Annuity and Settlements

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How annuities work and how Hamilton annuities compare to Wells Fargo

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http://spectator.org/blog/2010/02/22/obama-hc-proposal-has-more-spe

"To finance the changes, President Obama proposes raising taxes even more than the Senate plan does. Under Obama’s proposal, higher income workers would see their portion of the Medicare payroll rise even higher. The tax would create a marriage penalty by applying to individuals earning over $200,000 and couples earning over $250,000. When the original version of the Senate health care bill was produced, the Medicare tax on those earning over $200,000 was supposed to be 0.5 percent. In the version that passed in December, the tax had been raised to 0.9 percent. And though it hasn’t even been made law yet, Obama is raising the Medicare tax for the third time, by assessing an additional 2.9 percent tax on income "from interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents…" This follows the historical pattern of payroll taxes, which have increased 20 times since first introduced in 1935, going from a combined total of 2 percent (including employer/employee contributions) to 12.4 percent today.

The Obama proposal would also raise the proposed tax on drug makers by $10 billion, to a combined $33 billion over 10 years, while delaying enactment by a year. It also delays enactment of the tax on medical devices and health insurers. "

Is there anything that Obama is better at than failing?

False, Neocon. HC bill never failed Senate, only in your misleading question.

1) a. it emphasizes earning a return on invested capital
b. it recognizes that earning a return makes $1 worth more today than $1 received in the future
c. it can be applied to future cash flows in order to compare different streams of income
d. all the above

2. As the discount rate becomes higher and higher, the present value of inflows approaches…
a. 0
b. minus infinity
c. plus infinity
d. need more information

3. You are to receive $12,000 at the end of 5 years. The available yield on investments is 6%. Which table would you use to determine the value of that sum today?

a. Present value of an annuity of $1
b. Future value of an annuity
c. Present value of $1
c. Future value of $1

4. As the interest rate increases, the present value of an amount to be received at the end of a fixed period…
a. increases
b. decreases
c. remains the same
d. not enough information to tell

5.As the time period until receipt increase, the present value of an amount at a fixed interest rate…
a. decreases
b. remains the same
c. increases
d. not enough information to tell

6.Mr Blochins is creating a college investment fund for his daughter. He will put in $850 per year for the next 15 years and expects to earn an 8% annual rate of return. How much money will his daughter have when she starts college?
a. $11,250
b. $12,263
c. $24,003
d. $23,079

7.Mr. Nailor invests $5,000 in a certificate of deposit at his local bank. He receives annual interest of 8% for 7 years. How much interest will his investment earn during this time period?
a. $2,915
b. $3,570
c. $6,254
d. $8,570

8.Sharon Smith will receive $1million in 50 years. The discount rate is 14. As an alternative, she can receive $2,000 today. Which should she choose?
a. the $1 million dollars in 50 years
b. $2,000 today
c. She should be indifferent
d. need more information

9.Mr. Fisher wants to build a house in 10 years. He estimates that the total cost will be $170,000. If he can put aside $10,000 at the end of each year, what rate of return must be earn in order to have the amount needed?
a. between 11% and 12%
b. between 8% adn 9%
c. 17%
d. none of the above

10. The shorter the length of time between a present value and its corresponding future value…
a. the lower the present value, relative to the future value.
b.the higher the present value, relative to the future value.
c.the higher the interest rate used in the present-valuation.
c. none of the above

11. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar to be received in the future because…
a. the dollar can be invested today and earn interest
b. of the risk of nonpayment in the future
c. inflation will reduce purchasing power of a future dollar
d. none of the above

12. The higher the rate used in determining the future value of a $1 annuity…
a.the smaller the future value at the end of the period.
b. the greater the future value at the end of a period.
c. the greater the present value at the beginning of a period.
d. None of the above – the interest has no effect on the future value of an annuity.

13. Mr. Darden is selling his house for $165,000. He bought it for $55,000 nine years ago. What is the annual return on his investment? …
a. 3%
b. Between 14% and 16%
c. 13%
d. none of the above

1.a
2.d
3.c
4.c
5.c
6.c
7.a
8.a
9.c
10.a
11.c
12.c
13.b

1- Do Smokers have to pay higher premiums for life insurance than non-smokers?
2- What is the current interest rates paid out on annuities in the USA?
3- When employing staff, should employers have the right to discriminate against smokers?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Smokers do pay more for life insurance, since they have a higher risk of dying during the period covered by a term life policy and a higher risk of dying earlier and thus making fewer premium payments for a whole life policy. The return of an annuity policy varies by the age of the insured and other factors. For an accurate quote, try this site to find the best life insurance

http://best-life-insurance-usa.blogspot.com/

Here you can get quotes from different life insurance companies in your area, its the best way to find an affordable life insurance with a reliable company.

Hope this help,

1- Do Smokers have to pay higher premiums for life insurance than non-smokers?
2- What is the current interest rates paid out on annuities in the USA?
3- When employing staff, should employers have the right to discriminate against smokers?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Smokers do pay more for life insurance, since they have a higher risk of dying during the period covered by a term life policy and a higher risk of dying earlier and thus making fewer premium payments for a whole life policy. The return of an annuity policy varies by the age of the insured and other factors. For an accurate quote, try this site to find the best life insurance

http://best-life-insurance-usa.blogspot.com/

Here you can get quotes from different life insurance companies in your area, its the best way to find an affordable life insurance with a reliable company.

Hope this help,

Chris Anderson visits Google to present his book “Free” This event took place on July 9, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Chris Anderson is the author of the international bestseller The Long Tail. He is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and was a U.S. business editor at The Economist. He began his career at the two premier science journals Science and Nature. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the University of California.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel’s latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor–effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don’t apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you’re trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

Duration : 0:53:47

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Carl will start higher education in 5 years. He has just informed his parents that he wants to go to a University that will cost $18,000 a year for 4 years. Anticipating his ambitions, his parents started investing $3,000 per year 5 years ago and will continue doing so for the next 5 years.
How much more will his parents have to invest each year for the next five years to have the right amount of money needed for his education? Using 10% as the appropriate interest rate throughout the question.

Well, at that rate in 10 years, which is the amount of time they have, their investment will be at about $48,000, so they will be about $24,000 short. So my calculation would be that they need to invest approximately another $1500 a year.

First, all lotteries are guaranteed money loser over the long run, medium run and even over reasonable short runs, that much is a given but it does appear that unlike the lucky number astrology stuff of the draw lotteries, there’s some actual possibilities for strategizing with scratch off games so I was wondering what strategies would work best.

Unlike the odds of a draw lottery, the odds of scratch off games change as tickets are sold. Lottery authorities often publish the number of tickets printed, the number of prizes in each category printed and the number of prizes in each category claimed to date on a daily basis, Texas does so in the form of a CSV file for download. They obviously don’t have a way of collecting the number of sales to date as the tickets are bearer instruments and not sold through a computer terminal but a reasonable estimate of the number of tickets sold and hence the number of tickets remaining by using the total number of prizes claimed versus the total number of prizes printed as the ratio of tickets sold. This means that scratch off games can be timed, with tickets purchased when the odds are in your favor or at least less against you. But what do you decide upon, expectations? (That’s when the probability of each prize level is multiplied with the value of the prize and then summed up over all the prizes and is a common Engineering technique for estimating returns on investments). The problem with expectations is that they require a lot of statistically independent chances before they average out if the probabilities are low hence you would literally have to play millions of dollars before the winnings play out as expected. Do you look for games with more prizes? more low value prizes? more high value prizes? underclaimed high value prizes? Probabilities of winning at least one prize of a certain value or higher?

Using the ratio of prizes claimed to prizes printed to estimate the number of tickets sold would be able to detect if given prize categories had been under claimed or over claimed when compared to the mean and the higher value prizes would show the most dramatic variation in odds. For example, the "Super Set For Life" game in Texas is currently 89% sold based on the ratio of prizes claimed versus prizes printed but only 3 out the 4 top prizes have been claimed which equates to 75% of that prize category. Another interesting aspect of that game is that if you took the full value of the top prize which is $500,000 a year for 15 years or 7.5 million, then the expectations show a $1.01 return on $1.00 invested. Of course, the prize is actually an annuity probably worth only 63% of the total advertised value which equates with a $0.85 return on the dollar but this is much better then the original $0.68 on the dollar expectation when the game was first printed. This would seem to indicate that if you could corral all the remaining unsold tickets together and just buy them one at a time until you’ve won the big prize hopefully by about the half way point, you might make money. Of course, you would have to buy 724,059 tickets before being 95% certain of obtaining that last 7.5 million dollar top prize but you would have a 50/50 chance at 381,084 tickets which would be closer to the median of what you would have to buy. Of course, the top prize alone would not meet the 7.6 million dollar median that you would expect to require to obtain the top prize but together with all the smaller prizes, perhaps. Mind you, your scratching arm would be very very tired.

On the Internet, there seems to be a lot of people espousing attempting to exploit manufacturing processes such as purchasing tickets at the end of the roll or changing rolls once a certain amount of prizes has been won. The former seems somewhat suspect since it’s nothing for a computer to randomize the prize placement throughout a typical roll of 50 or 25 tickets at the point of printing but the latter is interesting since there is a guarantee of minimum prize amount per roll that’s published to assure retailers they are not getting rolls completely devoid of prizes and it’s likely that this would be achieved by evenly dividing low tiered prizes between the rolls and then randomizing their positions within the roll. Having said that, since I have scanned images of my winning tickets, I can see that my winning tickets have all been in the first quarter or the last quarter of a roll and none of them has been in the middle half but then I can hardly afford enough tickets to have a statistically relevant sample. Maybe if you have sufficient records to determine where in the roll your winning tickets were, you could email them to me so that we could get a reasonably relevant sample (I’d only be interested in Texas games for the time being).

So what strategies do you think might marginally improve your odds of winning? Aside from not playing at all.
Duh, I said these were astronomical odds and improving them marginally still leaves them astronomical. I just wanted to hear some strategies that people use. It’s somewhat simple minded to just be saying that lotteries are bad odds, most gambling is and that’s a given.

FIFTY PERCENT!!!

That’s the odds you’re trying to "marginally improve".

Scratch tickets, and all other lottery games start with a 50% take for the lottery companies. In other words, for every $100,000 lottery companies take in from sales, they only pay out around $50,000 to winning tickets!

To put this into perspective, the WORST casino game you can play has around a 10 to 15% advantage over the player. Lottery = 50%!!!

Even if you COULD "marginally improve" your odds, you STILL wouldn’t be able to overcome that great of an advantage. Let’s say you had an incredible system that could give you a 10% edge over all other ’scratchers’. You’d still be trying to beat a 40% advantage!

Simply put, ANY form of lottery is the worst bet you can ever make!