Rules Of Thumbs

A general rule of thumb for a contingent fee agreement is that for a personal injury claim case it will take 9-12 months to reach agreement on compensation.

The general rule of thumb for the lump sum value of a structured settlement is approximately 50% or less of the total value of the settlement payments.  For example, if you have a settlement worth $1 million spread out over 10 years, if you were to sell the structured settlement you could expect to receive $500,000 due to the discounting due to the time value of money (obviously, this holds true if you intended to buy structured settlements).

Cash payout on structured settlements can be established to provide the claimant with a lump sum as opposed to income for life. For an annuity, in calculating benefits per settlement dollar, the general rule of thumb is: the longer one’s life expectancy, the smaller the payment – and the shorter one’s life expectancy, the larger the payment.

As a rule of thumb, you should estimate that you can reduce your auto insurance by 10-15% by combining your automobile insurance with the same carrier as your homeowners or renters insurance.  This discount could be applied to your auto insurance or you homeowners insurance.  For example, I received a 10% discount on my homeowners insurance because I had my auto insurance with the same insurance provider.

It’s important to note that despite this discount, you should still shop around to get homeowners and auto insurance quotes from separate providers.  I did this and was able to save over $500 per year even after having my homeowners increase because I was no longer getting the discount.

In general, if you don’t go to a top tier business school, it is not worth quitting your job to go.  You should instead go to an executive MBA program to get your degree or do an online program for your business degree. 

A rule of thumb for how much you should have when you retire is to have 20 times your expected expenses in retirement.

A rule of thumb for how much you should save is about 10% of your take-home pay…if you start early enough. If you are over 40 and haven’t accumulated a sizeable nest egg, you should try and increase this amount to 30%. This rule of thumb should help you build an emergency fund, save for a house, etc.

A rule of thumb for how much house you can afford is that you should try and keep the purchase price of the house less than 2.5 times your GROSS annual income. (Good luck in San Francisco, New York, or basically anywhere you’d want to live

A rule of thumb for mortgage payments and mortgage size is that every $200,000 borrowed, your monthly mortgage payment will be $1,000. This rule of thumb is loosely based on a 5% mortgage rate and a 30-year mortgage.

A good rule of thumb for estimating how long it will take for anything growing at a compound rate to double is to divide 70 by the annual growth rate as a percentage.

For example, if you wanted to know how long it would take for the value of you home to double, and you estimate that its value will increase by 5% per year, simply divide 70 by 5, which equals 14. So, if your home value appreciates 5% for year in 14 years it will be worth twice what is today.

Alternatively, this rule can be used to figure a growth rate. For example, if you know that it costs twice as much to go to the movies today as it did 10 years ago, you can divide 70 by 10 years, which equals 7. So, on average, movie ticket prices increase by 7% per year for the past 10 years.