The Advisor

Investing a few hours to create and maintain a household budget may be the key to identifying opportunities to save more for the future, including for long-term goals such as retirement. Yet it's surprising how few households take the time to commit to a budget. Many financial experts recommend making time for this task, which could pay dividends down the road.
 
Get a Grip on Your Money

Finding the extra money to save is not always easy. The good news is that many families realize they spend money on nonessentials -- such as eating out and specialty coffees. These are expenses that can often be reduced with the aid of a budget. A budget may also help you reduce large expenses to make room for savings. For example, if your transportation costs are considerable because of a long commute to work, look into carpooling with a colleague or working at home periodically.  READ MORE

Most states don’t recognize small insurance companies as beneficial holders for required medical malpractice coverage. Couple this with the fact that most medical practitioners aren’t insurance experts, and the end result is that doctors have only a few (very similar, quite expensive) malpractice insurance options.  When it comes time to purchase or renew your medical malpractice insurance, you have three options:

*Retail Med-Mal: while this may seem like the simplest solution, it is also the most expensive. With zero returns on premiums paid, you are funneling your money into a “black hole” where, regardless of your claims history, you never see a return on reserves. In the event of a claim, you have little say so in your defense or the claims negotiation and settlement process.

*Normal Risk Retention Group: although an RRG is a step in the right direction, your medical group will sharing overall medical malpractice risks with other medical groups insured by the RRG. While you may get back some of what you put in (as a return on equity or a stock repurchase), the amount depends on the claims experience of the RRG’s insureds as a whole and the financial condition of the RRG at the time of your departure from the RRG. Under this approach, the medical group’s financial investment remains 100% in the RRG during the entire insurance coverage period.

*Physicians Benefit Resources Risk Retention Group: PBR RRG retains a small percentage of overall insurance risk (an average of ten percent) and therefore your group’s participation in shared risk with all of PBR’s insured medical groups remains small. Your initial one time equity buy in (6% of mature premium) is small for the reason that PBR’s retention of risk is small. PBR cedes off an average of 90% of overall risks into its reinsurance structures. The primary reinsurance structure is the reinsuring Captive Insurance Company (CIC) which is owned 100% by your medical group’s owners and only reinsures the physicians in your medical group practice. In the PBR RRG model, the majority of your medical group’s financial investment remains in its CIC, which will remain owned and controlled by the owners of your medical group.  READ MORE

This city’s young adults are among the most educated in the country, and its unemployment rate was 3^rd lowest in the nation for metropolitan areas in Oct, 2011. You may only drive 10 minutes to work or to outstanding cultural and sports events; yet can drive to Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis or Chicago in hours. Hearing the Husker fight song can cause an entire bar to erupt into cheers.

I am speaking, of course, of Lincoln, Nebraska. A little more left leaning than the rest of the state, the atmosphere in Lincoln, Nebraska is vibrant. Friendliness and tolerance abound. It consistently boasts rankings that make other cities drool:  READ MORE

Update: It now appears the House Republican leaders have decided to accept a short term deal.

The House rejected the Senate's temporary payroll-tax deal Tuesday, leaving no resolution in site going into the holidays.  

If Congress fails to act, this is what it means to you:

*160 million Americans will see a payroll tax hike averaging $1,000 for each taxpayer.
*2.5 million jobless workers will lose unemployment benefits.
*Doctors serving Medicare patients will face a 27.4 percent drop in federal reimbursements.   READ MORE

Looking for the ideal city to live and work? Welcome to Burlingame, CA … Where opportunity and a great life style intersects.

Imagine tree lined streets with intense fall color, the smell of coffee houses on a crispy morning coupled with the irresistible aroma of fresh European bakeries, the train connecting important areas running along an old station, people strolling along the main avenue with no urgency as if every day is a Sunday, delectable al fresco- lunches at an international gourmet restaurant, fine shopping, and all the conveniences of a big city in a cozy village and you are in Burlingame, my town.

Settled by wealthy San Franciscans looking for a better climate for their second homes, Burlingame is a city of old charm and a vibrant life. Perhaps its friendly layout for walking or riding a bicycle completes the romance and feel of a town that still resists the pressures of the big metropolis.

But, how did Burlingame evolve into what it is today and what can it offer to you?
The San Francisco Peninsula changed after the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. The area bordered by the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean south of San Francisco was rural in nature. Small farms, dairies, and little communities along the railroad dominated the landscape.  After the devastating events of 1906, many displaced residents of the city sought  a new beginning on the Peninsula, south of San Francisco and these little communities provided that opportunity.

Burlingame was one of these small towns that grew as a result of the new influx of residents and rapidly developed services for the growing population. Paramount among these services was health care. In 1907 civic leaders joined together to create Mills Hospital in Burlingame. As the community grew so too did the Hospital and the variety of services it provided.

To accommodate a new influx of people after WW II, a larger facility was needed. In 1954, the Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame was opened. Today Mills-Peninsula is one of the most respected medical complexes in California with modern facilities that attract medical professions from all over the country.  READ MORE

By Karen Weinstock, Attorney at Law

The H-1B cap has been reached or exhausted for government fiscal year 2012. New visas for cap-subject cases can be filed on April 1, 2012 for a start date on October 1, 2012, for government fiscal year 2013.

What happens now with medical organizations who wish to hire and doctors who wish to work during this year?

The good news for doctors is that many of them qualify for an H-1B for a cap exempt organization. The most common cap exempt organizations are higher education institutions and non-profit research organizations. Employees working for these organizations are not counted against the cap so doctors working for university hospitals and non-profit hospitals classified as research hospitals re exempt. However, doctors who work for a for-profit company that predominately services these cap-exempt organizations may qualify for an H-1B cap exemption. This is a very common scenario in physician practice. Many physicians work for private practice groups but they actually perform their services in hospitals that are either university hospitals or non-profit hospitals that may be classified as research hospitals and in that case those physicians can still claim their cap exemption and be granted H-1B status in the mean time, even though the visas are gone until October 1, 2012 for most of the population.

For additional questions, please call our immigration law firm at 866-644-0404.  READ MORE

I've been thinking about starting a stock market prediction business. Clearly, there is a huge demand for timely and accurate information of this type, and just as clearly, predicting the future is much easier than dealing with the realities of whatever is actually happening at the moment.

If investors could know what's going to happen next, they could develop a plan to deal with it in the present. Maybe Wall Street could help me get this new business up and running!

What's that? Wall Street institutions already spend billions predicting future price movements of the stock market, individual issues & indices, commodities, and hemlines. Really? Is that right also? Economists have been analyzing and charting world economies for decades, showing clearly the repetitive cyclical changes and their upward bias.

Funny then, or strange would be more accurate, that the advice generated by the oracles of Wall Street seems to assume that the current environment, good or bad, will be everlasting. Isn't it this kind of thinking and advising that prolongs the downturns and "bubbles" the advances---in all markets?

If it were true that our favorite pinstriped product pushers can actually predict the future, why would investors do what they do in response to the predictions? Why would financial professionals of every shape and size holler: "sell" at lower prices, and "buy at any price" when market valuations surge upward?

Shouldn't lower prices be the call to the mall?  READ MORE

By Stacie Strassberg, California Mortgage Advisors, Inc.

As if the sights and sounds of San Francisco weren't enough to keep visitors completely enthralled, Mother Nature invites you to drive just a few minutes north of the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge and into a suburban area that seems like the other side of the planet from downtown. It's the lifestyle and the landscape, the call of the mountain (Mount Tamalpais) the smell of the trees, the wide, open spaces and the bodies of water. It all combines to makes you want to hike, bike, kayak, fish, sail, surf, windsurf, and do all that good stuff that gets the body moving and mind mellowing. (Yes, mellow. This is also the County that coined the phrase, "have a nice day.") In Marin, even the climate is cooperative. There is a rainy season (sometimes it dips below 40 degrees during winter) but that gives way to lush flowers, fruits and vegetable gardens, even small wineries dot the backyards of Marin County. There's also the like-mindedness and culture and commerce, award-winning restaurants, farmer's markets and distinguished schools–– spread out over 10 distinct communities that make up Marin (total population 250,000.) It's all of the above (and so much more) that makes Marin County a destination, a place that will inspire you to live life fully, be happy and productive, raise a family, build a dream house––though conservation and renovation are the way of Marin since so much of this land of superlatives (where the Coast Miwok once flourished) is protected from growth.  READ MORE

This is a fantastic article that I just read this morning and wanted to pass on to all of you.  I take zero credit for it and encourage you all to click on the provided link to read the article in its entirety and then head back here to comment (or over to our Linkedin group for further discussion). 

The article is titled "How Doctor's Die" (click here for the full article) and was written by Ken Murray, MD (a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC).  After reading this, I once again encourage everyone to either leave a comment here or contribute in our LI group.  I am very interested to see what everyone has to say on the topic. 

Click "read more" to see the first two paragraphs.    READ MORE

By T. KEITH MANGRUM, MEDICAL GROUP INSURANCE SERVICES, INC.

You may have purchased individual disability insurance (IDI) early in your career, and like many other Physicians, you may have added Group Long Term Disability (LTD) insurance to supplement this income protection.  But not all LTD policies are alike!  Here are 10 things you don’t want to hear at claim time from a Group LTD claims examiner:

1.    “Your policy only defines your occupation as ‘medical doctor’”.  Find out if your LTD policy defines your occupation only as “M.D.” -- or is limited to just a few specialties -- instead of the comprehensive list of specialties/sub-specialties recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS).  “Occupation” is often defined very differently in IDI and LTD policies.

2.    “Your ‘material and substantial duties’ are NOT the specific procedures you were performing.” If you perform cutting-edge or experimental procedures, or your “specialty” is not currently recognized by the ABMS, then you may have difficulty qualifying as “disabled”.

3.    “We think you can be retrained as some other type of medical doctor.  If you refuse, we can reduce -- or even terminate -- your benefit”. Find out if “rehabilitation” or “retraining” is mandatory in your policy.  READ MORE