Medicare & Medicaid Health Insurance Programs Explained
I’ve never had the need or the opportunity the learn about Medicare or Medicaid, two government programs that garner a lot of attention every two years, and that have recently been in the news because of President Obama’s attempts to bring about health care reform. Like many people, I didn’t understand how either program worked so I decided to do some research and put together this Foundation post.
The biggest difference between the two is eligibility based on financial need. Medicaid is designed to help low-income, financially needy individuals and is administered differently in each state. Medicare is not based on need and is entitlement based, through your payments into the program through your taxes. Medicare is administered nationally and the rules are the same everywhere.
If you’re curious to learn more, read on plucky adventurer because it starts getting a little more complicated. ![]()
(Click to continue reading…)

If you go back a ten or fifteen years, there were two things you could do online that would get you laughed at: finding a date and getting a post-secondary degree.
Everything I’ve ever read about debt settlement has been extremely negative and, for the most part, ugly. It’s because debt settlement is designed for people in very dire circumstances.
For the first twenty years of your life, the most important measure of your future were your grades in school. Scored well, you got into better schools and tougher classes. Scored poorly and you didn’t. Just about the time I thought grades stopped mattering, I learned about my FICO credit score.
Depending on who you ask, a credit card is either a very useful financial tool or an incarnation of the devil. Your perception of credit cards is often colored by your personal experience, as it should, and it’s easy to see how a mountain of debt could make one despise credit. I’ve always seen them as useful tools, powerful in the hands of a responsible credit card user, and dangerous in the hands of someone unfamiliar with how they work. If you want a primer on credit cards, I invite you to read the Foundation series post,
April is Financial Literacy Month and to help kick off this month of financial education, I thought I’d go back to the basics with this edition of the
Five years, on the first day of my first “real” job, the HR administrator of my company handed me a folder labeled XYZ Company Pension & Retirement Plan. Inside the folder was a description of the company’s pension and 401(k) package, two “things” that meant almost nothing to me. I knew what a pension was but had no clue was a 401(k) was, but the folder seemed to have enough information in it to help me start my own 401(k) company if I wanted to. I made some good decisions about my 401(k), mostly by luck (I put 40% of my money into emerging markets, which was a good choice but I did it for a bad reason – I had no reason!), but you shouldn’t have to. 


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