Life Insurance Awareness Month, So What?

Dogs get fleas awareness month! Everything is getting more expensive awareness month! I was reading a Reuter’s article on LIAM, Life insurance awareness month yesterday and I really thought it would kind of leave the average reader saying, “So what?”

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t have an interest in and awareness of what life insurance can do and the real impact it can have on their family, I’m just thinking that people could really care less about a month devoted to the awareness. So, rather than go on for a month and offer a free camera for the winner of a photo contest I thought I would just take a few minutes in my years long effort to educate whoever will listen about life insurance to share my thoughts about why life insurance is important.

Having heard just about every lame excuse for not buying life insurance or not buying adequate life insurance, let me share why I have bought it and bought enough of it. First, let me dispel with any thought that I get a break on the price of insurance because I’m an agent. I wish!!

I don’t carry life insurance because I think my wife couldn’t hack it without me. Who knows? She might do better. But Pam and I have dreams, places to go and things to do, a grandchild to spoil. If I’m not here I want her to know that my dream is that with or without me she will have the opportunity to do it all. No dream of ours should be left undone.

I don’t carry life insurance because we don’t have an adequate portfolio of investments. I carry it because I want her to have choices about those investments. Given options she might choose to leave everything to our granddaughter or to our church. She might want to set up a scholarship fund for our local Christian school. If that portfolio is all she has she might not have those choices. Her only option might be to conserve it and use it to live on.

I don’t carry life insurance because I feel like I have to, but rather because I want her to have everything I could have possibly given her if I had lived. I want her to be better off than I found her. I want her to know that the rest of her life mattered to me even though I couldn’t be there.

Bottom line. I know there are business purposes for life insurance and I help people all the time with analyzing their life insurance needs, but at least with personal life insurance it really all comes down to how much you care about the person or people you love.