How Many Students Get Athletic College Scholarships?

2%

Thats the answer.   2% of college students get an athletic scholarship.    I got that answer off the NCAA site.  

By comparison when I looked at merit scholarships last year in my article How Many College Students Get Scholarships?   I found that 8.3% of students got private scholarships and 8.8% got institutional scholarships.    I assume there is some overlap though  and there is nothing I know that keeps a student from getting private scholarships and athletic scholarships.


All and all though, I'd say its about 4 times as likely that an individual will get a merit based academic scholarship than an athletic scholarship.   However I'd assume athletic scholarships have a higher average value.

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Best of Blogs for Week of October 11th

Every Friday afternoon I share some of the more interesting or notable posts that I have seen in the personal finance blogs and other sources for the past week

The Big Picture shares Household Debt-to-Income Ratio, USA vs Canada

Planet Money shows Everyone The U.S. Government Owes Money To, In One Graph
If you or someone you know is under the mistaken impression that we owe "all our debt" to China (or Japan or something similar) then this would be a good graphic illustration to refute that kind of notion.

CNBC reports The top 10 landowners in America

Dough Roller answers Does Being an Authorized User on a Credit Card Improve Your Credit?
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How Do Parents Spend Their Time?

I read this article on Slate : Dads Watch TV Instead of Taking Care of Their Kids 
It pointed to a Pew Research study Parents’ Time with Kids More Rewarding Than Paid Work — and More Exhausting and the Pew study had a chart showing the number of hours that parents spend in leisure, childcare, paid work and housework in a week.   Dads spend 3 hours more a week in leisure time and Moms spend 7 hours more doing childcare.  So you could conclude like the Slate article did that men dump the kids on mom to go watch the NFL.

But wait...

The graphic on the Pew site shows that the total hours for men is more than the total hours for women.     Here's the break down of the numbers they show:

	Moms	Dads
leisure	24.5	27.5
childcare	13.5	7.3
housework	17.4	10
paid work	22.8	40.5

Clearly Dads are enjoying more leisure and Moms are doing more childcare.   But does that mean that Dads are watching TV *instead  of* or at the expense of childcare?     You'll notice that Dads do a lot more paid work than moms and moms do more housework than dads.

It just seems unfair that Dads have 3 hours more of leisure time doesn't it?

I told you to wait... are you still waiting...?       Ok, here it is lets look at the chart again :

See?    OK I'll make it more obvious :

If you add it up Dads spend a total of 57.8 hours doing paid work, housework and childcare and Moms spend 53.7 hours in those tasks.    I could stop there and make the kind of conclusion the Slate article made and declare that Dads do 4 hours more work in home and out of home than Moms in a given week.    But that would. be unfair as concluding that Dads ignore the kids to watch football.

You might notice that the hours in question don't add up to a full week.  The total for the 4 activities is 78.2 hours for Moms and 85.3 hours for dads which averages out to 11.2 hr and 12.2 hr daily for Moms and Dads respectively.   So we're only looking at about 1/2 of the total hours in a week here.   I am not going to assume people sleep 12 hours a day.   Where is the rest of the time going??

To get the real answers you have to go to the actual source of the data.  In this case the Pew Research "study" simply got the numbers from the BLS ATUS  or American Time Use Survey.   Ahh... good old BLS.  Not even shutdown during the shutdown.  

I'm honestly not sure where the Pew Research study got its numbers.   They say they used the 2010 data on the BLS ATUS but I can't find ATUS figures for 2010 that match exactly what Pew said.   I am probably just not finding the right table on the BLS so I'm not worried about that.  

In any case, I did find the BLS ATUS figures for 2012 that break down daily time use for parents and compare moms and dads.

Here''s a breakdown of the average time spent in various activities in a 24 hour day for Moms and Dads of children under 6 years of age :

And the table with the specific numbers :

	M	W
Sleeping	8.36	8.92
Personal care	0.56	0.68
Eating / Drinking	1.19	1.09
Household activities	1.11	2.28
Purchasing goods and services	0.59	0.82
Caring for and helping household members	1.51	2.54
Caring for and helping nonhousehold members	0.07	0.11
Working and work-related activities	5.33	3.04
Educational activities	0.23	0.2
Organizational, civic, and religious activities	0.28	0.27
Leisure and sports	4.49	3.69
Telephone calls, mail, and e-mail	0.05	0.09
Other activities, not elsewhere classified	0.22	0.27

Personally I find it hard to believe that people average that much sleep.  

Here is how much more time Dads do things than Moms sorted in order :

Working and work-related activities	2.29
Leisure and sports	0.8
Eating / Drinking	0.1
Educational activities	0.03
Organizational, civic, and religious activities	0.01
Caring for and helping nonhousehold members	-0.04
Telephone calls, mail, and e-mail	-0.04
Other activities, not elsewhere classified	-0.05
Personal care	-0.12
Purchasing goods and services	-0.23
Sleeping	-0.56
Caring for and helping household members	-1.03
Household activities	-1.17

Major differences in use of time not shown in teh Slate or Pew Research articles are :

Women spend 0.56 hrs more sleeping.
Women also spend 0.23  hr more purchasing goods and services, most of which is grocery shopping.  Personally I'd put grocery shopping in the household activities but I guess since it isn't actually IN the household they figure it separate.
Women spend 0.12 more on personal care.
Men spend 0.1 more eating and drinking

 Then the differences in other categories amount to only about 5 minutes of a given day.

Finally I'm going to regroup activities into larger buckets that I think make sense.   I'm putting paid work and household work and grocery shopping all in one larger 'work' category.   Then I've got sleep, leisure, childcare (which technically includes a little time for nonhousehold members and care of adult household members) and then finally everything else goes into the 'other' bucket.   Here's my chart :

The combined time spent in the work category and the childcare categories are pretty close to equal between moms and  dads.   When you add it up Moms spend about 11 minutes more in an average day on work and household and childcare than Dads do.    The other time is divided up between sleep, leisure and other stuff.    Note this is all for households with children under age 6.   When kids get older then parents spend less time on childcare and more time divided up elsewhere. 

Edit:   There is also a more detailed report on how parents spend their time on BLS : Time use of working parents: a visual essay     It dices the numbers some more.  One interesting point it has is about secondary child care which means watching the kid in addition to another activity.   For example if you're watching TV while keeping an eye on your kid at the same time.

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Obamacare and My Early Retirement Planning

This blog is supposed to be centered around about my personal journey to early retirement which I hardly ever write anything about.   Way back when I started Free By 50 over five years ago.. (5 years..  really?)... it was about my personal quest to be financially free by the age of 50.   Early retirement is a gradual journey though and not exactly worthy of daily updates.   So I usually wander far far off that topic and talk about cable TV programming packages and buying cheap beater cars.    Today I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the actual theme of this blog for once.    And I've found what I think is a good reason to do so.

Obamacare officially launched October 1st 2013.  Ok not really.   The exchanges where you can buy insurance opened for enrollment.   OK not completely.  The websites claimed to open but mostly failed to work property.    Which is an amazing thing since everyone knows that large software launches are always perfect on day one.[1]   Well whether or not it works well... this is a lot of peoples real first taste of the meatier part of Obamacare.   This is the first point where people are seeing the prices and options for individuals to buy insurance via the exchanges .   That doesn't impact me now nor does it impact the other approximately 80-90% of the country currently insured by their employer or in a government program.   But it gives me an opportunity to see how the new system can impact insurance costs in the future.

One of the big unknown variables in early retirement planning has been the ever increasing cost of buying individual health insurance coverage.   Until recently we'd seen health insurance going up 8-10% a year pretty steadily.   At that rate insurance would more than double by my early retirement target age.   That kind of uncertainty can throw a wrench into my retirement plans.   On top of that if my wife or I had a preexisting condition then we could be denied coverage entirely.   I wouldn't want to quit work early if I knew we'd be unable to get insurance.    So planning for early retirement had a couple major unknown variables due to health insurance costs and availability.  Would I be able to afford insurance when I'm 58?   Would we even be able to get it?? 


Through its individual subsidies Obamacare creates more certainty in the cost of health insurance for most people and it also removes the worry about being denied coverage for existing conditions.

First of all if you're under 400% of the poverty line then you get a subsidy that is designed so that you pay no more than 9.5% of your income towards insurance.   I discussed how that works before.    I can use that as a good baseline to estimate insurance costs and assume that health insurance will cost 9.5% of my income.   That will work at least for starters, I'd have to estimate some out of pocket cost on top of the insurance premiums.   

Of course it assumes that our income stays under the 400% poverty line.    That may or may not be a good assumption.   The federal poverty line for 2013 is $15,510 for 2 people.   At 400% that would give us $62,040 for 2 people.    If I have a target early retirement income of $50,000 then that is under the threshold for 400% poverty line even for just myself and my wife and for any kids it goes up further.   For 4 people the poverty line is $23,550 and 400% would be $94,200.    Of course I would prefer to have a higher income in the future.    If its just me and my spouse then we could more easily exceed the 400% level of income of $62,040.   For a family of four though hitting the $94,200 level is a higher income target and less likely.    I did a quick, rough calculation and figured that on my current path that by the time I'm 50 years old I would have enough assets that would generate income of about $55,000 annually (in todays dollars).    I'll probably be below 400% of poverty in early retirement but that is not a given.

In some situations I could 'game' the system to limit my income in order to get a larger subsidy.   I'm not sure if I'd consider purposefully manipulating the system for a higher subsidy to be ethical.   I'll have to give that some thought if we'd actually want to do such a thing.     If I'm managing my own real estate and withdrawing money from retirement funds then I'll have flexibility to pull money out when I want to.  If for example I'm on track to hit $63,000 in income for a given year and I know that the 400% limit is at $62,040 then I could purposefully limit my income for that year to $62,000 so I don't exceed that 400% limit.   For example, instead of pulling money out of an IRA which is counted as income, I could instead borrow some money short term and use that for our living expenses then pull out a larger amount from the IRA the next year. So if it was just my wife and I and we had $60,000 of income then we'd get about a $400 subsidy. But if I shifted that so it was $40,000 one year and $80,000 the next then we'd get almost $2400 subsidy for the year with $40,000 of income.   

The amount of the subsidy we might get will depend on who's being insured.  It would be a lot less for two people versus a family of four at the same income level.   I used my states exchange to get some idea of what the plans would cost and what our subsidy could be.   Thankfully our exchange web site works well enough to give you estimated cost quotes and doesn't force you to fill out 10 pages of forms to do so.  If I was 50 years old with an income of $62,000 then the subsidy for my wife and I would only be about $200 a year and the insurance plans would $400 to $950 per month.   A $200 annual subsidy doesn't really amount to much and wouldn't be worth me gaming the system.   Now on the other hand if we had a family of four at that time then the subsidy would be more like $200 a month and insurance would run $600 to $1300 range.   So it depends on whether or not we've got dependents at the time of early retirement.   Of course dependents can be on your plan until age of 26 years old now so thats a long ways into the future.   I'd figure on having 2 dependents under our coverage for a long while.

Summary points:

With Obamacare subsidies I think I can safely guesstimate our health insurance costs to be capped around 10% of income.
We may or may not qualify for a subsidy.
If we have dependent kids at the time  its a lot more likely we would get a subsidy.

With the guarantee coverage provision we no longer have to face uncertainty about whether or not we are able to buy individual coverage.

Bottom Line:  I'm going to use 10% of income as a baseline budget cost for health insurance expenses when figuring our early retirement planning.


[1] If this comment doesn't send your sarcasm meter off the scales then you're not too familiar with software.
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