A few months ago, I spoke to the owner of a start-up company who was completely convinced that consumers do NOT trust their real estate agents to help them find service providers. He believed that agents were not the best group to help a home buyer secure all of the services they need to complete a transaction. He passionately believed that consumers believe that real estate agents are dishonest and do not have the best interest of their clients in mind.
While there is always room for service improvements, our fundamental premise is that consumers DO trust their agents to help them in every step of the transaction.
The GOOD NEWS? We were totally RIGHT! The Houston Association of REALTORS® took on the task of measuring consumers’ trust in their agent to find service providers for their clients. They reached out to nearly 8000 real estate consumers through their consumer research panel and found some fascinating results.
An overwhelming 95% of buyers that responded to the survey believe that their agent has their best interest in mind! They believe that their agents made it easier to find service professionals while saving money as well. Home buyers and sellers told us that their agents gave them viable many options of service providers to consider. 87% of those that are satisfied with the service provider recommendations they received are likely to recommend their REALTOR®. Importantly, 82% of home buyers and sellers believe that service provider recommendations are a key part of the REALTOR’S job.
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At United State Insurance Market Place (http://www.UnitedStatesInsuranceMarketPlace.com) we understand how medicaid and medicare works. As one of the leading insurance agents in the Medicare Supplement arena – we are here to help everyone who qualifies.
The program that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law has lasted 50 years. Medicaid has become part of the fabric of American life, medical safety net that serves the Americans who are least likely to get health care coverage from any other source.
A long list of laws have adjusted Medicaid in ways that form consistent trends, experts say. The most recent additions — currently in their comments period — may offer clues to where the program is headed next.
“In terms of the overall program structure, there are two interesting points. One has to do with a series of steps involving expansion of coverage for children, which took place over a period of years and ultimately provided a source of coverage for all children under the federal poverty limit,” says Penny Thompson, who left her post as deputy director for the Center for Medicaid and Shift Services in Baltimore in September 2014 and is now a consultant in Elliott City, Maryland.
“That’s made a big difference for low-income families,” Thompson continues. “Positive research shows that children in enrolled families are successfully accessing care, especially primary care, though there are pockets of concern—a lack of coverage for dental care, delays in getting appointments, problems accessing specialists—and a lot of local variation.”
In a similar way, Thompson says, Medicaid has incrementally added services for people with disabilities including home-based options for delivering services.
“In part because of strong and effective advocacy from the disability community, Medicaid has given people with disabilities options in supporting them outside institutions,” she says, adding that today, individuals receiving care are as apt to be getting home care as institutional care. “Dollars are split about 50/50.”
Thompson thinks that program expansion will continue, and that all U.S. states will eventually participate in that expansion, despite the political upheaval that currently surrounds it.
Caroline Pearson, senior vice president at Avalere Health in Washington, D.C., agrees.
“I think there will be full adoption, but it may take a decade to have the vast majority of states on board,” she says. “At the moment, there is so much anti-ACA and anti-Obama sentiment, and that is dominating the decision-making. The further you get away from the passage of the ACA, the more the politics will quiet down.”
Economics, she adds, will prevail.
“The fact is that there is a huge amount of federal money on the table to both insure citizens and grow the states’ health care economies,” Pearson says.
Even the states that are currently not participating in the full Medicaid expansion are finding ways to use federal money to pay for health care, Thompson says.
“Virtually every state, including those that have thus far rejected expansion, are engaged in productive and meaningful steps to promote quality, affect health care costs overall and deliver coordinated care,” she notes.
Even as Medicaid expansion takes root, however, states are looking for ways to shift costs away from their own checkbooks. Many states that have thus far rejected Medicaid expansion as a whole are using program waivers, essentially implementing customizable approaches to expansion.
“Medicaid has broad waiver authority to allow any sort of experimental programs in the states where it’s happening, and most of the states that have joined in the last six to 12 months have used waivers. They’re using the premium assistance model to enroll the expansion population into exchange plans and use the extra money to subsidize that,” Pearson says. Montana, too, is working on expanding and is in negotiations with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services for a waiver that would give the state more cost-sharing flexibility.
Even the states that have fully accepted Medicaid expansion are customizing their approaches to shift some costs onto beneficiaries.
“We’ve seen a flurry of waiver requests that would allow for charging people premiums, incentivize healthy behaviors, put in work requirements, or put in health savings accounts. That’s a change from the status quo,” says John Holahan, an institute fellow specializing in health care economics at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
Because Medicaid expansion gives beneficiaries higher income limits, some recipients may be able to afford deductibles or copays, an expense that states are happy to let them shoulder.
“As Medicaid expands and covers slightly higher-income adults, those people look like they could contribute more financially and maybe don’t need a full menu of services,” Pearson says. “Medicaid used to be mostly for kids and disabled adults, and we didn’t expect them to do much for themselves. It was incredibly generous and mostly free. As you start to fill the program with people who have more independent means, there will be a lot of questions. As we move toward universal coverage, how do you create a fair sliding scale in terms of cost assistance and scope of benefits?”
Many states also see managed care for Medicaid recipients as another cost-cutting measure, a trend that will probably continue.
“States are moving out of the business of trying to run a health care program; they will rely on private plans to do that,” Pearson says. “Everything about how the rest of us get our health insurance and deal with health plans will start to apply in Medicaid.” But there is currently little federal oversight for managed care Medicaid, a deficit Pearson thinks will eventually change by adding more beneficiary protections into Medicaid rules.
Managed care may also make it easier for Medicaid recipients to move from government benefits to the insurance marketplace as their economic situations improve.
“It’s good for recipients to have available, both in the marketplace and via Medicaid,” Thompson says. “Now that we have the ACA subsidizing policies, you might have a family where the kids are covered under Medicaid and the parents are covered under an exchange plan, or a family is covered under Medicaid today and their income increases so they move to the same plan in the marketplace. As incomes change, people may not have to disrupt the delivery of care for people who are sick.”
That consistency of care is important, she adds.
As states change the face of Medicaid, though, it’s important that they don’t lose sight of the program’s original intent, Thompson says.
“On the one hand, in a lot of respects, Medicaid is a payer like other payers, and it covers a lot of people who might otherwise be covered by individual or employer plans,” she says. “On the other hand, Medicaid covers people with lower incomes, disabilities and long-term care, so less cost sharing is possible. Some states want to have more of a focus on cost sharing, because they think it’s useful for people to get used to paying something. That way they understand that there are out-of-pocket expenses when they move to another payer. They still need to be extremely sensitive to the fact that any copay for people in poverty can prevent them from getting the care that they need.”
By the same token, it’s important that states not drop benefits that are important to the poorest benefit recipients. “Non-emergency transportation is something you won’t find in a regular plan, but it can be very significant to a low-income person in helping access care,” Thompson adds.
Despite all these changes, Medicaid probably isn’t going away, at least not any time soon.
“Unless Republicans take over the presidency and both houses of Congress, I don’t think the basic structure will change,” Holahan says. “Sixteen million people get coverage through Medicaid, and it would be very difficult to replace.”
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We’re still in a housing crisis survey reveals
A new study reveals that 81 per cent of Americans believe that the housing affordability crisis in on the rise. More than two-thirds of respondents in a national survey by the MacArthur Foundation say that it is more challenging to find affordable housing now than for previous generations.
Just 29 per cent believe that the housing crisis is over and 76 per cent say that it is important that their elected leaders in Washington take action to address the situation.
The majority (60 per cent) believe that owning a home is an excellent long-term investment.
One area that has recently been named the metro with the highest level of underwater homes is also far above the national average for concern over affordability and putting household budgets under extreme pressure.
Almost half (48 per cent) of adults in Chicago – 40 per cent in the suburbs – are spending at least 30 per cent of their income on housing costs. Nationally that is the case for 31 per cent of adults.
Almost half (47 per cent) of Chicago residents believe that the city is in the midst of a housing crisis; 26 per cent expect it to get worse. In the suburbs, 54 per cent believe they are in the middle of a crisis with 12 per cent expecting greater pain ahead.
Builders more confident for single-family homes market
Confidence in the market for newly-built single-family homes has risen this month. The National Association of Homebuilders housing market index in conjunction with mortgage lender Wells Fargo, shows a 2 per cent rise in June.
“Rising home sales, an improving economy and the fact that the HMI gauge measuring future sales expectations is running at an eight-month high are all positive factors indicating that the housing market should continue to move forward in the second half of 2016,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz.
The measures of sales conditions, expectation for sales in the next 6 months, and buyer traffic; were all higher.
Top Hispanic real estate pros named
Latino real estate professionals across America have been named in an annual report.
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, in association with Zillow, compiled the list of top millennial agents, top individual agents and for the first time also ranks agents by volume and gross commission income.
“With a strong surge in Hispanic homeownership, it was an outstanding year for new homebuyers and the real estate professionals who served them,” said Joseph Nery, NAHREP President.
The top five agents were:
Claudia Restrepo, Keller Williams Realty The Legacy Group, WA
Mario Negron, RE/MAX Prestige – Houston New Home Team, TX
Marshall Carrasco, Marshall Realty, NV
Mark Dimas, Winhill Advisors, TX
William Bustos, Keller Williams Realty Utah Realtors – William Bustos Group, UT
Nominations for the Top 250 were received from numerous small and major markets, with Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami leading the way as the cities with the most submissions. For the second consecutive year, RE/MAX was the most highly represented brand with 61 agents on the list, followed by Century 21 with 38.
For more information about for the Hispanic Community – Click Here
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Employers display a wide range of opinions about the recent mergers of major health insurance companies.
Anthem, the country’s second largest health insurer, announced plans Friday to buy Cigna, the fifth largest. That follows news earlier this month that the third and fourth largest insurers, Aetna and Humana, would similarly merge.
“Large employers will have concerns about the merger between Anthem and Cigna because employers will be left with only three major insurers who can support large multi-state employers on a nationwide basis,” Brian Marcotte, president of the National Business Group on Health (NBGH), said in a statement. “Many large employers offer more than one national plan to provide employees with choice, cover provider network gaps and to have insurers compete on performance, strategy, cost management and innovation.”
Marcotte did not leave out the possibility of benefits for businesses looking to cut health costs, however, suggesting that more powerful insurance conglomerates might have more leverage in negotiating prices with providers.
The NBGH’s cautious approach in responding to the news appears to reflect the reality that businesses have different takes on the merger. A recent poll of 100 companies by Aon conducted shortly after the Aetna-Humana merger displayed the differences of opinion about the increasing consolidation of the insurance industry.
While 46 percent of companies believed mergers would result in “fewer health plan options for them and their employees,” 21 percent said it would result in cost efficiencies. A third said it would not have a great effect either way.
The mergers are part of a changing national health care landscape that has employers reassessing the plans they are currently offering their workers. Indeed, the Aon poll showed that 54 percent of companies are considering making changes to their plans in the near future, including shopping for a new vendor (38 percent) and supplementing traditional coverage with third-party vendor options, such as telemedicine (13 perc
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If you’re in the market for a new house, you may have considered a home with energy-saving features. And if your wish list goes beyond having a low-flow showerhead or two, you may have come across a few properties touting LEED certification. What exactly does that mean?
What is LEED certification?
LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a third-party program that certifies buildings and homes that have used green building or renovation methods to enhance energy efficiency and indoor comforts. This may include delivering clean indoor air, incorporating safe building materials, and using less water and energy in day-to-day operation.
What are the benefits?
One major appeal of a LEED-certified home is the focus on air quality. A home with this designation has been designed to maximize fresh air indoors and minimize exposure to pollutants and toxins.
Buying a green-certified home can also help you save on monthly utility bills. They’re built so you can comfortably cool and heat the space with minimal energy use — anywhere from 30 to 60 percent less energy than the same home built to industry standards.
Then there’s the potential satisfaction of knowing you’ve reduced your environmental footprint more than you would buying a conventional home.
What about the cost?
You might find that a LEED-certified home costs a bit more upfront, but your savings in energy costs can counteract that over time.
Social media can be a powerful means of announcing news, engaging people in a dialogue and establishing a company’s credibility with potential customers.
Nowhere is this opportunity more important, and nowhere is this summons to communicate less common, than among the majority of life insurance agents. These individuals may have their own accounts on Facebook and Twitter, among many other sites, or their respective employers may have official pages with tens of thousands of “likes” and “followers.”
Put aside, for a moment, how many of these so-called fans are real, as opposed to bogus accounts that give the appearance of national or even international popularity, and focus, instead, on the posts and tweets that these companies publish. That content – and its conflation of typing with writing, as if banging on a keyboard will produce beautiful copy – is often nothing more than a sentence fragment and a link to some promotional page.
Please note: As a fellow life insurance professional, I have no interest in bashing my industry or condemning my competitors because, despite what some outsiders may believe, our business is not a zero-sum game; there is plenty of room for growth, which is another way of saying that we can – and we must – compete fairly while we cooperate with one another fully.
That means individual agents and life insurance companies need to provide substance – news people can use – and style, written in a way that resonates with readers and amplifies your (or their) distinctive voice. Or, as I like to remind various groups on Twitter: “If you have something to say, then it is worth saying well.”
Start this conversation by asking questions. Find out what your current and prospective customers want to know, and give them answers that are both accurate and accessible.
Which leads me to my final point: Personalize your message – be a voice of reason, not a shouter of gimmicks and slogans – so readers can learn something of value about buying life insurance. And yes, that task requires you to devote some time (at least an hour per day) to writing material that is cogent, concise and complementary (on behalf of the longer, more in-depth content on your website).
These tactics work.
They work because they teach rather than preach. They work because they reflect the efforts of an author (or a group of authors) with a style that is authentic and responsive.
Gone are the passive reactions of the past, worsened by the automated production of posts and tweets that say little and accomplish even less.
By fulfilling this assignment, and by having a conversation with customers, social media can advance an agent’s visibility and enhance a life insurance agency’s credibility.
These benefits are too great to dismiss, and too plentiful to ignore. The insurance industry has the will – and the power – to transform social media for the better.
Now is the time to honor the promise of this medium, with knowledge, enthusiasm, wisdom and sincerity.
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When looking at a house and trying to decide on whether to go with a 2 car garage or 3 car garage, one must ask yourself – what is this going to cost me?
The typical garage cost is around $9000 so if you break this down over a 30 yr mortgage and figure that you are paying $6 for every $1000 that you finance, you will pay around $45 a month for that extra garage.
Is it worth is for you? How would this affect your car insurance?
Not only are Americans not saving more for retirement, one out of every 10 aren’t saving anything at all this year—and they didn’t last year, either.
That’s according to a new Bankrate.com report, which found that just 19 percent of Americans have actually managed to up the amount they’re putting away for their senior years. Fourteen percent are saving less, while 55 percent are grimly hanging on to save the same amount they did last year.
But that 10 percent who aren’t saving at all for retirement, and didn’t save last year, is the highest percentage seen since 2011.
Investing in yourself, improving your earnings, and refusing to be seduced by the marketing messages we all hear, plus some…
In 2011, some of the news was even worse: that 14 percent who are saving less this year were 29 percent then. That number has been going down steadily, albeit slowly; in 2012 it was 18 percent, and in 2013 it was 17 percent.
The number of those who are saving more is inching upward, too; in 2011 it was just 15 percent, while in 2012 and 2013 it was 18 percent.
Even though people are trying to save more, some are fighting an uphill battle; the Financial Security Index has fallen for the third month in a row, to 101.2. Although any number above 100 indicates improved financial security compared with a year ago, and the index has topped 100 every month since June of 2014, it’s hit its lowest level since last October.
People may be feeling a tad more secure about job security, but each of the other components that make up the index have fallen: savings, debt, net worth, and overall financial situation. And savings is actually deteriorating compared with a year ago.
Women are definitely suffering; their feelings of financial security have turned negative for the first time this year.
Men still score on the positive side, but they’ve tied their lowest positive reading of the year. And both sexes are saying that they feel less comfortable with their savings now, compared with where they were a year ago.
In addition, women’s comfort level with debt has also turned negative this month, for the first time since December 2014.
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The New York Times weddings section is renowned for its obsession with status, providing a window into what the world’s most self-important people deem to be important. Sex and the City references the section repeatedly, and many publications have taken to scrutinizing couples’ credentials over the years.
In 2013, I built Wedding Crunchers, a search engine for the express purpose of analyzing NYT wedding announcements, and published an exploration of trends across 35 years of what I dubbed “yuppie nuptials.” Three years after my first effort, if feels like an opportune time to revisit the analysis and take a look at some new trends. The data set now includes more than 63,000 wedding announcements dating back to 1981, and a lot has changed in the weddings section since then.
The latest data shows that:
The modern announcements focus less on debutante culture and more on people of diverse religious backgrounds.
The average age of the people in wedding announcements is increasing.
Technology plays a more prominent role: Many couples now meet online, and tech companies account for an increasing percentage of employers.
Some things remain the same — the omnipresence of the Ivy League, lawyers, and Wall Street, to name a few — but with the preamble out of the way, let’s dive in and see what we can learn.
Schools are the most common place to meet — but apps are on the rise
Schools are the most common place to meet — but apps are on the rise
The NYT only recently began including information about how couples met, whether in college, online, at SoulCycle, or by some other method. I extracted this “how they met” data from 702 announcements since August 2015 and assigned each announcement to a high-level category. Here’s how the meeting spots of the NYT wedding section break down.
Schools account for more introductions than any other category, with colleges outnumbering graduate programs by about a 2-to-1 ratio. The somewhat vague “met via mutual friends” comes in a close second, followed by online dating and what I labeled “happenstance,” which applies to announcements that say something like “they met at a bar” or, in one case, at Burning Man.
Schools where NYT couples meet
The “organized activity” label I created includes couples who met doing things like volunteering for political campaigns, playing in kickball leagues, or attending church. The “other” bucket is something of a catchall, including couples who were set up on blind dates, met at other weddings, or were childhood friends.
There are clearly some universities that dominate the wedding listings. Of the 188 couples who met at school, 15 met at Harvard, more than any other institution. On the right is the full list of schools that produced more than five couples.
Older couples are more likely to have met online or via mutual friends. I also parsed out age data for each individual, so I could make the same “how they met” graph for people in their 20s, 30s, and over 40.
How the couples met, by age
Based on 702 New York Times wedding announcements published since August 23, 2015
It’s interesting, if not surprising, to see how the frequencies change based on age group. Almost half of 20-somethings in the NYT weddings section met in school, compared with only 2 percent of the 40-plus demographic. As people get older, it’s more likely they met via mutual friends or online.
Tinder’s Wedding Section debut: Dating apps begin to make their mark
I was curious which dating services were most frequently mentioned, so I took all the couples who met online and split them further by the particular services they used.
Online dating sites
Based on 87 New York Times wedding announcements published since August 23, 2015
OkCupid leads the pack, having introduced 39 couples, while Match and JDate follow with 16 and nine couples, respectively. Tinder and Hinge have four each, but their numbers might be limited by a selection bias. Phone-based dating apps are relatively new, so it’s nearly impossible that a couple who met online five years ago could have met using a phone-based app (though shout-out to Reverend Dennis Tinder, who officiated this 1988 wedding, cementing his status as the first “Tinder” appearance in the weddings section).
The “other” bucket includes a handful of dating services that appear in one announcement each, and some folks who met online even though they didn’t use a dating service. One recent couple met on Instagram, proving that even in the relatively staid world of the NYT, it can, and does, go down in the DM.
While Tinder and Hinge have each introduced four NYT couples, Tinder is winning a subtler competition for notoriety.
Whenever Tinder appears in an announcement, it requires no additional description, whereas Hinge is always referred to as “the dating app Hinge.” The implication is that of course people know what Tinder is, but maybe they’ve never heard of Hinge, much in the same way that Goldman Sachs is consistently described as the investment bank, while less notable companies are often “an investment bank.” Here are the relevant excerpts:
“introduced through Hinge, a dating service”
“introduced through Tinder in 2013”
“introduced through Tinder in February 2014”
“met in Houston through Tinder in 2014”
“met in Manhattan in 2013 via the dating app Hinge”
“introduced through the dating app Hinge”
“introduced in June 2014 through the dating app Hinge”
“introduced through Tinder in March 2014”
30-somethings are the new 20-somethings
People in the NYT Weddings Section have been getting older over time. Wedding announcements started including ages in 1989, when the median age was 27 for women and 29 for men. As of 2016, the median ages have increased to 30 for women and 32 for men. In 1989 you were twice as likely to see a 20-something in the weddings section as you were a 30-something, but as of 2016 the 30-somethings have taken over the majority, presumably to the chagrin of expectant grandparents throughout the tristate area:
30s are the new 20s
Based on 38,274 New York Times wedding announcements published since 1989
Same-sex couples are an exception to this trend: The median age of same-sex couples was 43 in 2011 and has since fallen to 35. But that might be an artifact of the legal process: When New York state recognized same-sex marriage in 2011, there was likely a backlog of older couples who would have been married years earlier had it been been allowed, and these older couples would cause the median age to skew higher shortly after the official recognition.
The words you’re most likely to see in a New York Times wedding announcement
Wedding Crunchers lets you search for words and phrases, then returns a graph that shows you how frequently they appear in weddings announcements. This is called an “n-gram analysis,” where the y-axis represents the average number of occurrences per announcement. So for example, if you see a y-axis value of 0.1 for a word, it means that word appears an average of 0.1 times per announcement.
NYT wedding announcements lend themselves nicely to n-gram analysis because they’re fairly consistently structured, including data on where people went to school, their job titles, who officiated the ceremony, and more. The special Vows articles are an exception: They are longer and don’t follow the standard announcement structure, so Wedding Crunchers specifically excludes Vows articles from n-gram results. As of May 2016 there are 63,000 wedding announcements in the Wedding Crunchers database.
Is tech encroaching on finance’s status as the city’s “it” profession?
New York is widely known as the financial capital of the United States, if not the world, and it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of married folks work in the financial industry. In more recent years, the city has grown its presence in the technology sector as well, embodied by Google pulling even with Goldman Sachs in NYT wedding announcement mentions:
Goldman Sachs versus Google
There are, of course, of more scientific ways to compare NYC’s tech and financial industries beyond cherry-picking wedding announcement mentions for two particular companies. Employment and wage data might be good places to start, but I’d argue that NYT wedding mentions get at something core to New York City’s prestige-obsessed culture that would be difficult to quantify with traditional employment data alone.
Put another way: I doubt that people explicitly choose jobs by asking themselves, “What would look best in my future NYT wedding announcement?” But I’d also suspect that the answer to that question is highly correlated with people’s actual decisions, at least for the people who end up in the weddings section.
So although Google and Goldman Sachs are just two companies among many, the fact that Google appears as frequently as the most prestigious investment bank suggests that at least a certain brand of tech company now rivals investment banks for prestige.
Startups are on the rise, too, though lest we get ahead of ourselves, they’re still only a tiny blip on the radar compared with law firms and banks, the most traditional of all NYT wedding professional institutions:
Startups are still minuscule relative to law firms and banks
Planet of the Apps
It seems like everyone is hawking a mobile app these days, and NYT wedded couples are no exception. Instances of “mobile apps” and related phrases shot up beginning in 2013, surpassing “social media,” which apparently is so first-half-of-the-decade:
Apps have surpassed social media
Trends come and go, and there are plenty of people questioning the near-term outlook for tech companies, but it’s amusing to look back on the proliferation and subsequent retrenchment of “internet” mentions circa 2000:
Tech bubble 1.0
Religious diversity is on the rise, but politically the weddings section is bluer than ever. One of the big themes of my previous analysis of the wedding announcements was the increase in ethnic diversity from the 1980s through today. That trend has continued, as encapsulated by more mentions of Hindu ceremonies alongside fewer Episcopalian ceremonies:
Changing demographics of the NYT weddings section
There’s also a trend toward having friends officiate weddings, as evidenced by mentions of Universal Life ministers and American Marriage Ministries. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a rejection of organized religion by the younger generation, but it does seem like reverends and rabbis have lost a bit of market share in the past decade:
Friends are officiating more marriages compared with religious leaders
Politics is one area where announcements aren’t getting more diverse. Political party names show up in announcements when someone works for a campaign, or is a politician or the child of one. I noted last time around that Republican mentions actually outnumbered Democrat mentions in the early 1980s, but over the past decade the ratio has favored Democrats by a nearly 3-to-1 ratio:
Democrats and Republicans
At least in the world of NYT weddings, peak Trump occurred in 2006. Upon closer inspection, about a quarter of all “Trump” mentions were actually for Donald’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and had a handful of clerks whose announcements made the weddings section.
Same-sex marriage is ditching old euphemisms
The NYT began publishing announcements for gay couples in 2002, some nine years before same-sex marriage was recognized by New York State. Initially, same-sex announcements used euphemistic phrases like “affirmed their partnership” and “commitment ceremony” instead of the traditional “married” language. But over time, and especially now that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, same-sex announcements began to use the same language as opposite-sex announcements, so we see the euphemisms in decline:
Legalization of same-sex marriage
Since 2011, when New York state recognized same-sex marriage, same-sex couples account for about 10 percent of all announcements. Interestingly, men outnumber women by about 3 to 1 in same-sex announcements.
A 2013 report from the Pew Research Center found that “female-female marriages outnumbered male-male marriages in every reporting jurisdiction except New York City,” so at least one plausible explanation for the same-sex gender imbalance in the NYT is that there are more gay men than gay women getting married in NYC.
Women earn more Latin honors than men
Another area in which men and women are not equal in the NYT weddings section: Latin honors. I’ve seen headlines before about how girls tend to do better in school than boys, and the weddings section supports the claim, as women graduate cum laude more often than men do:
Cum laude Latin honors
The trend holds for magna cum laude mentions as well, though the genders are pretty much equal for summa cum laude graduates.
“Eyebrows on the same level”: Calculating the most perfect NYT wedding photo
(Shutterstock)
The NYT’s rules for submitting a wedding announcement specify that photos should include couples with “their eyebrows on the same level and with their heads fairly close together.” Some friends of mine were recently featured in the weddings section despite a rather nonconforming photo, which, believe it or not, came up as a topic of conversation at the morning-after brunch.
My contribution to the discussion was a promise to use the Wedding Crunchers database to determine the most conforming photo of all time. I ran every wedding photo through a face detection algorithm to extract coordinates for facial landmarks, then ranked the photos based on how level each couple’s eyes and eyebrows were, plus how close together their heads were.
Finally, we can all stop wondering: The most perfectly conforming NYT wedding photo of all time belongs to Tyler Davidson and Hilary Burt. Congratulations!
Remember, you can run your own searches at WeddingCrunchers.com, and be sure to share your favorite trends!
by Todd Schneider on May 31, 2016
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While some (very few) industry experts say there’s little or nothing to fear on the retirement front, deep down inside we all know it’s not true.
How else to explain how worried everyone is about retirement?
Insecurity on the job (or a complete absence of employment), low and frozen salaries, high expenses and unpredictable markets have thrown people into a tizzy over how they’re going to afford to retire, or how they might be able to cheat their retirement demons by continuing to work.
Why, it’s enough to give a person gray hair (assuming they don’t have it already).
And now a new report from the National Association of Government Defined Contribution Administrators, Inc. (NAGDCA) has provided a whole host of statistics that is just about guaranteed to strike terror into the heart of anyone who’s ever contemplated retirement — even as an intellectual exercise.
It certainly has done so for them; here’s their opening sentence: “The unfortunate state of Americans’ financial preparedness for retirement is well-documented, and may be summed in two words: NOT READY.” (Bold caps theirs, by the way.)
One thing they’re super-worried about is the looming disaster of health care costs for retirees — something that they say nobody is ready for, and that most people don’t even seem to realize will become a major problem.
We’ve pulled out 10 statistics from NAGDCA’s report that seem to us to rank pretty high on the nightmare list.
We offer them here for your delectation — and to keep you awake at night when you need to stay alert and figure out how to get more money to pay those senior bills.
1. 22 percent
Just 22 percent of workers are very confident they will have enough money in retirement, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s 25th annual “Retirement Confidence Survey.”
2. 45 percent
According to recent Congressional testimony, 45 percent of Americans have saved exactly nothing — zero, zip, nada — toward retirement.
In fact, although lots of higher-net-worth folks have — and use — retirement accounts, those on the lower end of the spectrum are truly ill-prepared to venture forth into retirement.
Said the testimony, “Overall, the average working household has little to nothing saved for retirement. The median retirement-account balance is only $3,000 for working-age households and only $12,000 for households approaching retirement. In two-thirds of working households with earners between ages 55 and 64 years, at least one earner has saved less than one year’s income for retirement.”
3. Not seen since the Great Depression
According to the report, that’s the magnitude of the financial challenges that will be faced by upcoming retirees — the first generation since that terrible time to do so.
Image: Three men stand in front of the dispensing kitchen of the Greater New York Philanthropic Society where penny meals, that are quite substantial, are served to the hungry, in New York, Aug. 3, 1932. The soup kitchen has been functioning since 1908 and is supported by private contributions. (AP Photo)
4. 20 years beyond age 65
That’s the expected additional lifespan of a woman of 65 — two years longer than a man — but it’s likely to bring her a lot of financial grief.
Women will face even greater challenges than men (see No. 3) because a) they live longer and b) they make less.
Add to that the fact that, according to Department of Labor statistics, they’re more likely to have worked “part-time jobs that don’t qualify for a retirement plan or interrupt their careers to take care of family members, resulting in lower retirement plan savings.”
Despite being diligent savers when they do have access to retirement accounts, the fact that women are not inherent risk-takers works against them in the market, driving down returns on their savings (although they will, of course, have larger balances than men who take crazy risks and lose everything — just not large enough balances to live on for another 20 years).
5. One out of six
Just one in six employers offers health insurance coverage to retirees these days.
And that’s a Very Big Deal, since the costs of health care in retirement make up the bulk of our list.
In days gone by, when employers provided defined contribution plans (remember those?) that paid a steady fixed pension every month, they also frequently offered health coverage to people who had spent a good chunk of their lives at the firm growing the business.
But no more. Now health insurance coverage during retirement can be summed up in one word for most people: Medicare.
Some lucky ones have six words: Medicare and long-term care insurance. But if not, you’re on your own when disaster strikes.
6. $220,000
That’s how much the average 65-year-old couple can expect to part with over the next 20 years in out-of-pocket costs for health care, thanks to not having any insurance to pick up the tab.
That’s $220,000 more that you’ll need to retire — and that’s if you don’t get hit with some kind of catastrophic illness or injury.
That’s the projected annual growth rate for health care spending through 2022.
Assuming a standard retirement projection based on withdrawing 4 percent per year to live on during retirement — so that you don’t touch the principal and have enough to live on for the rest of your life — where does that leave you?
You do the math. Sure you can. Use a calculator.
8. 62 percent
That’s all the average retiree can expect Medicare to pay of his health care expenses, once it finally kicks in.
Congress decided when it passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 that it was going to beat back whatever it could of the program’s budget-deficit projections by mandating “various cost-containment measures,” said the report. “For the most part, the savings accrue to the federal government.”
Yep, that’s right. The government, which has the freedom to bring in more money via higher taxes and other means.
Not to you — and you can’t raise your retirement income, short of going back to work. So you’ll have less to spend on other things, like food and that roof over your head.
9. 38 percent
That’s how much of your medical expenses you’ll have to pay when you file a claim with Medicare.
In case you’re wondering how your medical expenses will shake out, the report very kindly broke them down as follows: 23 percent for out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses; 32 percent for Medicare premiums for parts B and D; and — the whopper — 45 percent for Medicare copays, cost sharing, and deductibles.
10. $200,000+
Remember we mentioned long-term care insurance?
Well, if you don’t have it and it turns out you need it, the figure immediately above is what you could end up paying for a single year in a skilled nursing facility (read “nursing home”) or a high-end assisted living facility (particularly if costs continue to escalate).
How does that fit into your retirement budget?
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