At Apprise Wealth Management, we want to help people make better decisions about money. We also read constantly and like sharing some of the commentaries we enjoyed reading the most each week.
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Here are this week’s articles as well as a brief description of each:
1. Time to Choose. Early November marks enrollment season for many employer health plans, Medicare and plans offered through the health care exchanges. You can have as short as a few weeks or as long as a month to review your plans and update your elections. Oftentimes, we wait to the last minute or simply retain our past coverage. However, plan provisions, pricing, family circumstances, and health status can all change from year-to-year. This makes it important to review your options and assess what coverage is best for the coming year. This post provides 10 helpful tips to guide you through the process.
2. When by Daniel H. Pink (Book Summary). This post summarizes Daniel Pink’s book When, which provides insights into the times during our day that may be best suited to particular activities. For example, most of us are at our peak in the morning. As a result, mornings can be the best time for analytic work as it requires the most sharpness, vigilance, and focus. Later in the day, when we are in the recovery phase may be the best time for us to do our most creative work as it requires less inhibition and resolve. Here Mr. Pink also speaks about the need to take breaks and how we can make them more replenishing:
- Something beats nothing
- Moving beats stationary
- Social beats solo
- Outside beats inside
- Fully detached beats semi-detached
3. No One is Crazy. Oftentimes, we criticize others for making decisions that we think are foolish. However, we may not know what the people making those decisions are thinking. In reality, while a lot of decisions are statistically wrong, they may be intuitively right for the person making them. An example would be buying lottery tickets. Those who have the least amount of money often spend the most. When you buy a ticket, you are essentially paying for a dream. Those who are well off may already be living a dream. Although the long odds still make the decision to purchase a lottery ticket a bad financial choice, the purchase can still be right for the person buying the ticket. While none of us may be crazy, there are times we all justify our decisions based on poor reasoning. Remembering this may help us gain better insights into why people make the decisions they do.
4. How IoT Can Help With the Aging Population Problem. A few weeks ago, one of the articles we highlighted discussed how increases in life expectancy can potentially impact our retirement planning. This article shares some ways technology can enhance elder medical care. It highlights five potential benefits:
· Reducing Falls
· Promoting Medication Adherence
· Generation of data that can improve elder care experiences
· Help facilitate independent living
· the effect of social isolation. Loneliness can kill.
5. 8 Questions to Ask Someone Other Than “What Do You Do?” Do you ever feel awkward when you meet someone new and need to quickly build rapport? This can happen at networking events, industry conferences, charity events, dinner parties, and other social/professional situations. An easy question to ask is “What do you do?” However, asking that question might not be helpful when we are trying to build rapport with someone else. Perhaps, it might be better to avoid the subject of work altogether. Research shows we favor relationships where there is more than one context for connecting with the other person (or multiplex ties). Here are a couple of the questions the author suggests we ask instead (click on the article link to learn the others).:
· What excites you right now?
· Who is your favorite superhero?
· What’s the best thing that happened to you this year?
We hope you find the above posts of interest. If you would like to talk to us about financial topics such as your investments, creating a financial plan, college savings, or your retirement savings please fill out our contact form, and we will be in touch. We can schedule a call, a virtual meeting via Zoom, or a meeting at Apprise Wealth Management’s office in Northern Baltimore County.
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Phil Weiss founded Apprise Wealth Management. He started his financial services career in 1987 working as a tax professional for Deloitte & Touche. For the past 25+ years, he has worked extensively in the areas of financial planning and investment management. Phil is both a CFA charterholder and a CPA.
Located just north of Baltimore, Apprise works with clients face-to-face locally and can also work virtually regardless of location.