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Obesity is Costly

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Obesity is one of the biggest drivers of preventable chronic diseases and healthcare costs in the United States. Each year the healthcare costs related to obesity range is $190 billion. America’s obesity crisis appears more unstoppable than ever. NBC News reported:

A troubling new report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that almost 40 percent of American adults and nearly 20 percent of adolescents are obese — the highest rates ever recorded for the U.S.

“It’s difficult to be optimistic at this point,” said Dr. Frank Hu, chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The trend of obesity has been steadily increasing in both children and adults despite many public health efforts to improve nutrition and physical activity.”

The continued weight increase in the youngest Americans is especially worrisome for long-term health. One in five adolescents, ages 12–19; one in five kids, ages 6–11, and and one in ten preschoolers, ages 2–5 are considered obese, not just overweight…

The consequences of the obesity epidemic are devastating: High blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and stroke are not only killing millions of Americans annually — the obesity epidemic is also a humongous burden on the American health care system, making up $190 billion a year in weight-related medical bills.

 

Hobbies and Activities for Couples on a Budget

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Are you allowing quality time with your honey to get pushed aside due to the lack of funds or a tight budget? There are too many free or low-cost activities available to ignore such a vital part of your relationship. According to Courtney Carver, author of Simple Ways to Be More with Less, “Shared interests for couples are so important. When you have a hobby or activity that you enjoy with your partner, you naturally spend more time together and have more to talk about. There are so many things you can do together. Hiking, skiing, cooking classes, travel and other activities add another level of connection and communication. It’s important to have your own individual interests as well, but the things you enjoy together will strengthen your relationship.” If you are searching for ideas for cheap couples activities, here are 25 ideas to help get you started!

Hobbies and Activities for Couples on a Budget

1. Ballroom Dancing

Most studios offer big discounts to first time students. Take advantage of these introductory specials and then use what you learn. Before you know it, you and your amore will be dancing your way through life. Go to access dance for information relating to all things ballroom.

2. Massage

Getting a professional massage is expensive. Learn massage techniques online for free.

3. Community Theatre

Enjoy seeing a live show or join a community theater group and be part of the fun. You will not only save money, but feel good about supporting your community.

4. Bicycling

Whether you’re on a mountain bike, road bike or a bicycle built for two, you and your sweet baboo will be rolling into fun times ahead.

5. Concerts in the Park

During summer months most local parks have free concerts. Pack a picnic blanket, a bottle of wine (if allowed), and some light snacks. Snuggle into your snookum’s arms and listen to sweet melodies under the stars. [Read more…]

Skipping Breakfast is Costly

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Skipping breakfast may be linked to poor heart health, resulting in more spending into healthcare. A new study says that skipping breakfast could be linked to poorer cardiovascular health. The findings reveal that, compared with those who wolfed down an energy-dense breakfast, those who missed the meal had a greater extent of the early stages of atherosclerosis — a buildup of fatty material inside the arteries. The Guardian reports:

“The research is part of a larger study that will follow the participants over a decade or more to see how disease in the arteries progresses. Published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the research looked at the health and diets of 4,052 middle-aged bank workers, both men and women, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease. At the start of the study, which is partly funded by the Spanish bank Santander, participants completed a detailed questionnaire into what they had eaten and when over the previous 15 days. Body mass index, cholesterol levels and other measures were collected, together with data including the participants’ smoking status, educational attainment and level of physical activity. Imaging techniques were used to track the extent of the early, sub-clinical stages of atherosclerosis in six arteries, including those around the heart, thighs and neck. The results reveal that, compared to those tucking into more than 20% of their daily calories at breakfast, those who consumed next to nothing for breakfast had a greater extent of atherosclerosis.”

The Investment Banker and The Mexican Fisherman

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The story of the investment banker and the Mexican fisherman contains an important lesson. It’s short, fun and well worth your time to read.

The Parable of The Mexican Fisherman

An investment banker stood at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The banker complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, “Only a little while.”

The banker then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The banker then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The investor scoffed, “I am an Ivy League MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.

“The investor continued, “And instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would then sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution! You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The fisherman asked, “But how long will this all take?”

To which the banker replied, “Perhaps 15 to 20 years.”

“But what then?” asked the fisherman.

The banker laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”

“Millions. Okay, then what?” wondered the fisherman.

To which the investment banker replied, “Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

How To Save Money In Your 20s

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Alexandra Talty writes on Forbes: “Between millionaires blasting Gen-Yers for eating avocado toasts and reports of millennials spending $96 billion dollars on food, people love talking about twentysomethings spending habits. And while no one wants to discuss sexy topics like soaring college loans, unaffordable housing and the lagging job market, stashing money in the bank is one way you can hit your financial goals.”

Here are some ways to save money in your 20s

1. Pick a month to do a cash diet: Take one month to only spend cash for your day-to-day expense. Using cash will really help you see how fast you’re spending your money and make you think twice about your purchases.

2. Entertain at home more often: Instead of meeting up at the bar, try to meet up with friends by throwing dinner parties at home. You’ll have plenty of time to relax at your table and won’t have to deal with a huge check at the end of the night.

3. Negotiate better contracts on recurring bills: Go over some of your recurring monthly bills like cell phone, car insurance and electricity. If one of them is expiring soon, you can either call and try to negotiate a better price for renewing or start shopping around and finding better deals.

4. Consider refinancing your debt: Check into refinancing any debt you have while interest rates are still very low. Even 1% can save you a ton of cash every month with student loans and mortgages.

5. Stop by your local library instead of buying books on Amazon: Browse Amazon for books but instead of buying them, save them to your cart and head to your local library and get your books for free.

6. Practice delayed gratification: Strategically planning larger purchases can save you hundreds. For instance, electronics are always best to buy during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, while travel prices tend to decrease between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

7. Don’t buy new: Between thrift stores, Craigslist and the Facebook marketplace you can snag steep discounts on most anything lightly used.

8 out of 10 American Workers Live Paycheck to Paycheck

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A year ago, about 75 percent of U.S. workers said they were living from payday to payday, a number that has grown to 78 percent this year. CBS News reported:

Almost 8 out of 10 American workers say they live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet, according to a new survey from CareerBuilder. That can force people to take on debt or otherwise struggle when an unexpected bill arises. It also raises questions about the stability of the broader economy given that consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of activity.

The survey highlights a troubling trend in household finances: More than eight years since the end of the recession, the share of Americans who are living on the financial edge is growing, said Mike Erwin, a spokesman for CareerBuilder. While some may want to blame Americans’ spendthrift ways, Erwin pointed to two trends that continue to put financial stress on households: stagnant wages and the rising cost of everything from education to many consumer goods.

“Living paycheck to paycheck is the new way of life for U.S. workers,” he said. “It’s not just one salary range. It’s pretty much across the board, and it’s trending in the wrong direction.”

Woman Divorces Husband After He Fails to Install Toilet

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An Indian court has granted a woman permission to divorce her husband after he consistently refused to build a toilet in their home, forcing her to relieve herself in the open. The divorce was granted after proof of undue financial demands are shown in a family court.

As reported by The Telegraph, Family court judge Rajendra Kumar Sharma in India’s western Rajasthan state ruled on 18 August that a toilet was a necessity in every home and defecating in the open was ‘disgraceful’ for society and ‘torture’ for women.

“In villages women have to wait until sunset to answer nature’s call. This is not only physical cruelty, but also outraging the modesty of a woman” the judge ruled.

People spend money buying tobacco, alcohol and mobile phones, but are unwilling to construct toilets to protect the dignity of their family, he added.

The woman’s counsel said she was married in 2011 to a labourer and filed for divorce four years later citing cruelty by her husband, as he was unable to provide the couple a separate room or a toilet.

Your Credit Score Could Make or Break Your Love Life

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A recent survey shows that a high credit score ranks above looks, ambition, courage, and sense of humor when daters are looking for the love of their lives. Bloomberg reported:

“It turns out credit scores are statistical shorthand for a whole lot more than the likelihood you’ll repay a loan, according to a number of consumer surveys and academic studies. One study, released two years ago, looked at consumer credit data over 15 years and found that the higher the year-end credit score, the likelier the person was to form a romantic relationship over the next year.”

“Now comes a survey from Discover Financial Services and Match Media Group, parent of Tinder and other dating sites, that shows just how appealing a good credit score can be. Financial responsibility was ranked as a very or extremely important quality in a potential mate by 69 percent of the 2,000 online daters surveyed. That placed it ahead of sense of humor (67 percent), attractiveness (51 percent), ambition (50 percent), courage (42 percent), and modesty (39 percent). A good credit score was associated with being responsible, trustworthy, and smart.”

What to Do When You Win the Lottery

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Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That’s great. Now you’re screwed. No really. You’re really screwed! On Reddit, user BlakeClass detailed the dangers of winning the lottery and what to do. If you only want to see what you should do if you win the lottery then skip down to bottom section of this post.

The Dangers of Winning the Lottery

You see, it’s something of an open secret that winners of obnoxiously large jackpots tend to end up badly with alarming regularity. Not the $1 million dollar winners. But anyone in the nine-figure range is at high risk. Eight-figures? Pretty likely to be screwed. Seven-figures? Yep. Painful. Perhaps this is a consequence of the sample. The demographics of lottery players might be exactly the wrong people to win large sums of money. Or perhaps money is the root of all evil. Either way, you are going to have to be careful. Don’t believe me? Consider this:

Large jackpot winners face double digit multiples of probability versus the general population to be the victim of:

  1. Homicide (something like 20x more likely)
  2. Drug overdose
  3. Bankruptcy (how’s that for irony?)
  4. Kidnapping

And triple digit multiples of probability versus the general population rate to be:

  1. Convicted of drunk driving
  2. The victim of Homicide (at the hands of a family member) 120x more likely in this case, ain’t love grand?
  3. A defendant in a civil lawsuit
  4. A defendant in felony criminal proceedings

Believe it or not, your biggest enemy if you suddenly become possessed of large sums of money is… you. [Read more…]

Relieve Stress by Talking to Yourself

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Carving out time for a therapy session is a great way to reduce some stress. But if you need to relieve stress without spending any money? Try talking to yourself.

A new study suggests there is someone else you can talk to release tension: yourself. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported: 

Psychology researchers from Michigan State University and University of Michigan conducted a study to determine if self-talk could reduce anxiety. To do so, scientists rounded up a group of participants for two experiments.

For the first one, the subjects were shown disturbing images, such as a man holding a gun to their heads. Then, they were asked to respond to the pictures in first-person and third-person as their brain activity was being monitored.

For the second one, they were asked to recall a traumatic experience in first-person and then in third-person while their brain activity was being reviewed.

In both cases, they found that participants displayed less brain activity in the region most associated with storing emotional experiences when speaking in the third-person than when speaking in the first-person.

“Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain,” Jason Moser, one of the MSU researchers, said in a statement. “That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.”

 

Woman Taking Selfie Accidentally Destroyed $200,000 in Art

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A woman taking selfie accidentally caused $200,000 worth of art in damage. The visitor tried to snap a picture at an art gallery The 14th Factory in Los Angeles. This temporary art exhibit and factory space displayed the latest exhibition from Simon Birch, a British multimedia artist based in Hong Kong, in a series of crowns on pedestals.

While posing for a selfie the woman toppled and she knocked a pillar that starts a domino effect causing as much as $200,000. Here’s the moment the woman accidentally sending pedestals and crowns falling in a chain reaction.

The exhibit contains 60 crown-formed sculptures and is titled ‘Hypercaine’. A video of the incident, uploaded to YouTube on July 13, has already racked up over 700,000 views.

Study: Giving Makes Us Happy

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Happiness from being generous has a neural basis within the brain. Generous behavior is known to increase happiness, which could thereby motivate generosity. A recent study submitted to the journal Nature Communications that used functional magnetic resonance imaging concluded that giving makes us happy.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications that “our study provides behavioral and neural evidence that supports the link between generosity and happiness.”  If you’re looking for a way to increase your happiness, giving or volunteering will surely warm your heart and put a smile on your face.

Seeker reported:

What inspires humans to display acts of generosity? Economists, psychologists and philosophers have pondered this question for millennia. If one assumes that human behavior is primarily motivated by self-interest, it seems illogical to willingly sacrifice resources for others.

In an attempt to solve this paradox, some experts have theorized that giving satisfies a desire to boost one’s standing in a group. Others have suggested it fosters tribal cooperation and cohesion — a key element in mammal survival. Yet another explanation is that we give only because we expect to receive something in return.

Scientists conducted an experiment with 50 people at a lab in Zurich who reported on their own happiness levels after acts of generosity. Consistently, they indicated that giving was a feel-good experience.

At the same time, MRI scans revealed that an area of the brain linked to generosity triggered a response in another part related to happiness.

How Johnny Depp Runs Out of Money

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Despite earning multi-million dollars, the Pirates Of The Caribbean star Johnny Depp is broke. He is currently suing his former business managers in a $25 million legal battle for mishandling his personal finance.

So how is Johnny Depp so broke? It has nothing to do with his extremely high income, but his reckless spending habit is causing his own financial mess. From the filing in a lawsuit, Depp has spent $3 million to shoot Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon a dozen years ago. The top-tier Hollywood star spends $2 million every month on daily expenses and wastes $30,000 a month on wine. This is a classic story of people making over a million dollars still live paycheck to paycheck and are in debt.

Whether or not one is living at the edge of your finances has much less to do with how much money you earn than it does how you spend. Being rich or poor is somewhat determined by choices and effort, but mostly determined by luck. However, living paycheck to paycheck is almost always due to choices. Without the full grasp of where the money goes and an inability to live below his means, Johnny Depp runs out millions of dollars.

His financial management group TMG outlined other extravagances that Depp spent on:

  • An estimated $200,000 for flying in private jets.
  •  $400,000 on a diamond cuff estimated to be worth less than half that amount.
  • “Millions” on guitars and artwork. 
  • More millions on Hollywood memorabilia.
  • $3 million for an “ash cannon” to fire off the remains of legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
  • $3.6 million annually for his personal staff.
  •  $5.35 million for his chain of islands in the Bahamas.
  • $18 million for a 156-foot yacht, which Depp’s financial planners have convinced him to sell to author J.K. Rowling.
  • And lastly, $75 million for the purchase and renovation of 14 residences worldwide.

Key to Earn More: Sleep More

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If you’d like to earn more money, sleep more seems to be the key to higher wages. A 2016 study from Matthew Gibson of Williams College and Jeffrey Shrader of the University of California at San Diego showed that people who increased their sleep by just one hour a night saw their wages increase by 1.3% in the short run and by 5% in the long run.

The sleep deprivation is not only bad for your health, but it’s also bad for your bank balance. Researchers from the London School of Economics found that just one hour less sleep each night can reduce household income by up to 11 per cent, with the impact accumulating with more time spent awake.

According to a study from CreditCards.com, 65% of Americans are losing sleep over money issues. A recent study by Rand Europe shows that a third of American workers report they regularly get fewer than seven hours of sleep a night, leading to the loss of some 1.2 million working days and robbing the U.S. economy of an estimated $226 billion annually.

Getting more sleep paid a big dividend to your health. In addition, more sleeps help you earn more in the long run. It’s a win-win situation for all employees.

E-cigarettes Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes

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Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are an expensive habit especially for some vaping aficionados that use premium e-liquids. Now there is a study by chemists at the University of Connecticut that shows e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as tobacco cigarettes. The findings appear in the journal ACS Sensors.

Researchers from the University of Connecticut found that e-cigarettes loaded with a nicotine-based liquid are potentially as harmful as unfiltered cigarettes when it comes to causing DNA damage. The researchers also found that vapor from non-nicotine e-cigarettes caused as much DNA damage as filtered cigarettes, possibly due to the many chemical additives present in e-cigarette vapors. Cellular mutations caused by DNA damage can lead to cancer.

An article on UConn Today explains: “Electronic cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat up liquid and turn it into an aerosol vapor that can be inhaled. Using e-cigarettes is also called ‘vaping.’ The contents of e-cigarettes, called e-liquid or e-juice, are usually made up of propylene glycol, glycerine, nicotine, and flavorings such as menthol, cherry, vanilla, or mint.”

With the finding of this new research, there is no longer a consensus that e-cigarettes are much safer than regular cigarettes. Karteek Kadimisetty, a postdoctoral researcher in UConn’s chemistry department and the study’s lead author, said: “From the results of our study, we can conclude that e-cigarettes have as much potential to cause DNA damage as unfiltered regular cigarettes.”

E-cigarettes increasing grows in popularity as a less toxic alternative for people looking to break their habit of smoking tobacco cigarettes. The result of the study is an early warning to people who regularly use e-cigarettes because they think there is no harm. Of course, to save money it’s better to avoid e-cigarettes and smoking altogether.