Can You Use Your Healthcare Insurance Overseas?

Can You Use Your Healthcare Insurance Overseas?

It’s open enrollment season right now, and this is the time to review (among other things) your healthcare insurance. Whether you are an employee of a company providing insurance benefits, a retiree ensured through Medicare, or an individual or family utilizing private insurance through the ACA (Covered California in our state), you will probably be…
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Is Your Variable Annuity Worth Keeping?

Are you holding a variable annuity (VA) that you purchased some time ago from an enthusiastic insurance salesperson? It behooves you to periodically review it to see if its purpose, cost, and value are still aligned with your financial goals. Below are some steps you can take to better understand what you bought and whether…
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Credit Freezes Are Now Free

Under a new federal law passed on September 21, 2018, you can now freeze and unfreeze your credit files at no cost at each of the nationwide credit reporting agencies – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. This new law additionally requires the credit agencies to allow extended fraud alerts up to one year (vs. the current…
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Is Financial Abuse a Health Issue?

Yes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which last year identified senior financial abuse as a public health hazard.  Defined as fraud, breach of personal trust, poor investment advice, or improper use of power of attorney, the CDC’s effort highlights the fact that an increasing portion of total American assets…
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What To Do About The Equifax Breach

As you probably have heard, nearly half of all Americans have had their most sensitive personal data stolen from Equifax, one of the country’s three credit reporting bureaus.  This is the biggest single data breach in American history, and we should all be very concerned about this situation.  Here are my immediate observations and suggestions,…
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Avoiding Tax Return Identity Theft

Now that tax-time is just around the corner, the IRS offers several warning signs that you may be a victim of tax-related identity theft and what to do about them: Your attempt to file your tax return electronically is rejected. You get a message saying a return with a duplicate Social Security number has been…
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