9 Financial News Tips You Can Use

The price of ICD-10 is, well, a lot. The wait for new patients to see a primary care doc — also a lot. Here are a handful of tips from the financial world that can help you manage your finances.

• The AMA estimates that implementation of the ICD-10 codes in October will cost the average small practice about $135,000 with a payment disruption of about $100,000. How does this change help patient care or help docs make a living? And whose brilliant idea was this anyway?
• The Wall Street Journal reports that only 42% of couples over 50 have discussed their net worth, 41% have talked about where they will live in retirement and 57% have talked about inheritance. Ah, the confidence of the ignorant….
• In 2012, it took a new patient about 45 days on average to get to see a primary care doc, according to the Sanders Report. That’s up from 29 days in 2010. So it is not difficult to understand why half of people who went to an ER would have gone to a primary care doc if they could. One out of five Americans — 57 million – do not live near a primary care doc. One solution (from a primary care doc): Reduce payments to procedurally based docs by 20% and give it to primary care docs with a big bonus payment to work on an underserved area and it will not take long for the shift to occur.
• Another note in the WSJ tells us that it has long been observed that the worst stock market year of a President’s four-year term is the first, while the best is the third. Going back to 1926, the numbers have been 8.2% for the first year versus 8.7% for the third. As always, going forward, who knows?
• Simple math: In retirement, if you reduce your investment expenses a full percentage point to 0.5% (doable if you stick to index funds, ETFs, etc.), your chances of running through your dough within 30 years will decline from 30% to 16%.
• More than 86% of stock analysts recommendations are “buy”, but they are wrong 50.2% of the time, according to tipranks.com. I guess we should go back to the dartboard and save some money and time.
• On January 24th, Apple dropped 12%, or $40 billion in market value and on July 17th, Google rose 16%, or $65 billion in market value. Does this sound a tad frothy in the tech sector, like a 2000 bubble? Just one more reason to diversify.
• A WSJ survey asked people what are the best recent innovations. In order, they are social media, GPS, smart phones, and fracking. Note that ICD-10, managed care, and prior authorization are not on this list.
• Want a new investing gimmick? The WSJ suggests that you might buy the S&P 500 index the day before a Fed policy announcement, sell it a week later and buy it again the following week, repeating each week until the next announcement. A portfolio run this way since 1994 would have returned 650% instead of S&P’s actual 505%. It sounds screwy, but the market seems to have done better during this period in the even weeks of the Fed’s cycle. Who knew?