As The Drum Turns…

Employees can make changes to their coverage (add/delete dependents or change their coverage) between now and the end of January which is considered to be the Open Enrollment period. Any change after that date will require a “Qualifying Event” as defined by the IRS. (typically such things as marriage, divorce, birth, death, loss of coverage that was in effect or becoming eligible for coverage not previously eligible for).

For more details please contact our HR Department.

It’s no secret that the market has been volatile over the past year. In fact, it is also no secret that a lot of people with investments have been trying to figure out the best way to protect their savings.

One proven strategy to help achieve pong term retirement security is to give careful consideration to the benefits of a well balanced and diversified investment portfolio.

This simply means allocating your money among different types of investments to help achieve a favorable rate of return while minimizing your overall risk of losing money. This results from market or other economic conditions that cause one category of assets to perform well often can cause another asset category to perform poorly.

If you invest more than 20% of your retirement savings in any one company or industry your savings may not be properly diversified. While diversification is not a guarantee against loss, it is an effective strategy to help you manage investment risk.

No single approach is right for everyone because individuals have different financial goals, different time frames for meeting those goals and different tolerances for risk.

It is important to periodically review your investment objectives and the options available in our Plan to help ensure that your retirement savings will meet your retirement goals.

We have started the annual review of our healthcare plan looking at our Plan performance as well as plan design and the cost to provide the benefit.

This year has been a reasonably “good” year for our plan as our paid claims have not exceeded the contributions from participants and the company which has allowed us to build our reserves for potential catastrophic losses.

While this is certainly good news, we also know that the cost of healthcare will continue to rise in 2010 as will the administrative costs to administer our Plan. Various surveys project costs to rise as much as 8% next year.

In addition, the continued debate over healthcare reform can potentially impact costs depending on the final bill and any additional requirements of private plans. We will continue to closely monitor this activity.

It is always important for all of us to do what we can to help control the cost of healthcare. Some actions that all of us can take to make this happen include;

• Making healthy lifestyle choices in diet and exercise

• Get an annual physical to make sure if there are any issues that they can be detected early

• Establish a relationship with a primary care doctor BEFORE you get ill. Having a regular physician who knows you and your health can mean earlier detection of disease/illness and often lower cost treatments.

• Consider requesting generic drugs whenever they are available

We will be announcing any plan changes as well as the cost for the Plan in the next few weeks.