Boomer Woman Blog

01 March 2010

Health insurance brokers: Consumers' friend

Health insurance brokers, while essentially insurance sales reps, are nevertheless a consumer's friend in the sorting through of policies and choices. I've talked to a broker for the first time this year. In fact, I didn't even know they existed until this year.

As a boomer woman, my knowledge of individual-purchased insurance was zip. I recall my brothers purchasing "major medical" in their youth. And self-employed relatives lamenting the hard choices they had to make about coverage. So, when the topic came up for us recently, I had no experience in purchasing insurance. We have always had the guidance of employers' HR departments.

An Internet reference to insurance brokers caught my eye as I scoured news articles and blogs about potential sources. (This, realizing that heath care reform via Congress would not be timely for us.) The concept is simple: an insurance broker represents multiple companies (say, a dozen) and works with consumers to find the right match. That may include a recommendation to apply to more than one company in order to compare policies and costs and eligibility, too.

I selected an insurance broker in Houston based solely on the web site. The best surprise so far: help in finding dental insurance independent of health insurance. A little more than $40/month for the two of us. All preventive care covered; 50% of big stuff covered. A good buy or only moderate? Doesn't really matter to me. What matters is maintaining an insurance that I know influences our behavior in having twice-a-year check-ups.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

26 February 2010

New Perspective on Work Space

When you see your house on the web, you can't help but feel self-conscious. So, house-after-staging is actually the best circumstance for this unusual level of disclosure. This photo is one-half of my office. What you cannot see is another desk and and a chair. The room dimensions? 30 x 13. You'll agree that there's not a lot of furniture for a room this size. The fuller story: before the stager did her work, there were 8 chairs (total), an air desk (in addition to the 2 desks retained), a third bookshelf, and 4 rolling carts. I am adjusting to the new work space. Slowly.

22 February 2010

Living Generically: Life After Staging

Having been staged (the house, that is), we expected to feel a bit plain. Or even generic, like a hotel room. The above photo is where I am right now. It's plain. It's generic. But here's the real what it's like: living in a staged home is like living in a hotel room with Sherman.

Sherman's our dog. When we are in a hotel with Sherman we must keep soap tucked away. Trash cans tucked away. Clothes hung. Papers in briefcases. Cords hidden. And, of course, absolutely no food or cutlery left in sight.

19 February 2010

Relying on a young friend

The stager (for the house that's going on the market) have us many instructions but a very short list of purchases to make. This was lucky.

Even so, we didn't want to assume that our boomer generation eyes would be up to the task. (Generational taste. And interest. Those are the problems.) So, we asked a young friend to do the shopping for us. A few bedside lamps, a chandelier for the kitchen table, and fluffy towels in just the right color.

She did a good job.

15 February 2010

Staging. Stripping. Eliminating.

This wall is now actually a highly decorated space in our home. Its spines (part of the dome ceiling) are built-in design, in contrast to the vast blank spaces that we now call home.

You see, the stager came. Only younger boomers understand staging. Older boomers missed that introduction to the real estate industry—but if they relocate now, they're going to meet a stager. In fact, I think that a visit from a stager should be mandatory in preparing a house for sale. Not so much for the staging as the stripping.

You see, a real stager does not necessarily match the picture we get from TV. Those "selling" shows bring in stagers who put pizzazz in the properties. Our stager insisted that pizzazz doesn't sell. Rather, it interrupts the buyer's train of thought and brings too much attention to the furnishings (or the current owner). Of course, if a buyer falls in love with the furniture, the stager has the opportunity to make a profit, along with the realtor, but my guess is that's not so common.

I have come to appreciate what our real-life stager did: strip the house of personality. Virtually all traces of us are gone. And about 1/3 of the furnishings are gone. What's left is lots of floor space, lots of blank canvas.

The reason I think that staging should be required is that it sews up the seller. If you go through this elimination process, you invest time and then cannot imagine bringing the old stuff back home. So, you're committeed to sell. Good for realtors.

In the meantime, we are clearing to the level of the photo above. And getting ready to tackle the garage. Oh, my.

12 February 2010

What can you get for $2 anymore?

For an incredible $2/hour, you can get play care. (Get it? Play care instead of day care.) It's for your dog: off-leash outside play with other dogs. That's not so common in the kennel world. I decided on the facility even before I knew the price. When I saw this photo on the web site, I laughed out loud and called them immediately.

For the record: I receive no compensation from the Paw Spaw for mention of the facility. In fact, I give the Paw Spaw money (for letting Sherman attend play care).

08 February 2010

Self-Storage: An Urban Tale

In my growing up years, putting something in storage meant taking it out to a barn or a chicken house. (Most things never came back out, which is just as well. I can conjure up the dust now, 40 years later.) My experience with commercial storage was limited to taking wool coats to a cleaners for seasonal storage. I stopped that during college. And then I went a long, long time before I needed to seek out a storage place other than my attic or garage. That time was last week.

My inexperience was obvious. I had to ask elementary questions like, "what kind of items need to go into climate controlled storage?" It finally wasn't the temperature factor that made me select two inside units, it was the agent's explanation that anything in an outside unit ends up collecting a lot more dust. More than your garage at home. Well, there's that dust issue again.

After a round of Internet comparison shopping, I visited a single self-storage facility and latched on to two small units with "first month free" rather than a large, full-priced unit. Did I visit the facility that looked like the best deal (from the Internet)? Nope. I went to the one that is most convenient to our grocery store and dog park. Familiar path and maybe an efficient path.

And what did I learn? To get two locks (for two units) that use the same key. And to label boxes with boring codes. You see, the manager once lost some valuable items in a storage facility because she carefully printed "Antiques" on selected boxes. Those were the only boxes the thieves took. (At a far-away facility, not mine, of course.)

The self-storage business is down a little due to the economy but holding its own as people preserve their house stuffs even if they are between houses. Baby boomers will help this industry in the next few years as retirement and relocation decisions increase in number.

05 February 2010

Where would you live if...

Even though our mobile society is not so mobile anymore, retirees are. And the leading boomers who officially retire in 2011 (if they're not already out of their jobs due to lay-offs) will make us all look mobile even if only a fraction of them start traveling or moving. They will also talk about it more than most people do....

So, the #1 question becomes, Where would you live if you could live anywhere? Some typical answers are back home, where family is, and where it's warm.

Tom Bold and I chose the climate route with a sub-answer of where it's warm on the way to where family is. But there's another sub-answer and Tom gets credit for articulating it.

"You know, we've always had two priorities for neighborhood. We sure don't, now."

Those priorities were quality of schools (that affected one of our home purchases) and length of the commute to work (that affected all of our home purchases, four of them). Now? Except for a very slight interest in resale value, and I'll emphasize slight, we don't much care about the schools. The commute to work is even less of a consideration. Commuting now centers on Internet access, not road access.

One commute is of interest: number of minutes it takes to reach an off-leash dog park. Happily, with 18 dog parks, the greater Las Vegas area can be called dog-friendly.

What drives us, then, toward a neighborhood choice? So far, it's what is missing that calls to us: sidewalks. The best morning walks with a dog happen off pavement. So, it's just possible that the house hunting will be defined by concrete.

01 February 2010

Looking for Neighborhoods

Visiting a potential next community means learning about neighborhoods as much as looking at houses. So, when a realtor says, you don't want to live over there... well, that's where you end up at the end of the day.

As I drove through that not-recommended neighborhood of Las Vegas, I found myself saying, How bad can it be? There's an Olive Garden.

29 January 2010

Retirement Flexibility: Every day is like...

Lots of retirees say, "every day is like every other day" to describe availability for, well, just about everything.

Today, Tom Bold and I reached one of those days. We left home on a trip to look at a possible relocation city to escape wintry weather. And we ran into wintry weather.

It took only a few minutes to pull out the map and re-route our travel along a warmer route. (Same destination but different driving hours, to be sure.)

What did we learn?

First, we were able to re-route without a concern because we could easily (easily!) reschedule our activites. No "must-be-back" worries (as long as I reserve 2/3 of the day to maintain my work schedule, combining on-the-road computing with in-the-hotel computing).

Second, the events of the day underscored our purpose. Escaping wintry weather.

25 January 2010

Three Realtors on Staging

I put on shoulder pads for the realtors. Not Bea Arthur shoulder pads, but shoulder pads nonetheless.

I also stripped the house of clutter and (most of) personal paraphernalia. I knew I could not reach the level of "staging the house" but I desperately needed to communicate that I knew the basics even though I do not.

Our three prospective realtors made these comments about staging.

Realtor #1: Well, you might try hanging a decoration on the front door.

Realtor #2: To price the house where I want it to be, you'll need to hire a stager. That's $3000 to $5000 depending on what they have to bring in.

Realtor #3: We pay the stager. She works for us.

All three said the barn door hangers could stay in the house. I'll explain that another day.

22 January 2010

Transition Decisions

It's one thing to talk about making this year a transition year for retirement and relocation. It's another thing to start casting the talk as decisions. Any one thing can take you to the point of making decisions. For me, it was seeing 3 realtor appointments lined up for one very busy afternoon.

The appointments in question are with realtors in our current town. Why even visit potential next towns if we aren't sure the current house can be sold? That's a new concept for us. All previous moves (into 4 houses across 30 years) were prompted by employment decisions. So, moving was a next step—not an initial step.

Our old concept also involved an important assumption: of course, our house would sell. All houses sold. We were part of the mobile society. Just as we needed to move for employment, others were doing the same. And a goodly number were coming to the place we were leaving. The longest we ever waited for a sale was 5 months. And that was the darkest house we ever had. And that's what potential buyers always said... it's just too dark. Two price drops later, it wasn't too dark.

Of course, this year is different. We make no assumptions about all houses having buyers. The Great Recession is a major reason. But there's another: our society is not so mobile anymore and that slow-down occurred long before our current economic ills. Our society is aging (thanks to us boomers) and when that happens, people just don't move around as much. So, society is less mobile and actually Tom Bold and I haven't made a cross-country move in more than 20 years.

Lucky for us, our daughter told us about HGTV. Now, of course, I knew that such a cable channel existed. (I'm not sure that Tom Bold knew but, after all, this is the man who made it to 2006 before he saw his first 10-minute Oprah segment.) I just had never tuned in to the house shows.

Let me tell you. I am now educated. I know about unsellable houses, interventions (different sort than I knew about before), getting it sold (they don't even have to explain the it because everyone knows what isn't selling), and staging. Oh, my, staging is quite the rage.

We have transformed from the mobile society to the staging society.

18 January 2010

Transition Questions

Transition year. Some of the leading boomers—born 1946 and not yet officially at retirement age—are transitioning to retirement by choice or lay-off. The old prediction was that when the leading boomers retired in 2011, the economy would slow and all of the U.S. would begin to feel the effects of this life stage of the big cohort. But instead of causing a change in the economy, boomers are responding to one. With the Great Recession, net worths dropped, careers ended before anticipated, and (for some) bankruptcy loomed due to mortgage foreclosure.

So, 2010 is a different transition than we imagined. The standard questions were supposed to be:
(a) What date should we set for the last day at work?
(b) How should we re-balance the 401K?
(c) When should we move to the perfect climate?

For Tom and me, those questions are replaced with:
(a) How will we bridge health insurance from now to Medicare?
(b) Does our house value allow us to make a move?
(c) Is a retirement location's cost-of-living more important than climate, now?

So? COBRA ends soon and we'll move on to private insurance or high risk pool. We don't know how house values have held up in our neighborhood but we'll talk to realtors soon. And cost-of-living must be balanced with climate... but climate remains important.

15 January 2010

Transition before Event. Of course.

A demographer would have spotted it... I didn't until I got right up to the edge.

For the past decade I have pegged 2011 as a turning point year. That's because it's the year that the country's first official baby boomers reach the classic retirement age and presumably make decisions that will affect the whole of society simply by nature of their numbers. I'm not in that cohort but Tom Bold is, so I have had a personal perspective on the upcoming turning point.

You've no doubt realized what I'm writing about today. The transition never starts in the event year. It starts a year before, or even more. So, of course, the first boomers are already unemployed (if not officially retired), already moving, already realigning insurance of all types, and already moving their money.

Granted, the Great Recession prompted and accelerated some of these things. But a goodly number of the decisions we are now making are the 2011 decisions. Transition begun.

21 December 2009

The Sister Cruise: With Perspective

The Sister Cruise (nothing institutionalized, just 4 boomer women taking a cruise together) was a test in patience last week. Fog delayed our departure by 24 hours but before the Coast Guard and Carnival decided on that delay, we sat in the Mobile (Alabama) Civic Center for 7 hours. We finally bailed to Holiday Inn without waiting for the cruise line-arranged hotel discount. That was good because we paid $88/room and at least some who waited for the arranged room paid $130 (same hotel).

Our shortened cruise to Cozumel was cloudy. Not a problem for us: we preferred the beach without sun. And with a partial refund promised, The Sisters were satisfied that the salvaged cruise would suffice.

Ah, we spoke too soon. Our Fun Day at Sea back to Mobile saw 12' to 15' waves and 50 mph winds. Part of the crew became ill. Lots of passengers were ill. Two Navy sailors near us felt ill, too.

One Sister was particularly aware of the clock and reported that the waves quieted at 3am, about 4 hours before our scheduled docking.

Of course, we didn't dock on schedule. The Coast Guard had closed the channel again—due to bouys blown out of position. More patience as we waited for the all clear.

You might think that we would wish for a different week for the cruise, like this week with its beautiful weather at sea and at the ports. The question is put in perspective with one fact about the cruise following ours: 900 children on board. That makes our experience on The Sister Cruise a tad more tolerable.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

18 December 2009

YO-YO: You're on your own

YO-YO (you're on your own) joins another favorite, YMMV (your mileage may vary), as watchwords for the holidays. These advisories may be uttered best in more gentle language but I think of them as initials before crafting the more congenial translations of "You can make your own choice for lunch and then we'll plan a joint meal for dinner" and "If you'd rather not go to the movie/mall/museum with us, maybe you can think of something you'd enjoy more."

Family holidays!

14 December 2009

Carry a big stick

Sometimes Sherman finds whole branches on the ground. There is tremendous noise as he drags them through his flap door. And we feel compelled to let him keep them in the house for an hour or so because, after all, we have favorite leisure pursuits, also.

11 December 2009

DIY Dog Wash: $6 Soapings

You know the DIY car washes where you are wise to bring your own quarters rather than rely on the change machines? Well, think smaller. We now have dog washes. For a mere $6 you can soap up a canine and try to rinse him off. If you think that $6 is a lot to pay for a bath, then you haven't ever paid a dog groomer for the service. Truth told, Tom Bold and I did not soap up the dog. We actually came to see the "dog park" that a trainer told Tom about. The park is not really a park. It is a commercial establishment (the dog wash) in Colleyville, Texas, with two play yards. One for big dogs and one for small dogs. The big-dog yard has a nice set of structures for an agility course. I'm impressed with the wisdom of the entrepreneur because we will eventually make it back for a $6 DIY soaping. It's that platform that is attractive. And the ramp up to it. And access being possible by two or more humans.

07 December 2009

New SF Favorite: Hotel Milano

I landed in San Francisco last month for a conference and ended with a hotel night on my own tab. It's usually a good idea to leave the conference hotel when the expense account ends. A happy discovery was Hotel Milano, just off Market and literally at the end of the block of the Westfield Mall.

Rooms are neat, clean, and big enough when you're upgraded. (I am not sure of the size of the intended smaller unit.) Internet access was fine and the view of neighboring buildings no worse than any other San Francisco hotel. For convenience to the Westfield, movies, and the Apple store, the Milano cannot be beat—because its room rent is low. I paid under $100.

I made a similar shift in lodging for a subsequent conference in Atlanta. I stayed in the conference hotel for one night (because I was scheduled to receive one night's lodging on expense account) and then moved to a less costly motel on my own dollars. That would be a drop from $190 per night to $50 per night. You've already guessed it: Motel 6 with AAA discount.

04 December 2009

Personal Technology: Beach Advisory

Even when the Wave (Google's new email-conversation software) isn't operating, I learn from it. Chillax. The contraction for chill out and relax. With this sort of advisory from my email provider, I am reminded that life is all about chillaxing.