add compound growth at 6 percent over 10 years, your income rider would top $400,000. Then you would start to draw your lifetime income at 6 percent of the $400,000, giving you $24,000 a year income for you and your spouse’s life.

Presto! You have filled your income gap. If you have the resources to purchase another annuity, you might get one with a cost of living clause to hedge against inflation. John Jamieson is the best-selling author of “The Perpetual Wealth System

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If you need a calculation of your lifetime income base on your needs, age and current income, email Connie Dello Buono at motherhealth@gmail.com or call 408-854-1883 for your own personalized retirement plan with living benefits, no market risk, tax-free and grows up to 13%, secured and guaranteed at 2.5% without participating in the downside potential of the SP500.

If you want your own agency with team support, helping families with retirement planning call Connie.