insurance

How We Established Our Own Business

August 22, 2011

In my post asking what you’d like to see me write about, two readers asked me to address the specifics of how my husband and I set up our home-based business, and I’ve also had numerous emails about this subject over the years.  So I’m going to lay out the basics of what we did, [...]

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Raising Our Deductible. Again.

June 26, 2011

When we first switched to an HSA qualified health insurance policy in 2007, we had a $3000 family deductible (our family back then was just my husband and myself).  In 2009, we raised our deductible to $5000 in order to reduce our monthly premiums, after a couple of years of rate increases.  Now we’re doing [...]

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The Cost Of A Car

August 15, 2010

In my last post, I mentioned that I’ve only driven my car 10,000 miles in the last three years.  A reader asked whether I’d considered getting rid of the car all together, and I thought that our conversation deserved its own post, in case some people had missed it in the comments section.  This was [...]

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My Thoughts On Cars

November 25, 2009

A reader emailed me a few days ago, asking for my thoughts on buying a car – so I figured I’d share.  I drive a 1991 Honda Civic wagon.  It has 218,000 miles on it, and has never once left me stranded on the side of the road.  Well, the muffler fell halfway off one [...]

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Getting A New Roof

February 24, 2009

I’ve mentioned several times that we need to replace our roof.  We had planned to do it ourselves, but the more we thought about it, the more we decided that might not be such a great idea.  One of the slopes of our roof is steep and two stories up, with nothing but the glass [...]

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How Many Financial Blows Could You Withstand?

February 13, 2009

A while ago my husband and I were discussing with my dad our plans to move to a less expensive town.  He was talking about how many financial blows a person can withstand, and how increasing that number should be a primary goal.  It resonated with me, and really made me think.  It’s part of [...]

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Lowering Our Health Insurance Premiums

December 30, 2008

We lowered our health insurance premiums, and our new bill starting in January will be $341/month.  It had gone up to $498/month as of November, and we decided it was time to increase our deductible.  By raising our family deductible to $5000 (it was $3000), we save ourselves $1884 in premiums for the year.  That’s [...]

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Raising Our Deductible

November 11, 2008

We got our annual health insurance premium increase this month, and we’re now paying $498/month for our health insurance.  I fondly remember 2003, when we were paying $110/month.  But since then we switched to an HSA qualified plan with a $3000 family deductible (as opposed to the $2500 per person deductible we had before), and [...]

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Health Insurance Deductible Scare

November 3, 2008

When I checked the mail late last night, we had an EOB from our health insurance company, saying that we were going to be billed $2600 for my husband’s recent knee surgery.  Holy smokes.  This was his second knee surgery this year, and we had met our $3000 deductible back in January when he had [...]

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A Credit Score Discount On Our Home Owner’s Policy

September 17, 2008

Back in January 2007, I wrote about a letter than I got from our home owner’s insurance company telling us that we weren’t getting their best rate because of our credit scores.  Last week, our insurance agent did an annual review with us, and I guess that our scores have gone up, because now we’re [...]

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