• Policy experts, economists, business people and teachers are debating the extent to which personal finance education can turn around the fact that so many Americans are one emergency away from financial disaster.
• At the same time, the ways in which people think about how we can become financially better off are increasing and evolving.

WHEN PARTS OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN toward the end of last year, many Americans went without a paycheck or two. Crisis followed.

A tax examiner for the IRS couldn’t afford to pick up his insulin prescription. A geologist for the Department of Interior was left with just $33. Some workers had to take on temporary jobs.

For a large swath of America, it was probably not a surprise that so many people became so vulnerable, so quickly. If their income was put on pause, or an unforeseen expense dropped into their lives, they’d be in a similar bind. Forty percent of people in the U.S. don’t have $400 set aside for an emergency, according to the Federal Reserve. Additionally, 25 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement.

APRIL IS FINANCIAL LITERACY MONTH, and policy experts, economists, business people and teachers are debating the extent to which personal finance education can reverse these grim statistics. Meanwhile, the ways in which people think about how we can become financially well are increasing and evolving.

In 2015, a study published in the Journal of Human Resources found little evidence that education intended to improve people’s financial decision-making is successful. “Policies to expand high school financial literacy education … may be misguided,” the researchers concluded.

Yet other experts argue that lessons on lending and credit are just as important as English or science classes — and the only chance to reach every child before he or she goes on to make life-defining financial decisions.

“The finding is not that we shouldn’t spend on financial education — we should actually try to make it better,” said Annamaria Lusardi, the director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center at George Washington University.

Financial educators are also confronting their limitations in a society where wealth and income are so unevenly divided, said Billy J. Hensley, the president and chief executive officer of the National Endowment for Financial Education.

The three richest people in the U.S. — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population. As medical, childcare and college costs take off, wages have sputtered. The median family income, after accounting for inflation, was $59,039 in 2016, little different than in it was in 2000 ($58,544).

n a new CNBC Invest In You and Acorns Savings Survey, more than a third of respondents said they don’t make enough money to meet their needs and save.

“People may be blocked out of financial institutions, or their income is too low, and it’s hard to get that extra 2 percent into a retirement account,” Hensley said. “You have to be able to apply what you’re learning.”

STILL, BETWEEN THE RAPID RISE in borrowing among college students and the fact that workers are increasingly tasked with saving for their retirement, financial education is more essential now than ever, Lusardi said.

“There are these huge challenges in front of us,” Lusardi said. “We need to be better equipped.”

Efforts to improve the curriculum in schools are underway.

The George Washington University School of Business recently launched an online resource, Fast Lane, which provides certain people, including students and policy makers, specific directions for implementing high-quality financial literacy in their schools. Checkyourschool.org is another new project, by the non-profit Jump$tart Coalition, which invites parents and students to report how their school is faring when it comes to personal finance education.

“A lot of parents are very engaged and they’re natural activists,” said Laura Levine, president and CEO of the Jump$tart Coalition. “We want them to start the conversations at their school about introducing or augmenting financial education.”

Recently, more states are leading the effort to bring lessons on taxes and debt into their schools.

Alex Todd has taught a personal finance class at Elizabethtown High School in Kentucky for more than two decades. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began to hold more of the courses. “Parents said they wished they’d had this class in high school,” Todd said.

Last year, Todd worked with state representatives to pass legislation that will require every student in Kentucky who enters high school in 2020 to enroll in a course like his, which teaches students how to be skeptical consumers and smart savers.

A recent study found that in states where personal finance education is mandated, students go on to make better decisions about how to pay for college. For example, they don’t take on as much private debt.

“If every state in America would spend a little bit of time teaching financial literacy to high school students, we can begin to win a battle we’ve been losing for the last 40 to 50 years,” Todd said.

IMPROVING TECHNOLOGY HAS ALSO made its way into the financial literacy field.

Practical Money Skills, a financial literacy platform created by Visa, includes interactive tools such as Financial Football, a 3D game in which players learn personal finance lessons as they try to score touchdowns.

The innovation is not just for kids. Researchers at Stanford University are leveraging virtual reality to show people their aging avatars, in the hopes that they develop empathy for their 70- or 80-year-old self.

“People view their future selves like a stranger,” said Sarah Raposo, a researcher at the Stanford University’s Life-span Development Laboratory. “If we could help people understand they’re preparing for themselves and caring for themselves, they might be more motivated to learn about financial planning.”

IT’S NEVER BEEN SO EASY TO FIND INFORMATION about paying off debt or investing.There are personal finance books, podcasts, television shows, YouTube series, blogs, news sites and Meetup events. The Reddit personal finance channel, in which people detail their financial circumstances and ask for advice, has more than 13.5 million subscribers.

“The personal finance education space is getting a lot more inclusive and friendly,” said Chris Browning, who hosts the podcast Popcorn Finance.

Browning created the series on tax tips and side hustles back in June of 2017 and releases an episode a week. Around 1,500 people currently listen in, he said, often while they’re driving to work or cleaning up the house.

“Talking about money gets kind of intimidating and pushes people away,” Browning said. “I try not to use a lot of jargon.

“People tell me they appreciate that it’s easy to understand.”

As personal finance advice proliferates, it also grows harder for people to pick out what’s actually good for them, said Hensley, the president of the National Endowment for Financial Education.

“There’s a lot of money to be made off of someone’s decision,” Hensley said. “Getting high-quality, vetted information is a challenge.”

TO THAT POINT, companies are moving beyond education, and streamlining the financial decision making process for their employees.

Nearly 75 percent of businesses today that offer a 401(k) plan already automatically enroll their workers. Research shows that few people opt out.

Up until recently, if an employee did drop out, that would be the end of their workplace retirement savings unless they signed up again. But now, some companies are auto-enrolling their workers more than once a year. (Nearly 10 percent of Prudential’s retirement clients do so today).

Prudential also now offers a way for workers to build up an emergency savings account at their jobs. The savings is an after-tax contribution that allows employees to automatically put money away in low-cost investments such as money market or so-called stable value funds.

“Education is important because people need to understand the context of their financial decisions,” said Vishal Jain, the head of financial wellness strategy and development for Prudential. “At the same time, its important to guide people to action.”

Steve Vernon, a retirement savings expert, also believes that information sessions on saving and spending can only go so far.

He is pushing for companies to offer a retirement income menu, in which workers could decide between a number of ways to receive their savings on a regular basis, say monthly or quarterly, as opposed to in one lump sum when they exit the workforce.

Vernon believes it’s unreasonable for companies to expect their employees to turn into an investment manager in their retirement. “That’s a complex task that most ordinary workers are not equipped to do on their own,” he said.

“You can educate people until you’re blue in the face,” Vernon added. “We need more.”

Information source

Cyber risk is one of the hottest topics in insurance. However, as it is still a relatively new and emerging concern, it can be made unnecessarily complex by industry jargons, buzzwords of the day, and a lack of standardization in policy wordings. As such, many companies find themselves confused about how cyber risk insurance actually works and are skeptical about whether it makes sense for their business to purchase a policy.

MYTH 1

“WE DON’T NEED CYBER INSURANCE. WE INVEST IN IT SECURITY…” Vulnerability and Risk Are Two Different Things

Heavily investing in IT security systems doesn’t necessarily protect large corporations from cyberattacks.

While it is true that clients who invest heavily in IT security may be less vulnerable to certain types of cyberattack than organizations which invest very little, they still run the risk of exposure. Cyber threats are rapidly evolving, and cyber attackers find new ways to access networks every day. Think of it this way, you have theft coverage on your home insurance policy even though you have high quality locks on your doors.

No amount of IT security can completely eliminate human error.

According to IBM, 95% of successful cyberattacks are incidents that occur as a result of a human error. Technology can reduce the possibility of an employee accidentally clicking on a malicious link in an email, but it can’t eliminate that risk completely.

MYTH 2

“WE OUTSOURCE ALL OF OUR IT, SO WE DON’T HAVE AN EXPOSURE…”

Protecting clients’ personal data is always the sole responsibility of the organization entrusted with the data, not a hired third party.

Outsourcing your organization’s data storage to a third party doesn’t eliminate your responsibility for your clients’ private data in case of a confidentiality breach. As the party entrusted with clients’ data, your organization bears full responsibility for all the regulatory actions that may arise as a result of the data breach. To avoid the detrimental effect of such actions on your company’s finances and reputation, you must ensure that the service contract you sign with the third party IT provider clearly states that the hired service is required to indemnify you (the customer) the cost of loss of or liability for compromised data in case of a data breach.

Organizations’ critical business operations can suffer as a result of a third party system failure

Many businesses rely on third parties for business critical operations. Should those providers experience a system failure, it could have a catastrophic effect on the company’s ability to trade, resulting in a business interruption loss and additional costs incurred to continue trading

MYTH 3

“WE DON’T COLLECT ANY SENSITIVE DATA, SO WE DON’T NEED CYBER INSURANCE. . .”

Funds transfer fraud and system damage or business interruption as a result of ransomware are two of the most common sources of cyber claims.

Cyber criminals use fraudulent emails or conduct social engineering over the phone to carry out fund transfer fraud.

In many cases, fraudsters pose as a senior executive appearing to give urgent instructions to junior employees to wire funds to and from a business bank account. Many of the victims of these losses hold next to no sensitive personal data.

The freezing or damaging of business-critical computer systems can sometimes be a much bigger problem to organizations than data theft

In 2017, the WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware outbreaks crippled many organizations within the manufacturing and logistic industries, costing some of them almost $2 billion CAD due to operational disruptions and turnaround drops.

MYTH 4

“CYBERATTCKS ONLY AFFECT BIG BUSINESSES. WE’RE TOO SMALL TO BE A TARGET. . .” Smaller Organizations Are Low Hanging Fruit for

Small businesses that lack the resources necessary to invest in IT security or provide cyber security training for their staff have become an easier and more attractive target for cyber criminals.

Attacks against smaller organizations are now so frequent that they are no longer newsworthy.

A recent Verizon report found that 58% of victims were categorized as smaller businesses. Claims data from Canada’s largest insurer of Cyber Risk shows that the majority of fund transfer fraud claims come from small-to-medium sized businesses.

MYTH 5

“CYBER RISK IS ALREADY COVERED BY OTHER LINES OF INSURANCE. . .”

Property, crime, and professional liability are three of the most common lines of insurance assumed to include some type of cyber risk coverage, but they often fall well short of the coverage found in a standalone policy.

Property insurance policies offer a narrow, add-on data restoration coverage that includes only some form of sub-limit for data restoration costs and no expertise to deal with a claim involving data theft or damage.

Crime insurance policies have only recently started to give coverage for social engineering attacks, but those policies are generally quite broad and lack the onerous terms found in a traditional crime policy.

Some professional liability policies offer limited coverage for suits arising from data theft, but they don’t cover any of the costs associated with responding to an event.

Standalone cyber risk insurance policies offer a broad coverage that is also purpose-built for true cyber exposure. Most importantly, they provide access to an incident report service and bring a level of expertise to handle cyber events effectively and efficiently with minimum disruption and financial impact to the business.

Do you want to know more details about the family health plan york and personal finance management then please drop your comments in the comment section.

Informational source

Over the next few weeks most college and university bound students will be packing up personal belongings and getting ready for the move away from home to enjoy the much anticipated “campus life”. But before packing away laptops, televisions, and iPods, students would be wise to have parents review their insurance policy to ensure valuable personal items are sufficiently covered in case of accidental loss or damage while away at school.

Parents and students should be sure to consider the following tips when assessing their insurance needs:

• Most home insurance policies extend liability to children while away at school.
• Most personal belongings for students living on campus or off-campus apartments are covered under the parent’s homeowners or renters’ insurance policies, however, some policies may limit the amount of insurance coverage available.
• Standard insurance limits may not be enough to insure an expensive computer, electronic equipment or jewelry. Consider buying a personal property floater or an endorsement to increase the limits on these items.
• Parents should think about purchasing a tenants policy in the student’s name while away at school. Tenants insurance will adequately cover all of the student’s personal property and provide extensive liability coverage at an affordable cost.
• Parents, who have ever considered removing their child from their car insurance while away at school should know that most insurance companies offer a “Student Away Discount” to ensure their child is still covered under their car policy when they come home to visit at a discounted price.
• Inform your car insurance company if you intend to take your vehicle to attend a school in another province. Some car insurance companies may not be licensed to insure outside of your home province.

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It’s the only way to achieve universal, affordable and high-quality health insurance.

A growing majority of Americans agree: Health care shouldn’t be a business. They’re finally coming around to the idea that it can and should be a public good instead — something we can all turn to when the need arises.

The favorite right-wing argument against Medicare for All — the most popular approach to universal, publicly financed heath care — is that it’s too expensive. More on those costs in a moment. But first, we should note that our current health care system is actually the most expensive in the world by a long shot, even though we have millions of uninsured and under insured people and lackluster health outcomes.

This is partly because a lot of that money doesn’t go directly toward keeping people healthy. Instead it goes to the overhead costs required to keep businesses running. These include exorbitant executive salaries, marketing to beat out the competition, the labor-intensive work of assessing and denying claims and so on. None of these would be a factor in a single-payer, Medicare for All system. Taiwan and Canada both have single-payer systems, and both spend less than 2 percent of total expenditures on administrative costs — and so does the United States’s current Medicare program. By contrast, private insurers in the United States spend as much as 25 percent on overheads.

But the most important way Medicare for All would save money isn’t by slashing administrative costs. It’s by using the power and size of the government, like other countries around the world currently do, to negotiate favorable terms with drug companies and service providers. There’s a reason a CT scan costs $896 in the United States, but only $97 in Canada.

And what about the sticker shock factor — the dramatic rise in government spending to accommodate such a program? Medicare for All would transfer all payment responsibility to one public agency (as opposed to a bunch of private companies), and that act of combination produces the big price tag that conservatives use as a cudgel. But while this would be more expensive for the government, it wouldn’t be for ordinary Americans. The money would be raised through progressive income and corporate taxes and end up costing most people less than their current health care. And coverage would be comprehensive and universal, meaning nobody would ever be unable to afford the care they need.

Pursuing Medicare for All would come with its own set of dilemmas: Eliminating an entire industry won’t be easy, and we’ll face plenty of political resistance and calls for half-measures. But if we want actual universal coverage, and we want it to be affordable and high-quality, Medicare for All is the only way forward.

To know more about the health insurance Harrisburg and Medicare please read my other blogs. For other queries drop your comments in the comment section.

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