Posted by It’s never all or nothing at Healthy Wage. Set yourself up for contingency by using the Buy More Time feature effectively.
(Note: go down-post right now if you want to get to the Healthy Wage stuff and don’t care to hear about Dr. Now. Because this is my blog and I want to talk about him first.)
I watch My 600 lb Life a lot, and absolutely love it.
For those of you who haven’t seen this show or are unfamiliar with it, what you have is “super morbidly obese” people traveling to Houston, often cross-country, to meet with a bariatric surgeon named Dr. Younan Nowzaradan and get approved for bariatric surgery to help them lose their hundreds of pounds of excess weight.
The patients are obese to the extent that they often cannot live anything close to a normal life. Many are immobile and bedridden. Those living far away from Houston do not have bariatric surgery available to them locally—in part because they are so large physically that the surgical theaters do not have the equipment to handle them, and in part because the medical risk of surgery is too great.
Dr. Now (as he is often called) offers to operate on these patients in Houston, but they must demonstrate that they can handle the rigor of a low-calorie, low-carb, high-protein diet and lose a substantial amount of weight on their own first. They also must have family supporting them—and not enabling them—and they often must undergo physical training programs and psychiatric counseling.
A typical episode follows a patient over a year—starting with an illustration of her current dire situation, continuing through her journey to Houston (often arduous) to meet Dr. Now, her efforts to meet the goal to qualify for the surgery, her recovery from surgery, and her adherence to the post-operative diet and fitness regimen and other supporting medical and psychological treatment.
There are often follow-up episodes in which successful patients seek and obtain skin removal surgery, and confront adversity arising from their new lifestyle as a much less obese people. Often the patients have conflicts with the people who enabled their eating behavior in the first place.
Some do not get there at all.
Although some patients are successful once they get going under Dr. Now’s care, and stay that way, most of them take a more tortuous path to their ultimate goal, with many setbacks. Some do not get there at all. Some quit, and a few have paid for their failure with their lives.
In all the difficult cases, we witness Dr. Nowzaradan’s frustration with clients who refuse to comply with his treatment orders and with friends and family who continue to enable their behavior. He does not mince words and I enjoy watching the confrontations.
But behind the caustic wit and the chilly bedside manner, we witness Dr. Now always offering chances for redemption to the problematic patients. There are second chances, third chances, fourth chances… and sometimes more. Janine Mueller comes to mind here as someone who struggled for a year but ultimately lost her wait and is doing excellently now. (James King, Steven Assanti, and Schenee Murry are constrasting examples.)
Which brings me to Healthy Wage and the Buy More Time feature. Like Dr. Nowzaradan, Healthy Wage will not abandon you if you fall short if you weight loss goal on your Healthy Wager—even 0.2 pounds short. You always have a second chance at getting your prize. Although you have to pay for this chance, as I will explain to you this is almost always a great deal and you should take advantage.
I readily admit the above segue is ham-fisted, but talking about Dr Now makes it worthwhile. And I made it as easy as possible to skip it. So there.
Buy More Time explained
The Buy More Time option (or the “extension” as it is commonly referred to) pushes the deadline of your HealthyWager back by 6 months.
The cost of this extension is 6 additional monthly payments. If you had a 6 month bet, the extension doubles the amount of money that Healthy Wage takes from you. For a 12 month bet, it makes the bet cost 50% more.
Should you complete the wager after one extension, Healthy Wage will pay you the prize it promised you at the beginning of the HealthyWager—that is, the original wager amount plus the gain. You do NOT get paid back the 6 monthly extension payments.
Should you extend and hit your goal before the 6 month extension expires, you must maintain your weight loss until the 15-day weigh-out period opens at the end of the extension.
You always have the option to buy more time. You get it in your app or website dashboard the moment your HealthyWager starts.
So if you are struggling with your bet, should you buy more time? To answer this, you have to consider the return on investment of an extension, and compare that to options other than extending.
Sunk Costs—or, Coca-Cola under the bridge (Forget about your original bet)
Your original bet is gone forever when you click the submit button on the Healthy Wager. It is either paid out all at once, or you take on a debt that you cannot discharge easily.
Some people look at extensions and calculate the reduced return on investment for the entire bet, or the reduced profit for the entire bet. If you could go back in time and do the bet over, these would have practical relevance. You could choose to keep the original bet and lay out.
But during the bet, when you are considering the extension, the original payments are in the hands of Healthy Wage and stay there until you complete the weight loss commitment. You cannot consider it in any financial analysis of whether you should extend or not extend.
Well, actually, there is one way in which it does matter, and that has to do with income taxes. If you cash out and you realize a profit (net gain) of $600 or more, Healthy Wage files a Form 1099-MISC and you have to pay additional tax derived from the income boost you just got. If you extend and win, your tax liability will likely be less than what it would otherwise be if you won the wager without extending, because the additional extension payments eat into the net gain. This factor tips the decision to extend in favor of extending, because the savings in tax partially offsets the additional extension payments.
Extend if you have made extensive progress on your original bet
If you set your bet up correctly–that is, if you did not make a sucker bet–and you make it most of the way to your goal, it is almost always going to be worthwhile to buy another 6 months of time to lose the rest of the weight.
If it’s a really big prize, and you have only a few pounds left, then definitely extend the wager if you can afford it. If you have 6 months to lose the weight, that’s going to be a much better reward and a much easier target than some of the alternatives for the money you would need to lay out.
For example, assume your bet is $100/month for 6 months to lose 51 pounds, and you stand to get that back plus $1,332 if you make it; for a prize of $1,932. The original return on investment for this bet is 222%. If the deadline has arrived and you are 10 pounds short, you can pay another $600 and lose the last 10 to get the $1,932 prize.
The return on investment for this extension is also 222%. You are paying $600 and getting more than triple that money back; the previous $600 is sunk and should be disregarded in any decision-making. And this is for losing 10 pounds in 6 months. If you aim to do this in 24 weeks, you’ll need to manufacture about a 220 kcal daily deficit. This is slow weight loss for most people.
This return, with this magnitude of money involved, is simply unavailable anywhere else. For most people, 10 pounds is less than 10% bodyweight. An new Healthy Wager is going to require a much larger weight pledge to make $1,332 in new money and will likely required a larger investment than $600.
Transformers in DietBet will only pay double for losing 10% of bodyweight in 6 months and staying on pace throughout. And you can only do three transformers at once.
Concurrent Healthy Wage 12-week minis will not pay triple or anywhere near it.
If you are slightly further away than 10 pounds, the alternatives are still inferior to extending. If you are further behind, however, you can think seriously about abandoning the Healthy Wager and doing something different with your money.
Starting fresh in lieu of extending
Here are some possible reasons to abandon the Healthy Wager and forget about the prize (other than giving up):
- You actually gained weight during your Healthy Wager. A new Healthy Wager will pay a better return if you start from a higher weight (assuming you lose the same number of pounds).
- You bet too little on your first Healthy Wager and you want to make a bigger bet (more pounds, more time, more money).
- You originally made a sucker bet (i.e. your investment is in the plateau region of the regular formula or to the right of the summit of the supersize formula) and you don’t want to throw good money after bad
If the deadline is some distance away and you think you want to start a fresh Healthy Wager, create one or more fake accounts with your projected weight at the deadline and run what-if analyses. (Or get with me and I will do it for you for free.) Remember that referral boosts are available on all new HealthyWagers.
The Extension feature is consistent with the mission of weight loss
And this is because without it, when people are midway through the bet and are falling behind, they would have to make a difficult decision of either pushing to the end and possibly missing the mark (and getting nothing for it); or living at Golden Corral for the duration of the bet, to bulk up for your next run.
But thanks to extensions, there is no such dilemma. Instead, all you need to do is push as hard as you can to get to the goal. There is no downside. If you make it, great. If not, the ensuing extension will be easier.
At least you can weigh in in your own home, and not have to step on a scale in a strip-mall clinic in Houston and have to walk down to Room 5 with your head in shame.
Weight Betting Odds 