Actuaries

If you're younger than 25 and planning to buy car insurance, you can save big by shopping around. Average auto insurance premiums vary from insurer to insurer, no matter what your age, but the difference is massive when you're a young driver, said Des Toups, senior managing editor at CarInsurance.com, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based auto insurance shopping site. Whereas a 55-year-old can save an average of $456 a year by shopping multiple insurers, a driver younger than 25 can save a whopping $1,102.

Actuaries and computer programmers may not have the most glamorous jobs, but they may have the best jobs. The newly released "Jobs Rated Almanac" named the actuary profession as the best job among 250 rated positions--surprising even those actuaries who say they love their jobs. Computer programmers were No. 2. "Not too many people think of an actuary when they think of a great job.

Cecil J. Nesbitt, 89, internationally recognized mathematician in actuary science, died Monday in Ann Arbor, Mich. Nesbitt, who taught mathematics at the University of Michigan for more than 40 years, published three books. The 1986 "Actuarial Mathematics" is considered the core textbook for actuarial studies. His first book, "Rings With Minimum Conditions," was written in 1944 and is still in use.

The saddest lesson of recent years for the American middle class is that those who "do the right thing" are first in line to get hammered. You devote a lifetime to a single employer, only to get laid off with a cheese-paring severance package. You finance your own retirement by religiously funding your 401(k), and Wall Street lays an egg on your head. Here's a lesson baby boomers are just beginning to learn: You pay for long-term-care insurance for years, even decades, and then your insurance company changes the rules.

Few youngsters are likely to answer "actuary" to the question of what they want to be when they grow up, but a new book rates it as the best job of all. Typical children's choices such as doctor and astronaut ran far behind less glamorous professions such as computer programmers, statisticians and parole officers in "The Jobs Rated Almanac," published by American References Inc. of Chicago.

DURING AN intermission at the Los Angeles Theatre Center recently, an amiable-looking man came up to me and introduced himself. We talked. He said his name was Robert Mahan. I asked him what he did, figuring him for a lawyer or a doctor. He smiled. "I'm an actuary," he said happily. "I'm not sure I know what an actuary does," I said. I did know that an actuary had something to do with statistics and probabilities, but I hadn't thought of someone actually doing that sort of thing for a living.

California's insurance commissioner scolded Anthem Blue Cross for raising rates for small businesses while praising industry rival UnitedHealth Group Inc. for cutting worker premiums. Escalating his campaign against rising health insurance rates, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said Anthem's premium hike for companies with 50 or fewer workers, which he pegged at 11%, was "unreasonable" because the company overstated its projected medical costs and improperly added fees related to the federal healthcare law. But state regulators have no authority to block Anthem's rate increase from taking effect this month.

Social Security's threatened financial collapse could be postponed by 23 years--until the year 2052--by reducing the annual cost-of-living increase in benefits by the 1.1 percentage points recommended by a federal advisory commission, according to calculations by Social Security actuaries. Average beneficiaries would get $8 a month less in 1998 than they would receive under the current calculation, a figure that would compound annually to $108 a month in 2006.

BOSTON - Lu Lingzi learned Sunday that she had passed a major exam for her studies at Boston University. The next morning, the test and a major project behind her, the 23-year-old Chinese graduate student and two friends headed over to watch the Boston Marathon. They chose spots near the finish line. Hours later, two bombs exploded there. It was midafternoon in Boston, the middle of the night in China. As hours ticked by and Lu still hadn't called, her parents and grandparents grew panicked.

Multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett is betting that no big earthquake will devastate California before March 31, 2001. And that, according to a principal advisor for the new California Earthquake Authority, seems like a very good bet. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has agreed to sell the state-run earthquake insurance agency $1.5 billion of reinsurance for four years, in return for a premium of $590 million, it was disclosed over the weekend.