docj

With all due respect, I'm not sure why you consider the plan to be all that good. My spouse has had several surgeries since she went on Medicare and none of them have cost us even a dime. We have Plan F supplementals which have now been superseded by Plan G. Our total annual premium costs, including long term care, are less than the $9k you mentioned.

With all due respect that is an article from 2011. On December 19, 2011 AT&T dropped its merger offer after serious public, Congressional and legal resistance.

Didn't you do an annualized cost analysis before you made the change? Of course, the plan with the lower premiums will charge you more for the Rx. It's a net zero sum game; it all has to turn out roughly the same in the long run. The trick is finding the one that is the best one for your particular set of prescriptions.

Yes, you appear to not understand that there is an annual "open season" for Medicare supplements every year in the Nov-Dec timeframe. So the worst that can happen is that, in the middle of the year, you start taking a medication that isn't on your current plan. If that happens you have to limp along until you get to open season when you will, hopefully, find a plan that covers it. If you change plans, your new coverage will start on January 1. We've done this multiple times. That's why I said that you can't just focus on premium costs; one year we both switched to plans with higher premiums in order to get coverage of all our meds.

Our experience has been that if we carefully analyzed the drug plans (Part D) each year relative to the medications we used, we have always been able to get all of our meds covered. My wife takes several high-priced meds, but we've always been able to shop for plans that covered them. What many people aren't aware of is that different Part D plans from the same insurance carrier can often have significantly different formularies. For example, this year my wife and I both have AARP Part D plans through United Healthcare. Since we always have our Rx filled at Walgreens, I wondered why I was on the "Walgreens AARP plan" and she was not. Sure enough, one of her expensive meds wasn't covered under the Walgreens plan. Yet the premiums for both our plans are in the ~$30/mo range. But her total costs would have been a lot higher on my plan. Changing Part D plans is very easy and acceptance is guaranteed as long as you had coverage in the previous year by another carrier. We've probably changed Part D plans in ~5 out of the 8 years we've both had Medicare. When selecting plans we only focus on the total annualized cost of the plan, including premiums and co-pays. Focusing only on premium costs can sometimes result in a faulty analysis.

With all due respect, if you choose the correct Medicare supplemental plan you will have essentially no exposure regardless of what your medical condition. Prescription plans do have co-pays, but if you analyze your plan each year using a calculator, like what you can find on the Medicare website, you can minimize those costs. When we started full-timing my wife had ~18 months without Medicare coverage. We bit the bullet and bought her a plan at the limit of what we could afford and we kept our fingers crossed. We lucked out and nothing serious happened until after she was on Medicare.

I just purchased a new Dell G5 to replace my aging Inspiron. Even though I went from a 4K display to an HD one, the fact that it is a 144kHz refresh rate is amazing. Letters are crisp and clear even at very small sizes! The G-series Dells are "gamer" systems. I'm no gamer, but they had the kind of configuration I was looking for-- 10th gen Core i7, 16GB of RAM, 515GB SSD, a NVIDIA video board. If anyone is interested in a 4 year old Inspiron 7559 with a 6th gen Core i7, 16GB of RAM . a 256GB SSD, a 1TB HDD, and a 4K touch screen let me know. Runs Windows 10 (not updated to version 2004). The primary issue is that the hinges are failing. One hinge was reinforced last summer by a shop in Canada using couple of screws carefully inserted from the bottom. The second hinge needs the same thing done to it. If you have an application where you can simply keep it folded up and use it as a server it would be fine.

I'd add April 5, 1968 to that list along with May 4, 1970.

I'm amazed that anyone would launch a new print magazine in 2020. JMO

How can 1,500 reports of issues with unrelated items made by a large number of subcontract vendors over a 4 year period mean anything? Are we expected to believe there's a correlation between fires in USB chargers, routers, UPS devices, extension cords, etc, etc? We're told that 10% of the reports resulted in fires. That's ~150 fires across a collection of unrelated stuff over four years out of who knows how many items that were sold?? You can't claim there's a problem until you know what the failure rate is. As I said in my previous post, almost everything has a failure rate; some of those failures can be serious, But recalls only happen when the RATE of dangerous failure exceeds accepted thresholds. Failures of unrelated items cannot be correlated with each other unless you can show some relationship , such as they were all made by the same Chinese factory.

With all due respect, this is the headline of the article in question. It doesn't say anything about Amazon Basics. I stick to my position that the intent of the article was to create clicks, plain and simple. Here's the headline: Dozens of Amazon's own products have been reported as dangerous -- melting, exploding or even bursting into flames. Many are still on the marketplace

With all due respect, I don't mean to downplay the potential threat of fire from a defective product, but IMHO the linked article is nothing but "click bait" journalism. I have no doubt that the discussed fires did occur, but the article lacks any reference to the absolute number of such problem or, more importantly, the defect rate as a percentage of items sold. I'm not condoning what may be Amazon's failure to recall the items mentioned, but until I learn more about the failure rate I wouldn't accuse the company of improper actions. Virtually everything has a defect and/or failure rate; what really matters is what is that rate and what are the consequences of failure. Recalls are required when a single item poses a risk at a rate high enough to trigger action. The problem with this article IMO is that it lumps failures of different, unrelated items into a collective fabric to make the situation seem more serious than it may be. There's nothing in common between the failure of USB charger and a powerstrip except that they both have the Amazon brand name. But it makes for good copy to be able to boldly write "Amazon products are defective!" That's why I class this article as "click bait". And, yes, I spend hundreds of dollars a month at Amazon. During this pandemic, in particular, Amazon has made our lives much easier.

There are a number of resellers (MVNOs) that sell unlimited hotspot service on several of the cellular networks. Most of those are on AT&T and T-Mobile. For unlimited Verizon service Visible is a good option. Most, if not all, of these unlimited plans have network management provisions so their speeds will vary. But the use of a load balancing router often will "smooth things out" and make streaming video feasible.

There's no mystery about how to use an older Trav'ler with SWM. The instructions for doing that have been located here for years: Using Winegard systems with SWM. We converted our Trav'ler SK3005 to SWM some ~7 years ago. But now it remains unused on our roof because we've cancelled DirecTV and now stream all our video.

My wife is now on her third "generation" of mask design. She now includes HEPA filters, adjustable ear elastics and shaped nose pieces. Because she has a sewing machine with embroidery capability, she has now started embroidering designs and even company logos on them.

No, we're running both but the two thermostats are set the same and the rear one hardly runs because the air flow from the front unit is enough to cool the coach until the very hottest part of the day. Admittedly, we face into the afternoon sun, so the rear has a lower heat load. But, it's also worth noting, that I have both fans set to low; there's much more air flow than there was with the Dometics that were replaced. Coleman claims that the use of a separate fan on the outdoor condenser allows the unit to develop its full cooling potential (15k BTU) even on low speed. I can't prove or disprove that, but they do provide a lot of cooling.

We just replaced the 20-yr-old 13.5 BTU A/C's in our 40' Beaver with 15k BTU Coleman Mach 8+ heat pumps. The change was dramatic. I'm sure the old units were dirty but I never appreciated how much more cooling we would get. We are in coastal TX and the temp and humidity has been horrible, but we're actually quite comfortable and the front A/C carries most of the load even on 95+ days. Furthermore these new units draw ~12 A while the old ones were more like ~16 A

We've towed our 2014 AWD CR-V for ~40,000 miles. I change the transmission fluid on a regular basis. I think I've changed it 3 times in the 90,000 miles we've put on the vehicle.

With all due respect, IMO there's a lot of misinformation traded on these forums about tires. Michelin used to have a lock on the RV community as a result of good marketing and the claim that they made "RV tires" rather than "truck tires". Since Michelins are seriously overpriced IMHO, now there are lots of people going to Toyos, without any specific evidence other than "I heard they are good tires." In reality there are a number of high quality tire manufacturers in the world who make tires that will work well on Class A (and other) MHs. ~6 years ago I changed out my steer tires for Hankook tires which provided a quieter smoother ride than did the Michelins they replaced. For 4 years we rode on 6 Hankooks. Those steer tires served us well and now have been replaced by top-of-the-line Bridgestones which I bought primarily because my daughter had been the manager of a Firestone store and was able to get me a great price on them.😁 (More on that later) What I look for when buying tires are those that are rated for "all position" use and I prefer styles that are advertised for "regional or urban" use" rather than those primarily focused on long haul trucking. As for price, let me say that the price I paid for my new Bridgestone tires was <40% of the lowest online price I could find for the same tires. So when you get excited about getting a modest discount because you a buying through FMCA or some other buying group, think you're getting such a good deal! It's still typical retail selling where the markup is at least 2x the wholesale price!

My wife is now on her third generation of mask design. Her masks fit better and are more comfortable than any commercial ones I've tried. She uses only high quality, tightly woven quilting fabrics, formed nose pieces and they have adjustable ear elastics. There's even a piece of HEPA fabric material as a filter. They're a lot easier to wear than the N95's we have. But yesterday, I noticed the temp was 90F, the dewpoint was 77F and the humidity was 69%. With those conditions it's simply unpleasant to be outside, with or without a mask.

In the Corpus Christi area where we live the new case rate had climbed to over ~500 per day before a mask order was imposed. I think the rate this week has been ~25-50/day. Yes, masks are uncomfortably hot in south TX weather, but they do seem to be effective in reducing the spread of the virus. But staying healthy seems inherently better than getting sick.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B000KFSLMO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

My property is in TX as is my broker. But I know that they insure parks all over the US

I encountered a similar issue when I purchased a lot in an "ownership RV park" in TX. We have 3,000 sq of property, a storage shed, a heated/cooled casita plus hookups. I was looking for liability coverage and contents and structure coverage. To my surprise no one wanted to cover it. If it was bare land they'd have gladly written a liability policy but no one wanted to touch the "improvements." To cut to the chase, I did find a brokerage that specializes in RV parks and, essentially, what they did for me was write an RV park policy for a park with one site--mine! I have no idea if they can help you, but it might be worth a call. I probably called at least a dozen places before finding them. This is the person who just handled my renewal: Liz Hoffman Rowley Insurance 512) 454-6655 Phone 800) 880-9397 Toll Free 512) 452-9018 Fax

If you look at the URL you can see that it's one of the many websites that list "Best Of" sorts of lists. The majority of them appear to exist to earn "click" revenues from ads. IMO almost all of them are suspect or worthless. If you want a real review of something try to find a site that actually performs tests. For example, If I'm looking for cooking advice I trust stuff I read here: Cooks Illustrated