Advanced Wellbeing offers financial therapy insights each week to inform more details about financial therapy.
If you have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, you are likely to see dramatic increases in your costs next year. This is due to a combination of factors that a July 18, 2025, article from CBS News calls a “one-two punch” of “double-digit premium increases along with a sharp drop in the federal subsidies that most consumers depend on to buy the coverage.”
If you have ever filed a homeowners insurance claim, you know it can feel more like an endurance test than a straightforward process. While insurers are legally required to honor valid claims, they have strong financial incentives to delay, underpay, or deny them whenever possible.
Over the years, I’ve learned this the hard way.
The recent horrifying murder of UnitedHealthcare Group CEO Brian Thompson has called attention to the anger many Americans feel about our health care system. This tragedy has thrust the very real issue of health care costs back into the headlines.
One article offered seven reasons why Americans pay so much for health care with such poor results.
I was shocked recently when the annual premium for my homeowners insurance jumped from $8,000 to $18,000. After some research, I found another reputable company offering the same coverage for much less. Switching companies, however, meant I needed to inventory everything in my house, especially valuable items like jewelry and artwork.
Travel insurance is a game-changer. It can keep a physically and emotionally stressful travel experience gone wrong from becoming a financial disaster. But only if you have the coverage you need.
As I described last week, my wife and I recently had our 30th anniversary trip ruined by a mechanical delay. The travel insurance company denied the claim.
Here’s how you can avoid making the same mistake.
When a cancelled flight sank our 30th wedding anniversary expedition cruise to the Arctic, I learned something new about travel insurance. It was an expensive lesson.
As always, I had purchased travel insurance. As always, I assumed cancellation coverage was for any cancellation of a common carrier resulting in you losing non-refundable deposits. I also assumed that purchasing “travel interruption for any reason” coverage meant just that, for any reason. Unfortunately, I had not read the 48 pages of fine print that would have revealed my assumptions were wrong.
A study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund in January 2023 compared U.S. health care costs with those in other developed nations, the majority of which have some form of universal health care. The U.S. was the most expensive. Yet any comparison of a country’s health care costs must also consider any differences in tax burdens.
The high cost of health insurance raises two questions: One, are health insurance companies reaping excess profits while policyholders pay hefty premiums? And two, why don’t more insurance companies jump into the health insurance market, providing needed competition that would help drive down the cost of health insurance?
The unconscious beliefs we hold around money affect our financial choices throughout our lives—and even beyond. Our money scripts have an impact on the way we think about final expenses for our loved ones and ourselves.
One important thing to take along when you travel abroad is travel insurance. I needed to use mine on three international trips this year. Obviously, my post-pandemic travel is not going well. While traveling back to the U.S. with a 102-degree fever is miserable, the pain is even worse if you don’t have medical coverage.
