Kevin Kroskey's Money & Mind

A Texas County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty is a "proven fighter for better roads, lower taxes, and responsible county spending." His wife also doesn't want him driving her crazy in retirement and is using this message to help him get re-elected. As a sign I once saw in a restaurant said, "Retirement: Half the Money and Twice The Husband." Have a plan for retirement -- for financial and non-financial aspects -- to ensure you are fulfilled with yourself as well as your relationships. And, have a laugh at Gerald's video.

By all accounts, stress—and its accompanying emotional mix of frustration, anxiety and fear—are bad for your health. When you experience stress in your body, you release increased amounts of glucose from our liver into your blood, and your body produces cortisone, which is actually toxic to your system. Your heart rate goes up, sending more enriched blood to your muscles. Your immune system kicks into high gear, and you stay in this high-alert state, which is only designed to help you, combat real threats, depleting you physically. Now, researchers have discovered that stress is contagious—that is, you can catch it from those around you, and even from the evening news.   Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted an experiment where they gave individuals a series of very challenging arithmetic questions and interviewed them—in both cases, in order to induce direct stress. They had another group of subjects watch the test and interviews...

According to the Student Loan Marketing Association (more commonly known as Sallie Mae Bank), the average tuition, room and board at a private college comes to $43,921. Public tuition for in-state students at state colleges amounted to $19,548 (about half of which is room and board), with out-of-state students paying an average of $34,031. How are parents and students finding the cash to afford this expense? Sallie Mae breaks it down as follows: 34% from scholarships and grants that don’t have to be paid back, coming from the college itself or the state or federal government, often based on need and academic performance. Parents typically pay 29% of the total bill (an average of $7,000) out of savings or income, and other family members (think: grandparents) are paying another 5%. The students themselves are paying for 12% of the cost, on average. The rest, roughly 20% of the total, is made up of loans.  The federal government’s loan program offers up to $5,500 a yea...

We all know that money cannot buy you happiness, right? As it turns out, this is not exactly true. A recent study by University of Michigan economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, examining data from more than 150 countries using World Bank data, has shed new light on the interaction between happiness and the size of your bank account. Their first conclusion: the more money you have, the happier you tend to be, regardless of where you are on the income spectrum. They also concluded that multi-millionaires do not think of themselves as “rich.” However, there do seem to be income levels where a person’s happiness can be increased faster than others are. Princeton University economist Angus Deaton has found that peoples’ day-to-day happiness level rises until they reach about $75,000 in income—a point where a person can comfortably afford the basic necessities of life without worrying where his or her next meal is going to come from. After that, this type of happiness le...

With all the news about long lines at the airport, now more than ever is the time to consider getting yourself "PreChecked". The one most commonly used by travelers is TSA PreCheck. It costs $85 for 5 years. This option is perfect for travelers who are flying within the United States. You'll skip the long lines, keep your shoes on and not even half to pull out your laptop. The other, broader option is called Global Entry. It costs $100 and it's a great option if you plan to travel internationally. Global Entry allows users to expedite the customs procedures in addition to speeding up the typical airport screening process. I personally recommend Global Entry. I originally signed up for TSA PreCheck but ran into an issue. Some of the discount airline carriers I use do not use TSA PreCheck. There is no Known Traveler ID printed on the boarding pass. Thus I was not able to skip the security lines at the airport when flying with these carriers. Global Entry, howe...

“I'm fascinated with the problem of why really smart people have such a hard time predicting the future. It is mostly because the future is more random than we think. But it's also because future performance (like earnings and economic growth) doesn't tell you half of what you need to know to predict future outcomes.” The above was taken from a recent and insightful article entitled Performance Vs Outcomes (Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool). The author described and provides examples in the world of investing that successfully picking what will do well requires not only predicting what may happen in the future, but also out predicting what everyone else’s expectation of what the future will be as well. In other words, to be successful with investing, it’s not only necessary to predict what may happen in the future, but also to evaluate whether the rest of the market is already pricing in that same expectation, or not. For instance, we’ve long known that soda consumptio...

Shareholders of publicly traded companies have an important job of providing a system of checks and balances on the company's corporate governance, including executive pay plans. Agents of the company (executives) have an inherent conflict of interest in maximizing their own wealth versus maximizing the wealth of the principals (shareholders). You can look back to 2008 and come up with a slew of examples illustrating this principal-agent problem , which in part provided the impetus for the 2010 "Say on Pay" rules in the Dodd Frank Act. Bloomberg recently had an intriguing article showing how the largest shareholders of publicly traded companies -- mutual funds -- generally fall in line with corporate boards for executive pay decisions but some notable outliers exist, having a more discriminating view of these pay plans and advocating for shareholder interests. The "most agreeable" of the mutual fund giants voted with directors on executive pay plans 97 percen...