Brown Corduroy Jackets & Life Insurance

Did you know that the brown corduroy jacket is back in? It appears again true that fashion recycles itself, which should be a relief to the stereotypical insurance salesman clad in his (the ladies would never do this) brown cord jacket with the leather elbow patches!

Today I had lunch with two insurance agents. One I was meeting for the first time, and when he mentioned that he happened to read LAST week’s blog—“Don’t Be Sold Insurance! Manage Risk”—I braced myself for a less than pleasant conversation; after all, this gentleman makes his living in the insurance business. But I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he loved the concept and believed that it was indeed his job to help clients manage risk first, and that the final step in risk management is to transfer risk via insurance. By the way, both of these dudes were impeccably dressed… and not in brown corduroy.

This week I’d like to give you some more introductory thoughts on life insurance, while our next post will be dedicated to some tangible steps that should help lead you to conclusions regarding your personal life insurance decisions. Here’s how we introduce the topic of life insurance in The Financial Crossroads in Chapter Six…

From “Life Insurance, Part I: Why?”

You don’t even want to read this chapter, do you? I say “life insurance,” and you immediately get a picture of someone in a plaid short-sleeved shirt accented with a squared-end tie and maybe even a brown corduroy jacket with the elbow pads and a serious comb-over. You picture someone sitting across the kitchen table launching a guilt blitzkrieg with a hefty price tag in your direction. You picture someone who has as much conflict of interest as the hungry lion circling the wounded wildebeest on the National Geographic show.

And, you may be partly right, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the duty of properly managing the financial risk associated with death. There are certainly times when properly managing risk warrants or even mandates the transfer of that risk with——you guessed it——life insurance. If you are already financially independent, you have self insured the financial risk that you might die prematurely. Whereas, if you are a young parent with a good income, but not enough saved to keep paying the bills indefinitely if you leave this earth, you need to purchase some life insurance. We will give you the guidelines you need to begin making this decision.

It is not easy to talk about life insurance because it’s not easy to talk about death. It is especially difficult to pin a numerical value on a person, but that is precisely what we do with life insurance. It is important to recall in this chapter the lesson we learned in the first chapter: money is not powerful, but your relationships are. The point of life insurance is not to “buy off” someone’s pain and suffering over the loss of a loved one; it’s to provide the financial stability so that the survivor doesn’t have to worry about the money and can instead properly mourn their loss. I encourage you to have deep and meaningful thoughts and discussions surrounding the topics of life and death, but when you are doing life insurance planning, an objective approach is wisest.