Hugh's Worthless Blog

WUSTL Family HMO Premiums 2004-2019 It is open enrollment time at good old Washington University , and for the first time I have switched from the HMO/EPO choice we have been using forever to the HDHP (high deductible health plan) that the university is offering and obviously pushing. The university is even contributing $800 each year to our HSA for the family plan ($400 for single plans), and with the EPO premiums now about 3.5 times the HDHP premiums ($475.79 vs $136.89) we decided it was time to switch.  Since I have been with the university over 15 years and they now store all our old paystubs on line, it was easy for me to extract the data to see how the family HMO premiums have increased over time. Back in 2004, the HMO premiums were only $189.75 per month which was less than 5% of my gross salary. For 2019 the $475.79 represents a 150% increase whereas my university salary has only increased about 70% over those 15 years. This now represents  almost 7% of my sa...

Well, they did it and we have a new tax bill signed and ready to go for our 2018 taxes. They had promised to try to simplify things, but as things often happen, the final result is not very simple at all. I have modified my online income tax deduction calculator to try to figure out the differences between the current 2017 tax structure and how it changes for 2018. The bottom line is even less households will be itemizing and most households (and corporations) will see a federal tax decrease in 2018. How the federal government will survive with such an increased deficit is another story, but most people are more concerned on how it will effect their own taxes. With the new expanded standard deduction, one thing I have noticed is that donor advised funds can be used very effectively to take advantage of the new rules. We have an account with the Schwab Charitable Fund , and we realized our best practice was to contribute a large chunk of highly appreciated equities this year to use...

The latest endowment numbers for the end of 2014 are in for all colleges, and it looks like everybody had a good year due to booming investment markets. Leading the pack as always is Harvard at almost $36 billion, up about $3.5 billion from last year. That means its endowment increased in value about the current total endowment of Ohio State or Johns Hopkins . If we look at local universities, Washington University saw a nice 17.5% increase to jump from $5.65 to $6.64 billion to remain the 17th wealthiest college endowment in the country. That means it increased in value about one billion dollars or a "SLU-worth", as Saint Louis University saw its endowment pop back up over the $1 billion point (#87 on the list), which it had not seen since before the market crash several years back. Another local university who saw a hefty increase was Lindenwood , who increased 17.4% to jump from $122 million to $143 million to have the 372nd highest endowment in the USA. All these...

UPDATE:  Well, that did not take long, the Obama administration has already decided they will leave 529 savings plans alone. So much for my previous post which is now no longer valid: Since I work in higher education and also have a son who is about to start college this year, I am always interested in the latest news regarding higher education. When President Obama announced the plan to allow everyone to receive two "free" years of community college , everyone was curious where the funds would come to pay for the plan. It appears the answer is by taxing withdrawals made by those of us invested in 529 college savings plans like the Missouri MOST plan . The idea is that earnings from the plans would be taxed when withdrawn, and those taxes could help fund the free community college plan. I was unaware that less than 3% of U. S. families have 529 accounts, and they are most heavily used by more affluent savers. I found a very interesting report from the General Accounti...

As a person who loves analyzing personal finance data , like the balance and interest paid on our mortgage, I am both excited but also sad to say we have just paid off the mortgage on our current house. We had actually paid off the mortgage on our previous home years ago, but after we bought our current residence several years ago, we decided to acquire another mortgage loan to cover some of the cost on our current, more expensive home. But now, after a few accelerated payments we have paid it off so we are again debt free.  The graph above shows the actual declining loan balance of our loan over time (pulled from a Google spreadsheet I developed) and the 4 sharp declining periods shows the 5 months when we had added large extra chunks of principal to our payments to accelerate the payoff of our loan. Two of those months are back to back (the last two) so that looks like one really big plunge where it is really two of them. Some people would therefore think I would always b...

This morning I was checking my email, when I noticed I received not one but two different messages notifying me that the previously taken domain, hughchou.com , was now available for purchase. One said it would reserve the domain for me for only $49 (alextro.com) and the other one said it would charge me just $69.95 for a one year registration (domainsreserved.com). What a great deal! Since I already had hughchou.org registered at GoDaddy , I thought I would see if I could just grab that name over there instead of using one of these high priced "domain resellers". What do you know, I can grab that same domain for one year for just $14.99 at GoDaddy and the second year is a whopping $2.99 more. So for a little over $18, I was able to grab www.hughchou.com  for two whole years! That domain just forwards to my other domains like hughcalc.org and hughchou.org as well as to my blogs like my St. Louis  restaurant blog , this general blog , and my wife's gluten-free reci...

Happy New Year! It is now 2014 and in celebration I have started the transition to move my main site to a new host and provider, Hostgator , with the new shorter URL hughcalc.org which is the base URL for all my online calculators . This will keep my site active longer with increased bandwidth and stability, and offload traffic off our department server which should never have been hosting this site in the first place. I should add some new content for the new year. Let me know if there are any new calculators I should add to my new site, like any modifications to my cholesterol ratio or BMI/BMR calculations. I am enjoying using my new Asus Chromebook C7 I won from a raffle at  Novu.com  because I am a UnitedHealthcare member (so I do not need my "Affordable Care Act" calculator ). I can use my Google Chromebook for just about everything. Some people say they are not "real laptops" but I can use it for 95% of the things I do at home on my computer. I thi...

Since I work for a large employer who provides us with our healthcare, I do not need to look up the premiums for what it would cost us under the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") for health insurance through the new federal healthcare marketplace. However that information is now available online at www.healthcare.gov for the 34 states whose marketplaces are being run by the federal government (my state of Missouri is included.) The site has been incredibly loaded since October 1 when the plans were first released, but they do provide a spreadsheet with all the premiums for every county in those 34 states. But that spreadsheet has almost 80,000 records which is a lot for Excel or LibreOffice Calc to digest, so I have decided to create my own little Affordable Care Act premium web application to make it easier for people to find the information for any county in the 34 states. Just select your state and your county and it lists all the options in a very plain web page t...

One of the more popular calculations on my website has absolutely nothing to do with mortgages or taxes , but with something that effects everybody -- blood cholesterol levels and ratios. My original cholesterol calculator just calculated the missing factor of HDL, LDL, Triglycerides and total cholesterol and calculated a few ratios. Then I created a second version that used the more internationally accepted SI units used around the world (and the corresponding ratios.) Now someone e-mailed me asking for an updated version that did not force the calculation of a missing variable and used LDL over HDL (instead of HDL over LDL), so I thought that would be yet another new version of my cholesterol ratio calculator. So now you must enter all 4 values and it will calculate the ratios and tell you how your numbers and ratios follow the desired guidelines for blood cholesterol numbers. Thank you, Dr. Tim!

During the presidential election there was a lot of discussion on helping the "middle class" while increasing taxes on the "upper class" to boost the economy. But how are these class differences defined? One interesting metric I heard about was that the middle class was defined as being two-thirds to twice the median household income. In 2010 that number was $59,127 which gave a middle class income range of $39,418 to $118,255 . However, this one number was being used to represent the whole country when we all know the median household incomes vary substantially throughout the country. Therefore, I decided someone needed to create an online " middle class income calculator " based on the median income data which is publicly available . My calculator lets you enter a household income amount (your own, or whatever number you would like to compare) to see which tier this income level would be in any metropolitan area or state in the country (based on 201...

Being a responsible citizen, I was all ready to vote for the St. Louis County Proposition L  in November to help update the county library system when I realized we cannot vote for it. Even though we are active County Library users, because we live in Richmond Heights and they have their own library, we are being taxed for the Richmond Heights Library . Therefore we do not pay any taxes on the county library system. Since we are not taxed for the county library system, the proposition will not be on our ballots when we vote on November 6. In reality we prefer visiting the County Library with its huge headquarters on Lindbergh (which we visit weekly) since it is still very close to us and almost as quick of a trip as the RH city library. Since we are still country residents we can use either library and we prefer the county system with its much larger selection of offerings. But just because I cannot vote for the proposition, does not mean I will not do my part to help pr...

Being the geeky sort of person that I am, I like to solve puzzles like the JUMBLE or Sudoku in the paper and also to play SCRABBLE. So for fun I had written a JUMBLE / SCRABBLE word solver / descrambler on my website and noticed it actually received a lot of hits. So I have updated it in various ways. First I created a new version that would highlight the actual dictionary words in RED on the versions that just prints out all the permutations (my original ones). This works for words up to 7 letters long. For words 8 letters and longer, printing out all the permutations gets pretty large and also makes for a large download, so I just print out all the dictionary words I find that match the letters that are given. I realized my online dictionary (which came from the latest Ubuntu wamerican , "American English" dictionary) included a lot of proper nouns, so in my latest descrambler I now flag all the proper nouns with an asterick (*). I also realized making a Spanish vers...

A federal report was released last week telling how the median US household has gone down in both income and net worth from 2001 to 2010. The median household is down from a net worth of $106,100 and an income of $48,900 in 2001 to a worth of $77,300 and an income of $45,800 in 2010. Net worth had actually been increasing well through 2007 ($126,400 median net worth then) primarily due to the increase in housing prices, but with the housing price bubble popping along with the decline in the financial markets net worth is down from that peak. What does this all mean? It means that it is time for a new online calculator ! I saw another nicely written article  on Scott Burn's AssetBuilder web site which included a nice table of percentiles, so I wrote up a new calculator so anyone can find your own percentile ranking in both 2001 and 2011. It uses linear interpolation to calculate all the percentiles between 0, 20, 40, 50, 60, 80 and 90 for income, and from 0, 25, 50, 75 and 90...

I actually received an e-mail from the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce looking for a simple payday loan calculator to post on a site they were developing. Being a fan on on-line calculators , and not a fan of payday loans, that sounded like a fun little project to do. I took my old " Find the Missing Value " calculator, and modified it a little so that now it is adapted more for the common payday or auto title loans where you pay a flat fee to receive an advance on your paycheck for a certain number of days. Using a typical $17.50 per $100 loaned amount (from Consumers Union ) if this amount is over a 14 day bi-weekly work period, it would amount to an annual interest rate of 422.8%. In today's market with record low mortgage rates, that is a pretty staggering percentage. Obviously the Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce thinks so too!

Since I took the week off, I am getting to catch up on my reading, and the latest book I have been reading is Bill Clinton's recent book, " Back to Work ". One interesting proposal he brought up was a mortgage refinancing proposal by Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of Columbia University . They propose that any current mortgage being held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac should be allowed to refinance at current market rates for only a modest refinancing fee. Clinton mentions in his book the closing costs would be a flat 0.4% of the loan amount and I did finally find that amount buried in the very lengthy description of Hubbard's proposal. Their Columbia University site has a whole ton of information and data available but it definitely took some wading through to get to the details. Having learned about this, it was now time for me to, of course, compose a simple calculator to see how this would compare to a more conventional refinancing where consumers often must ...

Some kind soul on the internet sent me $25 via PayPal for my financial calculator website , and told me I should go buy something for myself. Normally I do not really purchase too much frivolous crap for myself, but I received my daily message from Geeks.com and noticed they were offering Free Shipping on almost everything, no minimum purchase! Included was their ' USB Sport MP3 Player ' (BLK-KY-07) which sounded like a cool idea since I am one of those many people who go through ear buds all the time with my MP3 players, and this looked more durable. Since the MP3 player was only $14.49 with free shipping and I could also get a 2GB microSD card at Geeks.com for only $8.49 more, I thought, why not, I am worth it! For less than the $25 PayPal payment I received, I could purchase both items and have them shipped to my house for my personal enjoyment. The package arrived yesterday at our house in an unusually large cardboard box. I was afraid they had my order wrong since...

It was just last year when I was mentioning I should not be complaining because our school taxes were going up by only 4%. Of course, I spoke too soon. I just received the latest Ladue School District newsletter explaining how our school tax rate could be going up by $.49 per assessed $100 (if the proposition passes), which translated means an increase of 15.8% over what we paid in 2011. However, our district will still actually have the lowest tax rate in the county, but that is only because all the other districts with low rates have been jacking up their tax rates as well. I thought I needed a nifty online calculator to figure out the increase, so I wrote one, not only for Ladue, but for most of the other school districts in the area who increased their rates substantially last year. I also found the median home values for all the districts to see how much a median home in each district would see as an increase. The actual increase for us personally will only be a few hundred...

It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation  32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local Galleria Apple Store , the Brentwood Micro Center , Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep  total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough, Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipp...

Today I received an e-mail message from my friends at TIAA-CREF who holds the bulk of my retirement assets. Included was an interesting webinar that talks about a retirement asset to salary ratio that can be used to see how well you are saving for retirement especially after stocks took the big hit in 2008/2009. When I saw that I knew it looked like an on-line calculator in the making to me, but TIAA-CREF did not have one on their site! So I knew I had to create one . First I interpolated their graph so you do not only have every 5 year increments on the retirement, but every year in between, and then I calculated the ratio for anyone who wants to enter their asset balance and salary (since dividing two numbers is so much work!) If you are going to make the 70% or 90% of salary goals I tell you, and if not I tell you now much more you need to get there. Hey, it sounded like a fun little calculator for me to write, so here it is . I also saw that Firefox 8 was just released ...

With all the "Occupy Wall Street" protests complaining about how the Top 1% are prospering at the expense of the other 99%, it was interesting to hear this week's news from the Congressional Budget Office which pretty much agrees with their argument. It is rare to see a government branch agreeing with a grassroots movement this far from elections! It seems that in the 27 years from 1979 to 2007, the top 1% of Americans saw their incomes increase by 275% while the bottom fifth of Americans saw their incomes increase by 18%. But what about all the incomes in between? I pulled the full PDF file from the CBO and pulled all the data for now only 1979 and 2007 but 3 other intermediary years (1986, 1993 and 2000) to build my very own income percentile calculator for anybody to use! You simply enter any income amount and it interpolates the percentile that income would be for each of the five years for which I pulled data (1979,1986,1993,2000,2007). It shows how over the ...