Products October 3, 2017

HealthEquity and Ubiquity Announce HSA Partnership

The combined services of the firms are being rolled out in response to employers asking for a comprehensive investment strategy that ties health and retirement benefits together.

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Ubiquity Retirement + Savings announced a partnership with HealthEquity, Inc., a national provider of health savings accounts (HSA) as a non-bank custodian, meant to encourage individuals to save toward their future while also saving for health care expenses.

According to the firms, the integration of Ubiquity Retirement + Savings and HealthEquity services will encourage employers and their employees to invest in both HSAs and 401(k)s. The end goal is to help participants maximize tax benefits, contribution rates, investment returns and overall savings.

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“While 401(k)s and HSAs have benefited sophisticated savers separately over the last several years, the market has failed, to this point, to produce a viable combination of the two accounts that can be easily accessed and managed by small businesses,” says Chad Parks, CEO of Ubiquity. “Ubiquity and HealthEquity will offer optimal contribution and investment strategies to employers while employees will be able to see their 401(k) and HSA balances from either platform.”

Jon Kessler, president and CEO of HealthEquity, says the combined services of the firms are being rolled out in response to employers asking for a comprehensive investment strategy that ties health and retirement benefits together. “Empowering employees to make decisions about consumer-driven health care and retirement together will create a long-term plan for retirement savings,” he adds.

More information is available at www.myubiquity.com.

Break from the Grind October 3, 2017

Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and A Liquid?

It’s that time of year again; the Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded.
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Among 2017 Ig Nobel prize winners were Marc-Antoine Fardin, who won the Physics Prize, for using fluid dynamics to probe the question “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?”

 

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And, be honest, haven’t you always wondered why older men have big ears? Wonder no more, because James Heathcote won the Anatomy Prize for his medical research study about this issue.

 

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

 

Among other winners, Milo Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, and Otto Braendli, won the Peace Prize for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring. In case you didn’t know, a didgeridoo is an Australian Aboriginal wind instrument in the form of a long wooden tube, traditionally made from a hollow branch, which is blown to produce a deep, resonant sound, varied by rhythmic accents of timbre and volume.

 

The Economics Prize went to Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person’s willingness to gamble. The Fluid Dynamics Prize went to Jiwon Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. The Nutrition Prize went to Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat. The Medicine Prize went to Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang, for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese. The Cognition Prize went to Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually.

 

There were a couple of other prizes that mentioned body parts that could cause this article to end up filtered by email firewalls.

 

More information is here.

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