Same Advice As Last Year…And The Year Before!

With so much financially unchanged I want to dust off some previous advice and suggest that it was right then and still warrants some consideration. If you are over 50 life insurance may be one of those anchors in the storm that helps us to breath easier.

Everything I’m hearing, including from my wife, is that retirement accounts are not quite back to 2008 levels and certainly haven’t come anywhere near 2008 plus a reasonable gain. There are, by news accounts, as many negative signs as there are positive concerning the recession, unemployment and business growth. If you were comfortable with the pace of your retirement growth in 2007 and you’re still comfortable with it, you had a lot more money than the average person to work with.

My suggestion when all of this financial chaos began and suddenly everyone had investment accounts cut in half, was to buy at least a 10 year term insurance policy for about how big a hit you took. As I said then, if the economy comes roaring back you can always dump the term insurance, but no one then and no one now is saying anything that would make me at peace with a full recovery taking much less than 10 years. With life insurance you can guarantee that if you die prematurely your spouse can expect to have as much to live on as he or she did pre 2008.

Not as optimistic as me? Get a longer term, say 15 or 20 years, but there simply is no other cost effective way to bolster your net worth for a short period of time and if all of the economy talking heads know what they’re talking about, someday we’ll all look back and shake our heads at everything that happened and be glad that we survived it.

Bottom line. The longer I watch this whole economy thing play out, and now add on the catastrophe in the Gulf, the more I think the hit we took two years ago is going to be felt for a lot more years than we would like to admit. Put the pieces back together and make the picture whole again with term life insurance.