Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Let's Get Life Insurance-y!

Taking a break from my normal chatter about eating and food-related topics, I do have a pretty serious topic to give folks a nudge about: life insurance.

I run into a strange occurence with my clients: people have it through work (which is good!) but don't know how much they have, and are still convinced that they have enough (which is bad).

The strange thing about it is that with home or car insurance, my clients are extremely interested in making sure they have enough coverage. I've been grilled for hours with various questions about how one thing will be covered, if they have enough coverage for this type of accident, etc. But I very rarely get that about life insurance! I just get the, "I have coverage already" response, and no more.

Please, do yourself a favor and make sure. Do your homework and see if the coverage you have is enough! If the answer is no, just tell me no. I definitely won't be offended. But also, don't think that $25,000 coverage through work is realistically going to be enough if you're married, have a child, and have a mortgage to pay. If you're in a dual income household, that's just a drop in the bucket. Having coverage through work is a great start, especially because it's usually quite inexpensive. But just having that likely won't be enough.

Bottom-line: get a trusted professional to review things with you. If you know and trust your advisor, you likely won't have to worry about any sort of high-pressure tactics. You might be surprised at how inexpensive coverage can be if you're healthy!

1 comment:

dolphyngyrl said...

My son was telling me the other day that someone (?) did a study where they tried to identify the common denominator for identify someone who is a terrorist or suicide bomber and the number one most common element is that they didn't have life insurance.

So when are you doing Dinner & a Life Insurance Deductible? :)