Enjoy your weekend!

Thirty-two-year old family physician Doug Nunamaker of Wichita, Kan., said after five years of dealing with the red tape of health insurance companies and the high overhead for the staff he hired just to deal with paperwork, he switched to a system of charging his patients a monthly fee plus the price of an office visit or test, CNN/Money reported.

For example, under Nunamaker’s membership plan — also known as “concierge” medicine or “direct primary care” practices — each patient pays a flat monthly fee to have unlimited access to the doctors and any medical service they can provide in the practice, such as stitches or an EKG.

For adults up to age 44, Nunamaker charges $50 a month, pediatric services are $10 a month, and for adults age 44 and older it costs $100 a month. Although Nunamaker calls the practice “cash-only,” he accepts credit and debit cards for the fees and services.

I have always thought that insurance was the reason health care was so expensive. If we could somehow cut out all the red tape, then prices could be lower. Looks like doctors are finally figuring it out.

Couple something like this with a proactive approach to health care (diet and exercise),it could be the formula of the future.

Peanut, cotton and rice farmers are big beneficiaries of price guarantees tucked into agriculture legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill. But another big winner may be producers of what is known as sticky rice, the kind used in sushi and other Asian dishes across America—and grown by a congressman who helped push for the provision.

The federal subsidy in the House bill guarantees farmers of Japonica Rice that if market prices drop below 115% of the average price of all types of rice, they will get a government payment to make up the difference. Japonica is the formal name for medium- and short-grain rice strains commonly called sticky rice.

Pretty ridiculous, isn’t it? Our politicians only care about themselves. There are no statesmen.

From my second son (he’s 16-years old):

“You know what feels good? Wen a kid from school asks if he can work for you.”

He and his business partner have a lawn mowing and pressure washing business. Their goal is to make $20,000 this summer. Seems pretty lofty but I’m proud of them for trying instead of setting around all summer playing video games. My oldest is working at a grocery store.

I’m very proud of my kids.

…parental brag off.

In the study was the following chart (I took the information and made my own spreadsheet):

Of course, that only tells part of the story. Here are the risk-adjusted returns:

The study’s author mentions that the returns for the equal-weighted (“EW”) index will be buoyed during up markets due to the fact that smaller cap stocks will be weighted more heavily than in the market cap-weighted index. The author also said that the EW index will lag during down markets. You can see from the above returns, that isn’t always true.

One thing that’s important to know is that equally-weighting indexes requires more trading, which will increase costs. The Guggenheim Investments Equally-Weighted S&P 500 Index ETF (formerly Rydex) has a .40% expense ratio.

This article from DailyFinance has these tidbits about MY generation:

• 41 percent of Gen Xers have saved less than $100,000 for retirement.
• 15 percent have begun borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, siphoning funds out of their 401(k) plans ahead of retirement.
• 23 percent have stopped contributing to their retirement accounts altogether.

UGH!

Granted, times haven’t been exactly easy on our generation. We suffered through the dot com bust and then the housing crisis. Those who were fortunate enough to not lose their jobs and were able to save money for retirement through the two crises, probably did alright (remember, it’s better to buy when prices are low).

The article goes on to list several of the causes of the poor numbers for Generation X. As the saying goes, it is what it is. I’m sure there are those who can’t afford to save a dime. However, I doubt this is the case for everyone. For those who can, I highly recommend starting yesterday. Prioritize. Put off buying stuff that’s not needed. Make it a goal to save $200 per month (NOTE: NOT including inflation, $200 per month over 20 years will grow to $181,000. No, it’s not a lot but it’s better than nothing. Don’t like that number? Save more.).

Oh, and pray for an inheritance. Good luck getting one from the Baby Boomers.

S&P 500, MidCap 400, SmallCap 600, & Other Indexes Performance (01-2011 – 05-2013)

This May’s 2.34% total return for the S&P 500 broke a 3 year losing streak for the month of May.

Yeah, you read the title correctly. I have an iPhone 5. I parted ways with my beloved BlackBerry and went with an iPhone 5.

I have had my iPhone 3 weeks. Here are my thoughts so far:

Pros:

• It’s a beautiful phone (of course it loses a lot of that beauty when you wrap it in an ugly case. I went with a holster/cover by Aduro that I ordered from Amazon. The Otterbox is huge and ugly and the belt holster would make me feel like I was lugging around a hammer.

• The phone is smooth. I really like the apps that are available. (More on this in a future post.)

• The camera is excellent (my boys tell me that the camera hasn’t changed from the 4s to the 5 so it’s not a “new” feature of the 5).

• iCloud synching is extremely useful. I love that I can add a contact on either my iPhone, iPad, or even my Windows computer and it a second later it’s updated on all the devices. With my BlackBerry, I had to manually update between my devices, which was a pain.

• Evernote on my iPhone, iPad, and computer is an excellent tool. I had a text version of Evernote on my BlackBerry but it wasn’t useful like Evernote is on my iPhone. Evernote was the big reason I chose the iPhone.

Cons:

Honestly, there is really only one con—other than typing on a touchscreen—that I can see with the iPHone 5, but it’s a big one…

• BATTERY LIFE STINKS! It’s almost as if Apple focused so much on making the phone pretty that they didn’t even consider battery life. Under normal use, my phone will not make it through a day without needing to be recharged. That’s unacceptable in my opinion.

I did some reading and found some suggestions on how to increase batter life. Some of them are things like: turn off location services, disable iCloud, blah, blah, blah. One website said that Evernote could be the culprit responsible for running down the battery. All of the suggestions require turning the iPhone into a pretty brick. In other words, what’s the point of an iPhone if you have to turn off all the features that make it an iPhone?

It’s possible that I have a bad battery. I’ll have to take the phone into an Apple store (the closest one is 100 miles away) and they can test it for me. If it’s bad, Apple will replace my phone, I’m sure.

So, that’s been my experience thus far.

What are your thoughts?

Take the quiz and report back here how you did.

Good luck!

Investor Knowledge Quiz