FINANCIAL HOUSEKEEPING | Compare your health insurance options
Whether you are looking at different health care choices offered by your employer, deciding which spouses’ health plan you want to rely on or shopping for new health coverage, comparing plans can be difficult and tedious.
The Evaluating Health Insurance Choices Worksheet – developed by the National Endowment for Financial Education and the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University – solves that problem, allowing a consumer to look at a plan and make a checklist of what each plan offers. When the two plans have been sized up, the worksheet makes for easy side-by-side comparison.
You can get directly to the worksheet form by setting your Web browser to: healthinsuranceinfo.net/nefe/worksheet.pdf
SHORT COURSE | Payday loans
A payday loan – often called a “cash advance” – is a small-dollar, short-term loan made without a credit check in order to bridge the borrower’s cash-flow gap between paychecks.
In general, these loans are $500 or less; when fees and interest rates are factored in, payday loans tend to be very expensive compared with other types of financing, including most credit card advances. The terms of a payday loan are critical, as they can determine just how easily the debt can be repaid, particularly if the cash-flow problem lingers for more than one pay.
Payday lending also is offered over the Internet.
