There were two major headlines (so far!) from President Obama’s budget proposal – using Chained CPI for Social Security and a cap on retirement accounts. Many places have cited the cap as a $3 million cap but in reality it’s a calculation. The limit is based on how much you could get from your retirement account if you converted it to an annuity. An annuity, if you recall, is basically a series of payments, typically annually. A pension is a type of annuity.

Right now, as far as I know, there isn’t a cap on retirement accounts (Mitt Romney disclosed he had an IRA with over $100 million). Your cap is essentially on the front end, how much you can contribute, and business owners, including self-employed individuals, have different limits than employees.

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I got into a discussion last week with a friend about the difference between a “termination” and a “layoff.” Fortunately, neither one of us is dealing with it and so it was more of an academic discussion. It was part of a discussion about the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) and how employers with 100+ employees must notify workers under certain conditions if they may lose their jobs. It covers plant closings (if they are planning on closing a site and the shutdown will affected 50+ employees during any 30 day period) as well as mass layoffs.

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A few years ago, during the depths of the credit crisis and new legislation, banks were scrambling for ways to generate more revenue. With there long time friend Mr. Overdraft gone (and the ability to re-order it to increase fee revenue), many experts predicted the death of the free checking account. Now that we’ve exited the credit crisis, was the prediction of the death of free checking accurate?

Nope.

Some banks instituted fees but then offered easy ways to get out of them, which is like not having them in the first place. So where do you need to go to find free checking?

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Last week, I shared a few tips on how to save money getting baseball tickets and today I want to talk about how to save money once you get into the ballpark itself. Baseball is a nice casual sport to watch when you want to hang out in the sunny outdoors without being glued to the action going on in the field. It’s basically several hours of casual sport punctuated with periods of anxiety, excitement, and action that really keeps you involved enough to keep going back.

Unlike a movie, which tries to grip you from start to finish, baseball offers plenty of opportunities for you to get up, stretch, and get some concessions. In fact, the concessions often come to you and it’s a pretty slick system they have going. Movie theaters would love it if they could scream “Popcorn!” or “Ice cold beer!” while you watched a movie.

When I saw this CNN Money article about how much stuff cost at ballparks, I thought I’d share my tips for saving. So, how can you save money while inside the ball park?

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On pretty much the eve of tax day, imagine a world in which the IRS mails you a prepared return and all you needed to do was review and sign it? It’s estimated that tens of millions of taxpayers would be able to use it, save around $2 billion and 225 million hours of preparation time. Now imagine if that reality were squashed by classic Washington lobbying – specifically by Intuit, maker of TurboTax. That’s what ProPublica and NPR are saying. Intuit has spent $11.5 million on federal lobbying in the last five years and while it’s unclear what they were lobbying, chances are they weren’t in favor of this prepared return.

If you look at tax preparation software, you’ll know that the simplest returns are often done for free. Companies offer this because it locks you into their system. Eventually your return will be more complicated and you’ll need to pay for software. Until then, they’ll gladly give you free until you pay. So you get five years of free returns, no big deal, when you start paying you’ll be paying for 40 years of returns. It’s a smart business decision.

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If you saw President Obama’s FY2014 budget, one of the biggest pieces of news in it was a change in the calculation of the cost of living adjustment, or COLA. COLA is used to figure out how much to increase many government payments, the most important of which, especially for retirees, is probably Social Security payments. The switch from the current inflation measure to what is known as “chained CPI” is estimated to reduce the federal debt by $230 billion dollars ebacuse chained CPI is expected to grow between 0.25% – 0.30% slower than the CPI they use now.

As is the case with any small percentage, the initial impact would be small and grow over time. As the years pass, the impact would be greater. “According to the National Women’s Law Center, a retiree who was collecting $17,520 last year would see 6.5% less, or $1,139, by age 85, if chained CPI were adopted now. A decade after, their payments would be 9.2% smaller, or $1,612.”

So what is Chained CPI?

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Julie Vlahon of Techbargains sent me a survey they did about a month ago asking their visitors how much they spent preparing their tax returns. For the folks who already filed, they asked how much they paid. For those who hadn’t, they simply asked them how much they expected to pay. According to their results, procrastinators (those who would file in April) expected to pay $160.56 versus $106.20 for those who filed them earlier.

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In terms of watching professional sports, baseball is probably third on the list (football and basketball are 1st and 2nd). But when it comes to the experience of watching the game live, I think baseball offers the best bang for your buck when it comes to a fun experience. Baseball is by far the cheapest of all the major professional sports because the stadiums are enormous and there are so many games each year. It’s also outdoors, played when the weather is nicest, and it is played a fairly good pace. It’s not so fast that you have to watch it all the time, not too slow that you get bored (well, depends on the teams playing!), and when it’s exciting, it’s exciting.

I used to go to a ton of baseball games when I was in school in Pittsburgh because the park was brand new, it was easy to get to, and tickets are cheap. We don’t go as often now that we’re in Baltimore (Camden Yards is also beautiful) but when we do it’s a great time. The ballpark experience itself, once you get in, can get pricey (a subject for a future post!) but getting in doesn’t have to be. Here are our tips for saving money on baseball tickets:

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