Savings

Call it retirement anxiety, or maybe recession obsession. For all of their married life, Patrick Webster, 63, and Susie Martin, 54, have been extremely frugal. Webster and Martin, who both work at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, have been stashing away their combined income at an enviable rate - more than 25% - for retirement. Together they have more than $1 million in investments and no debt. But rather than feeling reasonably secure about their financial future, they dread a return of hard times.

Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a plan Tuesday to study tearing down part of the Men's Central Jail and replacing it with a facility designed for mentally ill and drug-addicted prisoners. The new facility could save the county millions of dollars and offer inmates a better chance of rehabilitation, according to Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who proposed the idea. Yaroslavsky has opposed earlier plans to spend up to $1.4 billion to renovate or replace the Men's Central Jail and the adjacent Twin Towers Jail.

I'm an 84-year-old man on Social Security with original Medicare and Mutual of Omaha gap insurance. My insurance premium was raised from $262 to $363 a month, a 39% jump. After all my monthly expenses, I have just $240 left. What can I do in the event of another increase in my premiums? If you've had your current Medicare supplement plan for years, it's not surprising that you've seen your costs steadily rise, says Steve Zaleznick, senior Medicare advisor at PlanPrescriber, a Maynard, Mass.-based online provider of Medicare education and plan comparison tools.

Four days after her April 27 breast reconstruction, the third and final surgery aimed at sparing her an early death from breast cancer, Angelina Jolie was in good spirits at home. Upon paying a house call, her surgeon, Dr. Kristi Funk of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills, found two walls of the actress' home covered with "freshly assembled story boards" for her next directorial project. "All the while she spoke," the doctor later wrote on her blog, "six drains dangled from her chest, three on each side, fastened to an elastic belt around her waist.

In these troubled economic times, it's not hard to understand why people might want to protect their life savings by purchasing a hard asset like gold or silver. At least, that's the pitch of Monex, the big Newport Beach investment firm, which bills itself as "America's trusted name in precious metals investments" and assures clients that it's "committed to customer service. " So let's take a look at the experiences of some customers who say their trust in Monex was misplaced.

A popular government program enabling underwater borrowers who are current on their mortgages to refinance at lower rates will be extended for two more years.  The Obama administration's Home Affordable Refinance Program had been scheduled to expire at the end of this year. HARP now will run through 2015, regulators announced Thursday . More than 2.2 million borrowers with little or no home equity have refinanced using the 4-year-old HARP, and consumer advocates and lenders welcomed the news of the extension.

All-inclusive vacation giant Club Med wants you to be happy, or so it says in a new Happiness Sale that launched Thursday. The sale is good for stays through fall at its 50-plus locations worldwide, including premium resorts in Guilin, China , and Belek, Turkey .  The deal: Club Med shows prices starting as low as $749 per person for a seven-night stay, but that's based on staying at its Sandpiper Bay resort in Florida. Still, there are savings to be had from the online check I did of several locations around the globe.

Winter always gets me thinking about going to theme parks in Southern California, even if I don't have visitors underfoot. The prospect of cooler temperatures and lighter crowds in February and March sends me looking for discounts on the high cost of tickets. I found that the Southern California CityPass -- with a flat rate for admission to Disneyland, Disney California Adventure, Universal Studios Hollywood and SeaWorld San Diego -- offers good savings, even when compared with incentives for SoCal residents.

The government's measure of Americans' savings rate soared in May to the highest level in 15 years, but the number isn't quite what it seems. The Commerce Department measures total personal income, then deducts personal spending to arrive at what was saved. That isn't a very reliable way to determine whether or how much people actually are saving, because a single month's data can be skewed by unusual items.

More than three in 10 people in California don't have enough savings to get by for three months if they were to lose their job, according to a study released Tuesday. More than two years after the official end of the recession, 30.9% of Californians have little to no financial cushion, according to the report by the nonprofit Corp. for Enterprise Development. If illiquid assets -- things that can't quickly or easily be converted into cash, such as a home -- are excluded from the equation, the number rises to an even more troubling 43.1%.

Call it retirement anxiety, or maybe recession obsession. For all of their married life, Patrick Webster, 63, and Susie Martin, 54, have been extremely frugal. Webster and Martin, who both work at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, have been stashing away their combined income at an enviable rate - more than 25% - for retirement. Together they have more than $1 million in investments and no debt. But rather than feeling reasonably secure about their financial future, they dread a return of hard times.

Re "Crucial CO2 gauge hits key level," May 11 Our failure as a nation to address the climate change crisis is heartbreaking. We must transition off fossil fuels, period. And we have at our disposal a simple mechanism to make that happen: a carbon tax. Tax carbon at the mine or port and invest the money in clean energy. It is ridiculous to insist that we can't afford it. We should be putting every resource available into the fight to maintain a habitable planet. Vicki Kirschenbaum Burbank ALSO: Letters: Sen. Warren speaks up Letters: Tax breaks for tea parties?

After the smothering defense and one-goal games the Kings battled through during their first-round playoff series against the St. Louis Blues, holding a two-goal lead over the San Jose Sharks on Tuesday night had to feel as liberating as a skate in the park. Almost too liberating. Unaccustomed to that luxury, the Kings sat back and allowed the Sharks to take 16 shots in the third period and 35 overall, saved mainly by the grace and agility of goaltender Jonathan Quick.

All he asks, Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich frequently says, is that voters judge him on his record. As he wages an uphill battle to hang onto to his job in the May 21 election, Trutanich rattles off a list of reasons he should be "rehired" to head one of the nation's largest municipal law firms. He cites a substantially reduced reliance on costly outside attorneys, favorable outcomes in lawsuits that he says have saved taxpayers more than $300 million and a crackdown on illegal billboards that activists called scourges on their neighborhoods.

It came with us always. First the old upright, then the Baldwin, then the Steinway grand, no matter how often we moved, or how far - she'd no more have left it behind than she'd have left me. There was, in those days, much shouting and storming about, the screeching of tires as my father sped off in the night. When I was 10, they split up for good, and we landed near Palo Alto, where my mother was left, a single mother in the suburbs, in her 40s, in the 1950s, a decade that did not take kindly to divorcees.

Here's a new way to use that medicine ball and challenge your muscles all the way from calves to shoulders. Demonstrated by Long Beach fitness instructor John Garey, who uses it in his "Core Power & Stamina" DVD, it's a great timesaving move to add to your next strength workout. What it does The squat on the balls of your feet tones your quadriceps, hamstrings and calves, while the rotation and extension of the medicine ball tones your shoulders, challenges your core and helps to improve your balance.

Millions of Americans aren't saving enough for retirement, but African American and Latino investors, on average, are further behind than whites and are more likely to be a greater burden to their families because they save too little and invest too conservatively, new research has found. "It's extraordinarily disconcerting," said Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, which along with benefits firm Hewitt Associates conducted a study of 401(k) participants.

There are dozens of ways to make your housing investment pay off faster and at a greater return. In some cases, a small extra outlay may be required, sometimes every month, but the added expense is often pocket change when compared to the available savings. If you double up on the principal portion of your house payment every month, for example, you can cut 15 years off your 30-year mortgage and save half the interest you would otherwise have paid. Your mortgage is typically your largest monthly expense.

A worrisome abdominal pain drove Jalal Afshar to seek treatment last year at healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. The Pasadena resident and Kaiser member had lived for years with a rare condition known as Castleman's disease, which affects the lymph nodes and the body's immune system. But this was the first time he experienced such severe symptoms. Kaiser granted his request to see a specialist in Arkansas. But it ultimately declined to pay for his treatment there. By June, Afshar said, Kaiser was arranging for hospice care so that he could die at home.

Re "Obama vows alliance with Mexico ," May 3 In trying to reduce the violence in Mexico, President Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto are doing a hat dance around the obvious solution. As repugnant as it may be to some, decriminalizing drug use would quickly accomplish a number of goals: Drug cartels would lose billions of dollars, hampering their ability to corrupt public officials; law enforcement on both sides of the border would gain much-needed man-hours for use in fighting serious crimes; and billions of dollars wasted annually on a fruitless drug war could be recouped for use in bolstering the economy.