We've been in business for almost 10 years now. We have a full benefit plan in place that includes fully paid company health insurance, dental insurance, disability insurance and a matching retirement plan. Up until just recently we did not have what is referred to as a "Cafeteria Plan" or Section 125. I began researching this option and met up with Johnny McCutchen with Aflac Insurance. If three Aflac policies are purchased through your company, Aflac will administer your section 125 plan for free. That means that your health insurance, dental insurance and any of the policies you purchase through Aflac (except for Life) are now pre-tax (federal and FICA). In addition you can add a FSA for your employees. FSA's can be used for Dependant Day Care and medical bills. We opted to just do the day care portion.

But just to give you an idea of the savings, here are some figures.

For an employee making $50,000 a year with family health insurance (employee pays the difference between the single employee rate and the family rate since we cover the full amount for the employee), and $620 a month in day care costs there is a tax savings of $216.00 a month. That means this employee will take home $216.00 more a month! As the employer it saves me $55.00 a month.

So what does it cost the employer? The Section 125 which makes insurance premiums pre-tax is completely free. The FSA costs $199.00 to setup and $25.00 a month. The $25.00 a month is the fee you pay to Aflac to manage the paperwork for reimbursing the Dependant Day Care claims.

So what do the insurance policies cost that you have to buy to get setup with the Section 125 for free? The Cancer Care policy and Accident Policy (which are my favorites) end up costing about $90.00 a month for a whole family.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to contact me at ssharp@plexusweb.com for more information about how easy the process was to get the program setup or contact Johnny McCutchen at (706) 614-0242.

Every week I get a marketing email from Quizno's. "More spam, how annoying..." you might say, and typically I'd agree and go straight for the unsubscribe link. However Quizno's is doing something very smart. They're regularly including real, honest to goodness value in their emails. Every week, it's a new coupon. Never an email without one. That's tangible value and it keeps me going there almost once a week when I otherwise wouldn't.

So, the person in front of me in line who isn't getting the emails isn't getting the savings that I'm getting. That makes staying subscribed a no brainer. Isn't that their goal? Saving some dough is definitely my goal.

MacBooks seem to taking over the office rapidly. As Buck mentioned last Thursday, there was a tax-free weekend in Georgia this past weekend. Travis and I took advantage of these savings as well as education discounts, to pick up new MacBooks. Adam already had one so the numbers are climbing. Colin may get Travis' "old" mini and after that the only hold out (ie: still running Windows) will be The President.

Today I received a little good natured ribbing from some co-workers about the fact that I use a start page. What gives? Man, that' something I don't get at all. I use Google's start page but Yahoo! has a nice one too.

What's not to like about a start page that has a bunch of nice, scannable links from your favorite sites? Plus info like the weather, movie showtimes, calendar events and even more timely things like World Cup match results.

What do these co-workers suggest as an alternative? A blank page. Could you be more inefficient?

Call me old-fashioned I guess :/

The folks at Apple are at it again. Check out this preview of Leopard, the next evolution of the OS X operating system.

Don't miss Time Machine.

UPDATE: Check out the WWDC keynote. Also, this funny intro video is worth a watch too.