Young, healthy, immortal. Sure, you’ve talked about life insurance and you know it really doesn’t cost much at all, but you’re a guy. Men, especially young men, absolutely hate talking about real life.

And in real life stuff happens. I know when you’re young there is way more good stuff than bad stuff happening, and there’s this odd rule of nature where it seems the bad stuff seemingly always happens to someone else. You read about. You hear about. It was a friend or a relative, but it wasn’t you and especially guys really believe it never will be.

I was emailing a client today about some quotes on life insurance that she and her husband are considering. Her husband had life insurance and let it lapse almost two years ago. I’ve been doing my best to get him off his male rear and put something in force, but there’s always an excuse. She wrote today, “We just attended the funeral of a 42 yr. old, strong, apparently healthy firefighter. Just dropped dead the day after Christmas. Left a wife and 2 daughters without much to live on. Kind of wakes a person up a little.” A LITTLE! HELLO! Just two years ago a 44 year old Captain from the same fire department died in his sleep.

Did you know that 1 in 6 men that reach age 25 never see their 65th birthday. This isn’t casual stuff. It’s not like we’re talking about 1 in 1000 or 1 in 100. This is one of those guys out of your three on three pickup basketball game who will die from a heart attack. This is one of the six of you carrying a casket of someone who was one of another six. Will it be an accident? Will it be one of the vicious drug resistant infections we have in the world today?

And it’s personal to virtually all of us. I know six brothers who are only four now because of cancer. One died at 45 and one at 62. My first wife died from cancer at age 34. She was crazy healthy and within months she was dead.

When I was young I used to label all of this discussion as scare tactics. I was invincible, immortal, unkillable. I just buried my head about the crazy unfortunate things that happened knowing that it couldn’t be me. Mortality wouldn’t get the best of me.

But it could be and almost has been a couple of times in the last 10 years. I still don’t use scare tactics in sales but sometimes I wonder if that’s really being fair to my customers. We all need a wake up call once in a while and if I don’t give it, who will. And if a person doesn’t buy life insurance because I don’t make them look at reality and they suffer a premature death, without insurance, how good a job did I do for them?

Bottom line. On average men’s life expectancy is about 78 and women’s is to about 80. That means for every man over 78 and woman over 80, someone died prematurely. I don’t know about you, but I personally know a ton of folks who have beat those averages to death and I personally knew a ton of folks who didn’t.

You could always just hope for the best, but what part of real life leads you to believe that is a good idea?