Two Approaches For Determining Your Life Insurance Needs
Not everyone needs a life insurance policy. A quick way to determine whether you do is to ask yourself if the surviving family could do the following without the use of life insurance funds:
Afford daily expenses
Pay recurring bills
Retire in comfort
If the answer is yes, you don’t need life insurance. If the answer is no, you need to figure out how much you need. Below are two ways to help you think it through:
The DIME Method. This method involves adding your Debt, Income, Mortgage, and Education expenses.
• Debt - Consider all your outstanding debts, excluding your mortgage. This could include credit card debt, personal loans, or car loans.
• Income - Calculate ten years of your income. This can start to help you understand what financial gaps may occur if you were gone.
• Mortgage - Add the amount required to pay off your mortgage. Using life insurance proceeds to pay off a mortgage may help your family keep its home.
• Education - Estimate the cost of your children's college education. You may want to use a range since costs can vary from school to school.
The four-question CHEM Method. This method involves determining whether any life-changing event happened to you that may alter your needs and responsibilities moving forward.
• Any new Children born? - A child is a gift. But a new one brings new financial considerations.
• Are you newly buying, selling, or paying off a Home? - Changes in ownership or the standing of your mortgage can alter your needs and strategy for the future.
• Have you had a change in Employment? - A new job or role in your company may change your income, which may cause you to reconsider your life insurance benefit.
• Have you had a change in Marital status - A marriage or a divorce can change your financial situation as well as factors such as your policy's beneficiary.
Thing Two
There's More Than One Phish In Your Inbox
Some of the most widespread cyber-attacks that compromise your personal and financial information are done through phishing. Phishing is when someone reaches out to you using deceptive emails and websites in an attempt to gather personal information, money, or both. The attackers’ abilities to masquerade themselves as a reputable company or person have gotten so good that many people have fallen for them.
Here are some tips to help keep yourself safe from these creative phishing scams…
• Stay informed through the news about the latest phishing techniques. Share your knowledge with friends and family.
• Whenever a company sends an email claiming to need personal information from you or encouraging you to click on a link or open an attachment, go directly to the company’s secure website and log into your account from there, or call them directly instead.
• On social media websites, don’t post personal information such as your home address, phone number, or date of birth. These are key pieces of information needed to open accounts in your name and can be used by scammers to create and send phishing emails to you.
• Verify a site’s security and legitimacy before inputting your username and password by checking to make sure the web address begins with “https” and has a padlock symbol to the left of the website’s URL. You can even click on the padlock to validate that it’s secure.
• Be aware of URL redirects that subtly send you to a different website designed similarly to the one you expect. Ensure the site name, capitalization, and punctuation are exactly as they should be. You can install an anti-phishing toolbar that will automatically run quick checks on the sites you visit.
• Ignore any emails or websites with bad grammar. Misspelled words and awkward phrasing are always red flags and should be considered illegitimate.
By following these tips, we hope you can significantly reduce your chances of falling victim to phishing and keep your online accounts secure.
Thing Three
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.”
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