TSCL enthusiastically supports H.R. 1902 and H.R. 2016, and we were pleased to see support grow for them this week. For more information on the status of the bills, visit the Bill Tracking section of our website..Senate Committee Debates Future of ACA.Unlicensed loan offers through the mail, via telephone, or door-to-door. "Auto payments of per month! Interest rates as low as 2.4 APR! Keys to the door of your next car!" It's not unusual to find auto loan offers in your mailbox, but beware. Make sure any lender you work with is legitimate, and licensed..Dependentparent benefit based on account of person who has reached age 62..Remember "Flo"? In 1999 she was the blond, perky, mature lady who came onto our TV screens telling us that she was here "to tell seniors about changes that affect our medicines." She would end by saying "I don't want big government in my medicine cabinet." Flo implied that, if Medicare provided a drug benefit for seniors, it would stifle research and development of new life-saving drugs coming to market and restrict access to drugs a patient was already taking..A question to ask yourself is how long you plan to stay in the home, and how many years remain on your current mortgage. If your current mortgage only has 10 or 15 years left to go, refinancing is likely to result in higher lifetime interest costs. When you get a new loan, most of the charges in the early years go towards interest costs. But if you only have a few years left on your current loan, you have moved past that stage and are making progress toward paying off your loan balance. If you refinance now, you start over from scratch..The proposal to cut the growth of COLAs formed a major Social Security reform provision of President Obama's 2010 Fiscal Commission. It would reduce the growth rate in COLAs by switching to the more slowly-growing "chained" CPI. "The switch is insidious because it's enormously complicated to figure out, and it looks so small on paper - just 0.03 tenths of a percentage point," Hyland observes. "But the loss compounds over time. Within a decade it would have a significant financial punch that just keeps getting bigger," Hyland explains. The following chart provided by TSCL illustrates the impact of a chained CPI on a married couple's Social Security benefits, which start at a total of ,500 per month today, and how their benefits change over the first ten years. After ten years the chained CPI would reduce benefits by per month, and would cut benefits by ,488 over the ten-year period..Quite likely. Age 62 is simple to remember because it's the same for everyone. But figuring out your full retirement age is hard because it differs for every one. It must be looked up online, or you must call the Social Security Administration to confirm it. Only one-out-of three people even know their full retirement age. But your full retirement age, whether it's 66, 66 plus 4 months, or 67, and the amount you can expect at that age, still doesn't get you your maximum benefit! Only half of all retirees even know that waiting until age 70 to claim retirement benefits gets you the maximum amount that you qualify for..Republicans, so far, have been unwilling to go along with any Democratic proposals although there is still bi-partisan work going on in the Senate to try and come up with legislation to lower drug prices.
