It’s almost that magical time of year again, when seemingly every second or third commercial on television is for Medicare health insurance. That time of year when retired football players and B-list actors take to the airwaves to beseech you to call a national 1-800 number to discuss important health and financial decisions with someone you’ll never meet and never speak with again. Yes, the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period—with all its conflicting messages and confusion—is almost upon us.

GLENS FALLS — The Board of Directors of Arrow Financial Corporation declared a 3% stock dividend on Aug. 25, which will be distributed on Sept. 24, 2021. 

The first image that often comes to mind when people think about long-term care is an elderly person sitting alone in a depressing nursing home. The misconceptions about what long-term care involves and peoples’ images of the most common care settings are understandable, since long-term care insurance originally started as nursing home insurance four decades ago. However, it has evolved into a much more flexible solution that allows you to receive care in a variety of settings.

In high school physics class, I learned that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. Within investments, the same principle applies to risk. To start, risk is a tricky thing to define. The financial world has settled on a measure of volatility called standard deviation. Although imperfect for a variety of reasons, standard deviation gives a quantifiable measure of how bumpy the ride has been which is a reasonable approximation for how it will be moving forward. Unfortunately, volatility is usually equated with losses. What about the opportunity cost of missed gains?