I was visiting with my folks recently on a Sunday night through Facebook Messenger. My mother had her iPad so they could see me and I could see them. My dad is 90 years old and my mom is 88 and they are still rocking and rolling. This video call made me think about technology and how things have changed over the years. I wonder if my parents had ever imagined that they could be having a conversation with one of their children several hundred miles away and they would be able to see me on something called a tablet one day.
My mother remembers her very first telephone number from when was a little girl in a small town in northern Minnesota. I can remember mine as well, but it was multiple digits. My mother’s telephone number was just ‘7’ because there were hardly any telephones in their community. The reason they had one was only because her parents owned a bakery on Main Street. Their house was attached to the rear and there was a storage room between the two.
My mother had a friend whose mother worked overnight at the telephone company in their small town. She had a cot there that she slept on because when someone needed to make a call in the middle of the night, she was awoken by a ring, she would talk to that person and then take a wire and connect their two lines. It had to be done manually. There used to be tons of operators across the country, just like her, putting wires in and out and making sure that connections were made.
Here we are today. We have come a long way from telephones connected to receivers. I have one still at my office, but I can’t remember the last time I took a call from it. I usually just push a button on my computer and talk through a microphone. Who would have thought that everyone would be carrying smartphones in their pockets? I don’t even like to call these phones because it’s really a small computer that happens to have a telephone app on it. They should probably rename these.
One of the reasons that I’m talking about all these technological changes is that there are parts of our life that really don’t change. The things that concern us really don’t change over time. We wake up every day and we might be concerned about our jobs, food for our families, our shelter/homes, etc. Those concerns remain just like the concerns for our children, our loved ones, our health, etc. We worry about the things that can go wrong in our lives like premature death or maybe just natural death and dying. There are so many different areas to be concerned about. How do we take care of them all because many of these, if not all, are not temporary problems?
This is one of the reasons that I wrote my book Investments Don’t Hug: Embracing the Life Insurance Asset. I have worked in many different financial spaces in my career, but the one that I embrace the most, and the one that clients want to make certain is contractually going to play out the way that it’s supposed to, is the permanent life insurance asset. It’s the one asset that I often say will make up for all the mistakes that you have made in your life. People do not put away enough money. We’ve seen that time and time again. People don’t make the right investments. The economy does not do what you want it to do. We are not always as healthy as we are supposed to be. We all think that we are Superman or Superwoman, and think we will be able to get through our entire lives unscathed.
As I get older, the knowledge from previous experiences comes together to provide wisdom. Sometimes people will refer to this as “the wisdom of the ages”. As I am visiting with clients: listening to their wishes, their wants, and their concerns, I will think to myself, I have seen this exact situation play out before. How many times as a parent do we wish for our children not to go through what we went through? They ask their children to please listen to their wisdom, and learn from their mistakes. Yet, we know how it plays out. Our parents did the same thing with us. We listened to maybe half the advice. Maybe we implemented a small portion of what we listened to. Do we expect our children to be any different than we were? Life does tend to repeat itself.
So, if we know that things will not necessarily work out the way that we had planned and there will be speed bumps along the way, wouldn’t you want an asset that will be a sure thing? Knowing that you have something like permanent whole life insurance allows us to live our lives a little more at ease and a little less stressed out. Someone recently said to me, “If you knew that you were going to win the lottery, would it cause you to spend the money that you do have differently today?” Would it? Maybe you would have more trips. Maybe you would get to enjoy more experiences for yourself, your spouse, your children, and your grandchildren. Maybe you could give more to organizations that need it and make a bigger impact in the world and your society. That is one of the magical elements of the life insurance asset. It’s kind of like a bond that matures at exactly the point in time when it’s needed. If constructed properly, it is created income-tax-free and is deposited into the bank accounts of all those people that you love at exactly the right time they need it.
You and I don’t know the day or time that that will happen, but I know that my family is going to be taken care of because of the guarantees that have been put in place inside my permanent whole life insurance policy. That frees me and you up to spend more time living while we’re still alive before we get to the death part. It allows me to live my life more fully and do the things that I want to do. It allows me to make a bigger impact while I’m here. You don’t have to live with fear. It can also provide me with funds for opportunities and I do not have to concern myself with what’s going to happen with the market, with politics, etc. We can dial down the pressure that we put on ourselves, on our lives, and on other people.
If you have not read my book or listened to it, go to Amazon, Audible, or iTunes to order it. Of course, you can read or listen all you want, but it really comes down to doing. It’s about implementation. It’s about constructing a plan of action so you can live the life you want to live and not a life full of worries. Life will continue to change just like how my mother remembers her family’s telephone number when she was a child used to be the number 7. Today, she can talk to me from hundreds of miles away on her iPad. Think of what’s in the future for you and what you have put in place to take you there. Contact our office and let’s put together a plan of action today.
