"Debts are nowadays like children begot with pleasure, but brought forth in pain." - Moliere

SavingAdvice.com Blog

Bridging the gap between saving money and investing


Join Now or Login

Environment

Hurricane Costs: Florence to Cost Hundreds of Billions

By Leave a Comment

Hurricane costs

Over the years, the overall hurricane costs have increased with each natural disaster. Hurricane Florence will be no different. The storm could cost the East Coast as much as $170 billion in damages and lost productivity. In New Bern, NC alone, more than 4,300 homes have been absolutely destroyed. Wilmington and many other coastal towns are still completely unreachable by car and it may remain that way for days.

Hurricane Costs Reach Hundreds of Billions

While the $170 billion estimates may seem high, flooding from Hurricane Florence has completely cut off access to coastal towns. Towns on the coast often rely on tourists to keep their economy going. Most businesses were forced to shut down completely for evacuation. Not to mention, destroyed homes and at least 23 individuals confirmed dead, with numbers climbing.

Below is a graphic of the most costly hurricanes in U.S. history from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with Katrina still leading the way. If estimates are correct, Florence will surpass that.

Hurricane florence

Hurricane Flood Insurance Payouts

Katrina led the way with more than 167,000 flood insurance payouts, reaching $16 billion in total cost. On average, each payout was less than $100,000. Estimates of insurance payouts for Hurricane Matthew (2016) range from $1.5 billion to $7 billion. Hurricane Sandy, another high-cost hurricane, led to $18.75 billion in insured property loss.

Personal Cost of a Hurricane

Cost of hurricanes

Outside of the obvious property loss and damage, many of these areas will suffer serious economic impacts in the months to come. Many individuals aren’t able to return home or travel far from home right now. Those who stayed are trapped inside with no stores, gas stations, or restaurants open locally. Individuals who evacuated often have to spend money to stay in hotels.

Because Hurricane Florence came so far inland and many areas are still unreachable, it will still be quite some time before we know the true cost of the storm.

hurricane costs

 

First Person Account of Hurricane Florence

Less than 30 miles down the road from where I live, homes and cars are floating away, a one-year-old child’s life was lost, and people are still without power. Many people will also be unable to go to work due to road access or their place of work being flooded.

Locally (in Charlotte, NC), we’ve been extremely lucky. We have had some trees down and some flooding. Although we’ve been stuck inside with many roads blocked off for a few days, we’re thankful for our safety and how we faired during this devastating storm.

Readers, have you been impacted by Hurricane Florence? Join the discussion on hurricane preparation in the Saving Advice forums. 

Read More

Protect Yourself Against Mosquitoes and Tick Bites This Summer

By Leave a Comment

protect yourself against mosquitoes and ticks
The number of Americans who have contracted life-threatening illnesses from mosquito and tick bites has tripled in recent years — making it more important than ever to protect yourself.

Mosquitoes are known to carry West Nile virus and, in some parts of the country, the Zika virus.

As if these viruses themselves weren’t enough to make you want to prevent bites and infection, the cost of treating each of the respective diseases. West Nile virus has a median estimated cost of $25,117 for treatment, and the associated medical bills could range from $5,385 to $283,381.

And the Zika virus has caused about $117.1 million in direct medical costs, plus $66.3 million in lost productivity.

Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

Ticks can cause their own share of illnesses — carrying the viruses that cause Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, among other conditions.

These also incur significant medical costs. Treating Lyme disease costs a patient about $3,000, on average. Rocky Mountain spotted fever, on the other hand, is less common but just as costly. An outbreak in Arizona from 2002 until 2011 cost billions of dollars.

None of the diseases passed on by mosquitoes or ticks have any vaccines to prevent the onset of infection once you are exposed to the viruses. However, doctors believe raising awareness about preventing bug bites can help reduce the number of cases in the U.S. this summer.

Protection Against Mosquito and Tick Bites

There are a few steps you can take to protect yourself against mosquitoes and ticks.

1. Minimize Your Exposure

The best way to protect yourself against mosquitoes and ticks is to minimize your exposure.

Of course, no one wants to stay indoors all the time but you can stay away from standing water. Change any bird baths or standing water outside your home regularly.

You can also stay clear of heavily wooded areas, which are known to house ticks and mosquitoes both.

2. Cover Up If and When You Go Out

Even though it is hot during the summer, it is important to cover your skin. The more skin you have covered, the less likely you will be bitten.

3. Use Insect Repellent

Any skin that is exposed should be covered with insect repellent. You should also avoid perfumes and heavy deodorants as these products can actually attract mosquitoes and other bugs.

Below are the top five insect repellents, according to Consumer Reports:

4. Check for Bites

If you spend time outside, check yourself for ticks and other bite marks when you get back home.

If you discover a tick and it has burrowed too far under the skin to remove yourself, seek medical attention immediately.

If you discover you have been bitten, keep a close eye on the bite and monitor your health closely. Any problems should be brought to the attention of a medical professional.

 

Lower-Cost Repellent Methods

If you are looking for a more natural, low-cost way to repel bugs this summer, consider the options below — different tactics work for mosquitoes and ticks.

Mosquitoes

Vitamin B1

Taking a vitamin B1 tablet every day will help ward off mosquitoes. The insect can smell the vitamin in your blood and it makes you undesirable.

Garlic

This might sound gross because it will probably make you smell pretty bad, but garlic helps keep mosquitoes away. Skip your perfumed products and instead rub the juice from a garlic clove on your skin and under your arms.

Rosemary

If you want to keep mosquitoes out of your yard, plant some rosemary. The plant has been known to repel mosquitoes.

Ticks

Wear Light Clothing

Ticks are harder to keep away than mosquitoes. Regular deep woods insect repellent can help but you’ll also want to wear light-colored clothing — because ticks are more attracted to dark colors.

Tea Tree Oil

Tea tree oil is also a great tick repellent. If you have some, put it in a spray bottle and apply it liberally to keep ticks at bay.

While these measures might seem like a nuisance, taking these steps is much less annoying than any of the symptoms you might come down with if a virus-carrying bug bites you.

Readers, do you have any insect repellent tips to share? Leave them in the comment section below!

If you enjoy reading our blog posts and would like to try your hand at blogging, we have good news for you; you can do exactly that on Saving Advice. Just click here to get started.

Read More

mosquito repellent tips, low-cost mosquito repellent, low-cost tick bite repellent

Climate Change Warning: Gulf Stream Currents at 1,600 Year Low

By Leave a Comment

Gulf Stream Currents
As if there weren’t enough reasons to be concerned about the environment, the Gulf Stream currents have slowed 15% in nearly 70 years, reaching their lowest level in 1,600 years.

The ocean currents known as the Gulf Stream move billions of gallons of water around the globe. The flows start north of the equator, goes along the east coast of the United States and then turns east toward Europe.

The reduction in the movement of this current may indicate a tipping point in climate change toward what scientists fear might be irreversible.

What Does the Gulf Stream Have To Do With Climate Change?

Climate change, and the extreme weather it causes, has cost the U.S. economy $240 billion annually for the past decade, according to National Geographic.

The 15% reduction in the Gulf Stream was discovered in two different studies. The first looked at sediments in the water — from a North Carolina vantage point — and how they’ve changed over the past 1,600 years.

The second study assessed thermometer data and the water temperatures over the span of 120 years. Both studies concurred an overall loss of 15%. Here’s what that means: it’s equal to 15 Amazon rivers.

If this trend continues, Europe will become colder during the winter (by about 10 degrees Celsius), parts of Africa will become warmer, and sea levels in the eastern part of the U.S. will increase (it’ll be almost as bad as what happened in the movie The Day After Tomorrow).

Point of No Return?

The loss of this current is causing potentially irreparable damage to ocean ecosystems, including the Great Barrier Reef coral. This is also contributing to the rise of hurricanes across the U.S and Europe — which may increase in severity of the trends continue

Paying attention to things like the drastic loss in Gulf Stream currents can help us prepare and focus on finding solutions early on.

“If we do not rapidly stop global warming, we must expect a further long-term slowdown of the Atlantic overturning,” said Alexander Robinson, a researcher at the University of Madrid, where the second study on the drop in the currents took place. “We are only beginning to understand the consequences of this unprecedented process—but they might be disruptive.”

Readers, are you worried about climate change and how it might impact your finances? What bothers you the most about the loss of Gulf Stream currents?

Read More

If you liked this article, you might like these other stories about how climate change affects personal finance.

Pope Francis Calls Catholics to Act Against Climate Change

By Leave a Comment

Pope Francis encourages Catholics and world leaders to fight climate change

Pope Francis has not been one to mince words or refrain from sharing his thoughts. In December, he accused the Curia (the senior governing group of the Vatican consisting of cardinals, bishops and priests) of suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and of “existential schizophrenia” though he did say that such problems pose a danger to all Christians including himself.

Now, Francis has turned his attention to climate change in a move that will again anger staunch conservatives who were already infuriated by Francis’ prior call to ease global policy via state intervention in the market economy.

According to the website thinkprogress.org, Francis made a biblical case for addressing climate change when he told a large crowd in Rome that, “Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will…[It] is a gift…that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude.” Francis continued by calling destruction of the planet a “sinful act” akin to telling God that his creation is faulty or inadequate.

Now, the Pope is encouraging world leaders and approximately 1.2 billion Catholics to take an active role in protecting the planet and thus preventing climate change that too often disrupts ecologies and peoples’ livelihoods. According to Seattle Pi, Francis will soon visit the Philippines’ city Tacloban, which was devastated in 2012 by Super-Typhoon Haiyan. Many believe he will subsequently release an encyclical (a papal letter sent to bishops and intended for wide circulation) concerning the threat of global warming.

As mentioned, American conservatives have not received this news kindly. In fact, Fox News correspondent Doug McKelway reported that the Pope had aligned himself with “a few environmental extremists who favor widespread population control and wealth redistribution.”

Still, the Pope’s call for action seems to have widespread support among most Catholics and Christians generally. In 2006, the Evangelical Climate Initiative warned its members that poor nations and individuals are most susceptible to the challenge and threat of global warming. Christians, the organizers said, who are naturally called to care for their neighbors must then care about climate change.

Altogether, it seems then that Catholics, along with other Christians, individuals of other faiths and those with no faith, should join efforts to protect the planet from climate change. In our collective efforts, we can decrease the burden borne by the poorest nations and individuals with the most to lose.

(Photo courtesy of Aleteia Image Department)

SMAP Is a Fraud

By Leave a Comment

SMAP Is a Fraud
NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive, SMAP, is a mission of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). SMAP launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on January 31, 2015. SMAP is an orbiting observatory that measures moisture in the top 5cm of soil everywhere on the Earth’s surface. It uses active and passive instruments to measure the planet’s moisture level from space. The three main parts of SMAP are a radar, radiometer, and the “largest rotating mesh antenna every deployed in space”.

The top 5cm of soil is the topsoil layer in which the food we eat grows and where other vegetation lives. SMAP will also determine if ground is frozen or thawed in colder areas. It is designed to measure soil moisture every 2-3 days over a three year period.

The data SMAP provides will help scientists provide early warning for drought. Researchers forecast an increase in drought frequency in many regions of the world by the end of the 21st Century. Sustained drought can lead to crop failure, livestock death and eventually the death of people. The National Drought Mitigation Center helps reduce vulnerability to drought through preparedness and risk management. The data from SMAP will help reduce vulnerability.

SMAP will help improve crop yield forecasts and irrigation planning not just in the US, but around the world. This will improve humanitarian food assistance. The number of malnourished people around the world is expected to increase by 5-26% by 2080.

The SMAP data will also improve the ability to predict floods with higher resolution measurements of soil moisture. Floods are the #1 natural disaster in the United States and the leading cause of weather-related deaths. The data will help improve local weather projections from days to weeks.

Soil moisture links the water, energy and carbon exchanges between the land and the air. The health of the biosphere is dependent on the flow and storage of water, energy, and carbon. The global climate depends on how these cycles link together and vary. Global climate change is the major environmental challenge of this century and will have a major impact on society in the future.

SMAP is one the highest priorities for the Earth Science community. The data gathered will have a major impact on science’s ability to predict weather and provide preparedness and risk management to society.

SMAP’s radar stopped transmitting on July 7, 2015 due to an anomaly with the radar’s high-power amplifier (HPA). Mission managers from NASA’s SMAP Observatory say that the SMAP spacecraft continues regular operations even thought the radar is not able to return data. They acknowledge that although some of the planned applications of SMAP data will be impacted by the loss of data, the mission will produce valuable science.

SMAP is a fraud. The SMAP mission is costing $915 million. The radar is the core component of SMAP’s mission and failed after a few months of use. Without the radar the SMAP mission cannot achieve the minimum success criteria, or Level 1 science objects, that NASA set when approving the mission. NASA has acknowledged that the radar cannot be repaired, but will not admit that the radar failure prevents mission success.

35 More Places to Find Coins

By Leave a Comment

35 More Places To Find Coins
Do you know a person who is always finding money? Do you ever ask yourself how is it possible that Mary/John or Joe always seem to find money wherever they go? Well, it begins with the process of always picking up the change that crosses your path. Here are 35 places to find coins.

• Under your washer.
• Under your dryer.
• On the street.
• At the restaurant on the floor next to the cash register.
• Old bank accounts
• Forgotten IRS returns
• In an old secret hiding place.
• Your baby’s diaper bag. Most parents will throw a wallet into the bag and then change will fall out.
• In your high-end camera bag.
• Change is almost always at the bottom of one of my backpacks.
• In between the cushions in your car.
• In any guy’s pants pocket.
• Next to a fountain that people throw coins in and make a wish. I tend to throw these in the fountain…just in case!
• Whenever the giant pile of snow melts you definitely find change…and some other things.
• Under a ski lift; you will also find tons of gloves, sunglasses, and the occasional hat.
• In your kid’s piggy bank. Hopefully you don’t have to use it though.
• In an old coffee can that was being used as a coin collection jar.
• At your Grandma’s house in odd places.
• In an old coin bag that you used to throw in your purse.
• In your random collection of boxes that everyone seems to always have.
• In the seat of your moped.
• Next to the ticket machine at the light rail station.
• On the bus.
• In your kid’s cheerleading bag.
• On the dance floor-but those coins are usually a little sticky.
• Underneath the outdoor patio at your local bar. If you’re lucky you’ll find some crumpled up dollar bills.
• In the sand at the beach.
• At your next food truck festival you may find change next to the front of each food truck. People are usually furiously digging through their pockets to pull out some change to make their purchase.
• At the “circle of death” during your next cruiser ride. The “circle of death” is where all the cruiser ride participants ride around and party at the end fof the night.
• You’ll sometimes find change on the patio that surrounds your local swimming pool or on the bottom of the pool if other swimmers tossed a coin in for fun. CAUTION-if you aren’t a strong swimmer avoid retrieving those coins.
• In your old yoga bag for the yoga class that you don’t take anymore.
• In your old swear jar.
• Sticking to the bottom of your shoe. It has been known to happen.
• Old garage sale change boxes.

There is an endless number of possibilities to explore and consider when looking to find loose change. Make finding change a game and over time you will be amazed at how often you will find change around you. Let your friends and family know about your loose change love. Have fun!