Insurance that retirees may not need
These days, it seems like every other TV commercial is for yet another insurance product. While consumer choice can be a good thing, not all insurance is as essential as the ads make it seem.
“There’s a lot of sales and marketing based on fear that especially targets retirees,” said Jonathan Howard, a certified financial planner in Lexington, Kentucky, as well as a former insurance salesperson. “People end up buying because they’re terrified of a loss rather than to cover an actual insurance need.”
Here is insurance you may not need if you’re near or in retirement.
Long-term disability. The premium for an employer group disability plan typically increases with age, said Greg Klingler, director of wealth management at the Government Employees’ Benefit Association in Fort Meade, Maryland. The policy also will limit the payout period until a particular age, such as 65. As this age nears, your maximum possible benefit shrinks. This is especially true for someone who could have retired earlier but is still working. “You’re no longer dependent on your salary, so weigh the value of protecting this extra income versus the high insurance cost,” Klingler said.
Critical illness insurance. A stroke, heart attack or life-threatening cancer are some of the serious health issues that critical illness insurance covers. If you develop one of these conditions, the insurer sends you a lump-sum cash payment, ranging between $10,000 and $50,000, that can be spent however you want. Despite this flexibility, Howard said he isn’t crazy about this type of insurance, “where unless a specific situation happens, you don’t get anything back.” Review your potential out-of-pocket costs for health insurance to see whether you need critical illness insurance or if you could manage the bills with savings, he said.
Social Security insurance. All the dysfunction and uncertainty in Washington has led to a new product: Social Security insurance. It’s a type of annuity, an insurance contract that turns part of your savings into future income. When you add this insurance to an annuity, the insurer promises your annuity payment will increase to cover any government shortfall that results in a smaller Social Security benefit. Howard said that this isn’t a good return on your money. “Retirees vote, and they predominantly live in swing states,” he said. “If the government ever reduced Social Security for people already claiming it, they’d never hear the end of it.”
Individual dental and vision policies. Travis Price, a Medicare insurance agent in Traverse City, Michigan, said individual dental and vision policies aren’t worth buying in retirement. The cost of group coverage is heavily subsidized by the employer, he said. But when retirees purchase insurance in the individual marketplace, “the coverage costs can increase 10-fold for less coverage. Often, seniors are better off simply being a cash patient and negotiating cash costs with their provider.” Another alternative, he said, is finding a Medicare Advantage plan that includes dental and vision coverage.
The drive from Bloomington, Minnesota, to Fargo, North Dakota, on the morning of Jan. 30, 2018, five days before the Eagles’ victory in Super
Bowl LII, was 3 hours and 45 minutes of earth tones and silence, of the occasional farmhouse amid vast farmland, of a sky without even a bird to puncture the endless gray.
During a walk around town, the cold and wind would stop you in your tracks, cutting through layers of shirt and sweater and ski jacket straight to your skin. For the quarterback who had been the NFL’s best player for most of that season to have come out of that region was a source of unfathomable pride to the people there, because, as one of them said, “There’s nothing else here.” It didn’t matter that Carson Wentz wasn’t going to play a snap in that Super Bowl. He had been a god at North Dakota State, and he was still a god in that part of the country, and he would remain one.
Set against that vista, the arc of Wentz’s career with the Eagles, particularly the strange manner in which it has ended, with a trade to the Indianapolis Colts for a third-round draft pick and a conditional second-round
pick, makes more sense than it otherwise might at first. It would be simpler and easier to account for Wentz’s departure if he had been a bust from the beginning, if Wentz had shown that the Eagles’ decision to trade up twice in the 2016 draft and select him with the second overall pick was ludicrous from the start. But it wasn’t.
Wentz followed a promising if uneven rookie season with those 13 marvelous, MVP-level games in 2017 and with two statistically excellent seasons — the second of which included his carrying an offense full of castoffs and rookies to a fourgame winning streak and a division title. If you say that you saw his awful 2020 coming or that he was never any good to begin with, either you weren’t watching Wentz play, or you’re a liar.
But the reasons that the Eagles are trading Wentz, that they had to trade Wentz, run deeper than his one lousy season. They have to run deeper, because in and of itself, a quarterback having one lousy season usually isn’t and shouldn’t be cause for an NFL franchise to cast him out, especially less than two years after that franchise has committed four years and as much as $128 million to the proposition that it must have that quarterback, and no other, as its starter.
The Eagles bear no small amount of blame for this fiasco. When it comes to the football team he owns, Jeffrey Lurie loves nothing more than having a quarterback who presents an appealing public image, who drives merchandise and ticket sales, and who can win games. And the only conclusion one can draw now, in the wake of this wreckage, is that he, Howie Roseman and the rest of the organization looked at Wentz and saw too much of what they wanted to see and not enough of what was actually there.
They failed in their evaluation of him, failed to take a full measure of him as a quarterback and a person, failed to understand what conditions were required for him to thrive and be content. But it’s also fair to ask: What kind of conditions and environment would have been best for Wentz? And was it possible for the Eagles to create them?
That’s why the context of Wentz’s past — his rapid rise at North Dakota State and its effect on his thinking, his opinion of and expectations for himself — matters so much.
One example: The week of Super Bowl LII, it took merely a matter of hours to arrange a phone interview with North Dakota governor Doug Purgum, to give him a chance to brag about Wentz and describe the state’s reaction when, in that infamous game against the Rams at the Coliseum in Los
Angeles, Wentz tore two ligaments in his left knee. “Everyone held their breath,” Burgum said, “and then there was shock and hurt and disbelief.” Was there more pressing business for the governor to attend to? Perhaps, but not so pressing that he couldn’t answer a question or two about his local hero. Carson came first.
Through Wentz’s first four years with them, the Eagles did nothing to discourage Wentz himself from thinking that way, from believing that he was their golden child, that it was merely a matter of time before he extended his legend beyond the Great Plains. Carson came first.
Good Lord: The Eagles won the Super Bowl and nearly reached a second NFL Championship Game with another quarterback, and they never hesitated to reaffirm that Wentz was their real meal ticket. They let Nick Foles depart, then signed Wentz to that gargantuan extension.
There’s a thin line between supporting a star athlete and reinforcing that athlete’s sense of self-regard and entitlement, and it appears that the Eagles, based on where that line fell on Wentz, crossed it. They treated him as every NFL team treats its franchise quarterback … until the moment they drafted Jalen Hurts. Until, for once, Carson didn’t come first.
As arrogant as the Hurts pick was — the logic behind it was sound, but the logic was sound
in a vacuum, and the Eagles did not exist in that vacuum — it seems a strange thing to ignite the total disintegration of the relationship between Wentz and the franchise.
Should the Eagles have drafted someone other than a backup quarterback in the second-round? Yes. Their roster wasn’t deep enough and talented enough that they could use so valuable a resource on a luxury item. But it’s reasonable to have expected Wentz to shrug it off, get over it and go play. Apparently, he couldn’t.
The Eagles presumed Carson Wentz was made for Philadelphia, for the most demanding and difficult market in professional sports, but growing up in cold weather, wearing flannel and Levi’s, and hunting down your own dinner aren’t necessarily indicators of how you’ll react the first time things don’t go your way.
When you’ve been admired and loved so much, how do you act when you’re not anymore? Maybe you act the way that Wentz has. You expect the love to be unconditional and never-ending, and when you realize it isn’t, you’re shocked, and you decide it’s time to leave, and you force your way out. You continue your search for a kind of adoration that you can find only in a place where there’s nothing else but you.
LOS ANGELES — Winning at Riviera was always a dream for Max Homa since he first attended the PGA Tour event as a toddler. He never could have scripted a finish like Sunday at the Genesis Invitational.
Homa missed a 3-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole for the win. On the first playoff hole, he appeared to have no chance when his tee shot settled inches from a tree. He somehow escaped to extend the playoff, and won it on the next hole when hard-luck Tony Finau failed to save par from a bunker on the par-3 14th.
As much of a heartbreak as it was for Finau — his 10th runner-up finish worldwide since his lone victory in the Puerto Rico Open five years ago — the emotion was too much for Homa.
He grew up 30 miles away in Valencia. He grew up idolizing Tiger Woods, the tournament host who presented him the trophy. He nearly threw it away with a 3-foot putt. And he walked off with his second PGA Tour victory.
“I’ve been watching this tournament my whole life,” Homa said, choking back emotions before he said, “Wow. I didn’t think it would be like this. ... The city of champions — Dodgers, Lakers, me now. It’s a weird feeling.”
Homa not only closed with a 5-under 66, he played the final 26 holes without a bogey.
This looked to be a storybook finish for Homa when Sam Burns, who had led from the opening round, ran into a string of bogeys on the back nine.
It came down to Homa and Finau, who saved par on the 18th for a 64, the low round of the weekend. Homa made a 6-foot birdie putt on the par-5 17th to tie for the lead, and he stuffed his approach on the 18th for what looked to be a sure birdie. And then he missed.
“You’re not supposed to miss a 3-footer in front of Tiger Woods,” Homa said. “I saw him yesterday and was too scared to talk to him.
“But he’s forced to talk to me now.”
Worse yet was his tee shot on the 10th. Homa managed to hood a wedge and scoot it up the slope to the edge of the green, and with a front left pin — typically the Saturday position, changed this year because of the wind — it left him 12 feet away. He narrowly missed. Finau, in great position, chipped to 7 feet and with his shadow over the cup, hit it too weakly.
The victory allowed Homa to crack the top 50 in the world for the first time, making him eligible for the World Golf Championship next week and get him back to the Masters.
Burns closed with a 69 and missed the playoff by one shot.
Homa and Finau finished at 12-under 272 on a Riviera course that was fast, firm and bouncy all week, and was never more difficult than Saturday in 35 mph that led to play being halted.
Top-ranked Dustin Johnson started the final round two behind and in the final group. He missed an easy birdie chance on the opening hole and it never got much better. Johnson fell back with careless bogeys along the back nine. He shot 72 and tied for eighth.
Burns steadied himself Sunday morning with two big par putts from the 10-foot range — on No. 14 to avoid a third straight bogey and on the 18th hole for a 74 that gave him a two-shot lead.
The third round was completed Sunday morning because of a four-hour delay from wind so strong on a course so firm that the average score was 73.34, the highest ever for a weekend round at Riviera since the PGA Tour began keeping such statistics in 1983.
Jordan Spieth never got anything going Sunday. Coming off a pair of top-five finishes to turn his fortunes around, Spieth was five shots behind going into the final round and could only manage a 71 to tie for 15th.
ACROSS
1 “One Day __ Time”
4 Mulgrew and Gosselin
9 Hope or Barker
12 Chat room giggle
13 __ in; inundated by
14 “__ to Billy Joe”
15 Actress Lupino
16 “__-Cop”; movie for Burt
Reynolds
17 “Lorenzo’s __”; Nick Nolte film 18 Home of the Buccaneers 20 Mechanical man
22 “Who Do __ Are?”
26 Preacher and author Norman
Vincent __
27 “NCIS: __ Angeles”
28 All in a __; lined up
29 “Murder, __ Wrote” 32 Slow-moving creature 35 Actress on “Desperate
Housewives”
39 “I __ of Jeannie”
40 Telly Savalas role
42 Get __ of; discard
43 Actor __ Ballard 47 “Mike Hammer, Private __” 48 King Kong, for one
49 Creature in Aladdin’s magic lamp 50 Swindle
51 “Presidio __”
52 Actress Samantha
53 Explosive letters
DOWN
1 Dismounted
2 Show for Matt Lauer and Al
Roker
3 “The __”; John Wayne movie 4 “The __ Kid”; film for Pat Morita
and Ralph Macchio
5 Reverent wonder
6 Light brown
7 Suffix for old, bold or cold
8 “__ Tank”; reality series
9 Yogi’s little buddy
10 Hateful
11 Accessory for the waist
19 Young dog
21 Popeye’s Olive
23 Stern and severe
24 Actress Massey 25 Unaccustomed to doing
29 One of thirteen on the US flag 30 Paid attention to
31 Historical period
33 More unpleasant
34 Monogram for JFK’s assassin 36 Spitting __; one who looks
amazingly like another
37 Throw out
38 Manufactured fiber used in fabrics and once called “imitation silk”
39 Small amount
41 Clark __; reporter for the “Daily
Planet”
44 Lower limb
45 Suffix for paint or punt
46 Actress Kirshner