According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, there are more than 80 abortion funds that help patients seeking the procedure or medication. Other groups, including the Brigid Alliance, help provide travel, lodging and logistical support to patients.

Is coverage for infertility treatments or contraceptives affected?

Contraceptive coverage is not affected by the ruling. Most private health plans, including plans in the health insurance marketplace, must cover contraceptive methods and counseling, including emergency contraceptives, as prescribed by a health care provider, according to Ellen Montz, director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the Center for Medicare Medicaid Services.

These plans must cover these services without charging a co-payment or coinsurance when provided by an in-network provider — even if someone hasn’t met the deductible, she added.

But there are fears that some types of infertility treatments, which are increasingly covered by employer-provided insurance, could be restricted, depending on the legal language included in abortion bans.

Legal experts say new rules don’t pose an immediate threat to infertility patients, their health care providers and embryos created in labs, but that could quickly change, depending on how the new abortion bans are enforced.

“That could be the next frontier,” said Ms. Raaii of McDermott, Will Emery, “through which states try to enforce these laws against patients, providers, employers, payers or others.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/your-money/health-insurance/abortion-health-insurance-coverage.html

Employees should carefully consider the options for their retirement savings when leaving a job, including leaving it in the old employer’s plan. The fees in that plan may be lower, but you would have to compare. (Some employers will not let you leave your money behind if the balance is small.)

Here are some questions and answers about rolling over retirement balances:

How can I compare fees for different mutual funds?

Typically, you can find a fund’s expense ratio, often labeled “total annual fund operating expenses,” on its management company’s website or in the fund’s prospectus.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a private group that regulates brokerage firms, offers an online fund analyzer that lets you compare information about different funds, including expenses.

Administrators of 401(k) plans are required to disclose fund fees, but research from the Government Accountability Office suggests many participants have difficulty using the information.

What if my financial adviser recommends rolling my 401(k) over to an I.R.A.?

Ask for the reasoning behind the advice, because advisers may earn fees from managing your money in an I.R.A. As of July 1, advisers must provide written documentation explaining why a recommended rollover is in your best interest, said Nevin E. Adams, a spokesman for the American Retirement Association, an industry group. The mandate is part of rules recently adopted by the Department of Labor.

Are there any drawbacks to keeping my retirement money at a former employer?

You cannot contribute to a former employer’s 401(k) plan, said Heather Winston, director of financial planning and advice at Principal Financial Group. So if you leave it behind, you should contribute to a new account to keep your retirement savings on track. Sticking to an employer plan means you are limited to the company’s menu of investments, she said, while an I.R.A. may offer more options.

Also, it can be challenging to keep track of multiple accounts if you change jobs several times, said Michael J. Garry, founder and chief executive of Yardley Wealth Management. Consolidating them in an I.R.A. can make it easier to make sure funds are correctly allocated among different types of investments.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/your-money/retirement-account-mutual-funds-savings.html

Publication 502 governs here, too, at least in theory. Employers have the ability, if they wish, to exclude some expenses that they don’t want their flexible spending accounts to cover. Already, these exclusions sometimes include abortion.

Could more employers exclude it? Here’s what may have them concerned: Your medical procedures have to be legal ones.

So consider this possibility: An employee in a state where abortions are almost entirely illegal orders abortion pills to her home and then submits the receipt for reimbursement from the flexible spending account. Is it a covered expense? Perhaps, though at some point a state may try to prosecute someone who takes the pills.

Then there’s the employee who travels from a state where abortion is almost entirely illegal to get an abortion in a state where it’s still legal. That procedure may seem fine for reimbursement, but which state’s laws ought to prevail? Or could it depend on where the company’s headquarters are — some third state, perhaps? Again, the risk here could eventually land with the person getting the abortion and not the employer or the plan administrator.

We put the expense eligibility questions to HealthEquity, a leading third-party administrator of these plans. It seems poised to approve abortion-related expenses in all of the above cases, at least for now.

Here’s the company’s reasoning: When it comes to employee benefits plans, federal tax laws and regulations are supposed to be the primary rule-making mechanism. And on June 24, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland put out a statement noting that states cannot prevent residents from traveling to another state for care. Moreover, he pointed out that abortion pills were federally approved.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/your-money/abortion-employer-federal-coverage.html

Now is also a good time to renew career contacts and to sign up for training that may help expand marketable skills, should you find yourself out of work.

“This is a great time to network and polish up that résumé,” said Jen Smith, a co-host, with Jill Sirianni, of the “Frugal Friends” budgeting podcast.

Here are some questions and answers about coping with economic uncertainty:

What is the best way to reduce credit card debt?

There are two common approaches. The first calls for identifying the card with the highest interest rate and putting extra money toward paying off that balance first. (At the same time, make the minimum payments on your other cards.) When that card is paid off, apply the extra cash to the card with the next highest rate and so on.

The second approach involves paying off the card with the smallest balance first, for a sense of quick progress, while making minimum payments on the others. When the first card is paid off, move to the next lowest balance.

If you have strong credit, consider applying for a card with a zero-percent transfer offer. You can move high-interest balances to the new account and pay them off without incurring extra interest. However, you’ll typically pay a fee of 3 to 5 percent of the balance you are moving, so this technique makes sense only if you can pay off the balance during the no-interest period, which often lasts 18 months.

If you need more help, nonprofit credit counselors offer debt management plans for a fee, which is offset by lower rates negotiated with card companies. The Justice Department offers a list of approved credit counseling agencies on its website.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/your-money/credit-card-debt-economy.html

A Sudden Shake-Up

If coupons had been slowly dying for years, the pandemic delivered a sharp blow.

Seemingly overnight, roiling supply chains and the lurch from office to home left consumers desperate to buy anything they could get their hands on; brand preferences went out the window. When inflation started to spike last year, not only did retailers have trouble keeping shelves stocked, they weren’t even sure they could maintain stable prices until the coupons expired.

“The last thing those manufacturers want to do is put more incentives on those because it’s going to spike demand up even more,” said Spencer Baird, Inmar’s interim chief executive. “This is what we very consistently hear: ‘We’ve got a budget, we’re ready to go, but until we get my fill rate where it needs to be, I don’t want to mess up my supply chain.’”

Use of even digital coupons sank in 2020, for the first time, before rebounding. While most of those are tethered to a specific retailer, the coupon industry is working on a universal standard that will allow shoppers to redeem digital coupons at any retailer that signs up.

But there’s no guarantee that retailers will stick with coupons, when other incentives are gaining in popularity.

Lisa Thompson works for Quotient, a company formerly known as Coupons.com, which started in 1998 as a website where you could print coupons rather than clipping them. The company is scaling back printable coupons, and the Coupons.com app already mostly offers cash-back promotions instead.

“Honestly, it’s a dying form of savings, and we know that,” Ms. Thompson said of paper coupons. “A lot of my work has been working with the marketing team to make ‘coupon’ sound sexy.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/business/economy/grocery-coupons-inflation.html

That makes it tempting to head away from the post for extra money.

A few miles south of Fort Campbell’s gates, Nicole Allen was working the front desk at Grifols Biomat USA Plasma Center, which had a “Welcome Home Troops” sign over the entry. About 20 percent of the people who come in to sell that part of their blood are enlisted men and women, she said. New donors can earn up to $1,100 in their first month.

A donor referral program can yield even more. “That’s how we see the military,” Ms. Allen said. “They tell the whole company.”

But what if you need more than that?

The lender at the front of the line

The founding mythos of Omni Military Loans begins with Staff Sgt. Fred Nives. After World War II, he wanted a car but couldn’t get a loan.

The firm that he started decades ago has a branch near Fort Campbell, a prime corner spot in a well-kept strip mall. Accolades cover the walls, including a years-old Better Business Bureau “torch” award: Omni had been a local semifinalist for ethics.

The company offers a simple product — installment loans of $500 to $10,000 that last up to 36 months. The term length is no accident. Most people stay in the Army for at least that long but often go delinquent on consumer debts when they leave the service.

Omni makes it very easy to pay, with a set-it-and-forget-it system that other lenders can only dream of. Decades before automatic payments from checking accounts were common, the Department of Defense gave soldiers the ability to pay bills through its allotment system. Soldiers divvy up their paychecks before they hit their bank accounts, sending some back home or, in the case of Omni, to pay off a loan.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/your-money/fort-campbell-military-installations.html

Tobias Pratt, a 31-year-old mortgage underwriter in Atlanta, decided to look for his first home in the spring of 2021. He had a well-paying job and a solid down payment, and his rent was ticking higher. Getting preapproved for a mortgage seemed like a wise move.

“I finally felt like I was in a good space to do it,” Mr. Pratt said.

But with housing prices so inflated, Mr. Pratt was quickly squeezed out of the market. He decided to try again in March because his lease was about to expire and the rent on his one-bedroom was about to rise by another $200, to $1,900. This time, high mortgage rates, which began climbing earlier this year, have narrowed his prospects even further. Instead of looking solely at single-family homes, he started considering condos — but those are expensive now as well.

“I can afford maybe two-thirds of what I could afford last year,” Mr. Pratt said, adding that the monthly mortgage payment could be as much as $700 higher, depending on the size of the loan. “But with housing prices still soaring, the inventory is limited.”

He also noticed that his grocery bill, which reliably cost about $225 for an online order placed every two weeks, had jumped to $300 in mid-March. “I was like, ‘Whoa, back up a minute,’” he said. “I looked at my last bill and I ordered pretty much the same groceries.”

That was when he decided to start tracking his spending more closely, noting expenses in a journal, looking for places to trim. He eliminated several recurring subscriptions, including Spotify and Experian’s credit tracking service; negotiated a lower-priced plan with his cellphone company; and started ordering less takeout from Uber Eats. To reduce his grocery bill, he swapped name brands for generic products, eliminated bottled water and cut back on extras.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/your-money/inflation-consumer-behavior.html

This man was a financial adviser, and I would have thought that a useful piece of financial advice for two life partners is to be transparent about finances with each other. Learning his income shouldn’t have come as a gut punch. Now for a few caveats. You can’t be absolutely sure that he lied about his net worth, which reflects the value of his estate minus his debts. Either way, it would be odd to apportion your relative expenses by net worth, which can fluctuate with the market value of your assets, including highly illiquid ones. And that clearly wasn’t the arrangement you two had; otherwise, going by his reporting, your share would be 40 percent, not a third. (If, instead, you paid in proportion to the income you now know him to have, your share would come to a sixth, not a fifth.)

Your response to what you discovered makes it plain that he has been misleading you about how much money he has. That’s a breach of your agreement and an act of dishonesty. I doubt you will be able to begin to restore your trust in him unless you let him know what you are feeling. Maybe his shifty ways are restricted to the realm of money; maybe, though, he simply isn’t worthy of your trust. People differ in respect of how much bad character they can tolerate in a partner. That punch to the gut, however, may reflect the realization that this man isn’t the life partner you thought you committed yourself to. The fact that you, in turn, have kept from him what you’ve learned and how you feel about it — the fact, bluntly, that you’re pretending to be in the dark — suggests that a serious trust deficit has settled between the two of you. Have that uncomfortable talk. But it may not be possible to pay this deficit down.

Some months ago, a friend of mine went to Kenya, and we discussed his not being vaccinated when he was planning the trip. Both his doctor and I urged him to get vaccinated because of his age, his weight and his high blood pressure. He told me I was living in fear and went anyway. He almost died there after getting hit with Delta and later Omicron. He was in the I.C.U. both times over a six-week period. When he did not return home as scheduled, I called a Kenyan friend of his in the United States about his welfare. I was told he was in the I.C.U. a second time and that this friend was dealing with the hospital and the bill. His friend then asked me point blank: “Tell me something, and I want the truth. Was my friend vaccinated?” I told him no and explained that I tried to convince him to get vaccinated before his trip. Now my friend is back home with health issues and refuses to speak to me. I suspect it is because I told the truth when asked about it. Was I wrong? Under the circumstances, I felt that his Kenyan friend needed the truth for medical reasons. Name Withheld

You didn’t learn your friend’s vaccine status as a health care provider or as an insurer. It would seem, rather, that he told you himself, without demanding confidentiality. While random gossip about someone’s vaccine status might violate the reasonable expectations of a friend, you were discussing someone’s situation with another friend of his, someone involved in his care. You had no obligation to treat what you knew as confidential. It’s not that the other man needed the truth for medical reasons. But he did have cause to inquire — this patient’s mulish and misguided decision imposed a significant burden on him — and you certainly would have been wrong to lie.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/magazine/what-should-you-do-when-your-partner-lies-about-his-earnings.html

And I view it as fulfillment of a fiduciary obligation. Assets aren’t being managed to the greatest interest of beneficiaries if, in fact, they can’t breathe or life is too dangerous at the end of their wealth building. So I see it as a means to an end, and that end is a planet that is livable — and lives worth living. And I see it as a strategy that explicitly acknowledges that investors have a role to play in providing these outcomes to the world.

LIEBER: Rachel, you were familiar with Amy’s funds. Did you come to a different conclusion?

RACHEL ROBASCIOTTI: We call our work “social justice investing.” It’s the deep integration of four areas: racial, gender, economic and climate justice.

LIEBER: Defining justice seems messy these days. On one hand, some investors don’t want to invest in weapons manufacturers. On the other, many of them would very much like to put more weapons in the hands of the Ukrainians.

ROBASCIOTTI: In the world our investors want to live in, the government is responsible for weapons and defense, and that is not a private activity.

LIEBER: Wait, so the government should be producing weapons?

DOMINI: Capitalism is great at distributing goods and services broadly and cheaply. Weapons shouldn’t be distributed broadly and cheaply.

LIEBER: Academics have been talking for years about how so-called active investing is a bad idea — that it’s just too hard to actively select the stocks that will do better than others over the long haul. Doesn’t E.S.G. investing violate these principles?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/your-money/esg-investing-stocks-elon-musk.html

The popularity of sales tax holidays is dismaying to many tax policy experts, who say the events offer shoppers a modest break at best and are often not well targeted to consumers who most need the savings. “State tax holidays tend to be political gimmicks,” Mr. Walczak said.

Some research suggests the holidays may simply shift the timing of purchases and, therefore, have limited net economic impact. And a report from the Tax Foundation says retailers may sometimes raise prices during the events.

“What we’re seeing is a lack of imagination about what to do in trying times to help people,” said Dylan Grundman O’Neill, senior state tax policy analyst with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Still, that doesn’t mean an individual consumer may not benefit from buying specific items during tax holidays, he said, which helps explain why both politicians and consumers like them. “We all like to feel we’re getting a good deal.”

Here are some questions and answers about state tax holidays:

Where can I get information about sales tax holidays in my state?

Most state revenue departments offer details online about how the sales work, including dates and lists of items covered.

How much can I save during a sales tax holiday?

It depends on the state and the item purchased. All but five states charge sales taxes, ranging from 4 percent of the sale to more than 7 percent, and some also have local sales taxes that can push the combined rate above 9 percent. Most states cap the amount of purchases exempt from tax during the holiday. Some require cities and towns to participate, while others make the tax holiday optional.

Do state sales tax holidays apply to items bought online?

Yes. The tax exemption applies if the item is bought online during the tax holiday, even if it is delivered after the holiday ends, according to state websites. But items bought online and delivered out of state are generally subject to sales tax in the state where the item is received, said Scott Peterson, vice president of U.S. tax policy and government relations at Avalara, a provider of tax compliance software.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/your-money/tax-free-shopping-state-holiday.html