September 3rd, 2010 by admin
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Rieva Lesonsky
Although the results of the health-insurance reform passed earlier this year will take years to fully work out, there’s one way your small business might be able to save on health insurance right now, reports CFO Magazine: Do what a growing number of small businesses are doing, and self-insure.
Large companies have used self-insurance for a long time, but until recently, the conventional wisdom held that was only a good fit for businesses with 1,000 or more employees. But new data from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows the percentage of employers with fewer than 1,000 people that self-insure has risen from 29 percent in 2008 to 48 percent in 2010.
Here’s how self-insurance works: Rather than paying a monthly premium to an insurance company, your company agrees to pay for employees’ medical claims. As with insurance, you build some type of deductible or co-pay into the agreement, so the employee is paying some of the cost. Your company may still use an insurance company to administer some benefits, and may choose to get stop-loss insurance (which covers claims above a certain dollar amount and below a certain limit, so you can “cap” your costs).
» Read more: Can You Cut Your Health-Care Costs by Self-Insuring?
September 2nd, 2010 by admin
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With the increase in pollution and higher rate of health issues, an increased stress has been laid on the use of environment-friendly technologies in all aspects of life. Even the construction of homes has laid stress on energy-efficient solutions to build green homes that are beneficial both for human life and the environment.
Making a green home has become easy and reasonable in the present scenario. It does not take much of efforts and cost to trace some of the effective heating and cooling devices that will help to build a green home. Here are some of the excellent tips to make your home eco-friendly:
The first step to make your home green is to build walls that are well insulated. Such walls maintain a healthy balance of heat flow out and in of the house during winters and summers respectively. This dramatically reduces the amount of energy required for heat flow in and out.
» Read more: Effective Tips to Make a Green Home
September 2nd, 2010 by admin
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Michelle Kaufmann has been called the high priestess of green “prefab” design. The architect, who worked for Frank Gehry early in her career, was one of the first to make a persuasive case that prefabricated design — which saves time and reduces waste compared with conventional home building, among other benefits — could be green and chic. Her old firm, Oakland, Calif.-based mkDesigns, designed and built 51 prefab homes since 2004, more than any other architectural firm, according to Kaufmann. Each structure was built as a series of boxes in a factory that were then shipped and assembled out in the field.
In May, amid the economic downturn, Kaufmann closed mkDesigns after two factory partners went under and several clients lost financing for projects. The experience was “devastating,” Kaufmann said, but after some soul searching she committed to pursuing her passion for making “thoughtful, sustainable design accessible.” Kaufmann launched a new firm, Sausalito, Calif.-based Michelle Kaufmann Studio, and sold the assets of mkDesigns to Waltham, Mass.-based Blu Homes. Her new firm will design prefab homes, but now Kaufmann is focusing more on larger community developments, which she says will benefit from economies of scale. We sat down with Kaufmann during last week’s West Coast Green conference in San Francisco to discuss the prefab industry.
» Read more: Q&A: Michelle Kaufmann on the Future of Green Prefab Homes
