Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Free Life Insurance Quote - Important Points To Consider

Taking care of your loved ones with a life insurance policy is a wise decision. Once you have made the decision to purchase a life insurance policy there are other important decisions which must be made as well. Life insurance is not money to be dispensed at the time of your death only. It is also protection for your assets and for the future of your loved ones.

What purpose does life insurance serve?

Obviously life insurance should bridge the gap between the time of grief immediately following your passing and the return to normalcy. Life insurance planning should provide for this short term need. Life insurance must all safeguard the assets you have acquired during your life and pass on as many of those assets as possible to your estate. Make a list of the assets you have and the needs your family will have after your death.

How to accomplish your objectives

Once you have ascertained what it is you want your life insurance to do you must consider how these targets will be achieved. Most of the time making sure that the needs of your loved ones will be met requires more than just a large infusion of cash. A plan should be in place for the proper allocation of the cash received from life insurance policies. There are also tax ramifications which should be analyzed.

Consult a professional

First and foremost the best advice is to get as many quotes as possible and compare. It is free and you will learn more about life insurance faster. There are many laws, particularly laws concerning taxation, which may eat away at the value of your life insurance. Ways to protect your life insurance are available. Using a trust instrument to receive insurance proceeds is just one valuable tool available for protecting your life insurance from taxes. An insurance professional or an attorney can help you with planning your estate to avoid most if not all taxes on your life insurance policies.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Accident Compensation - Why Bother With A Compensation Claim?

People are injured everyday, some worse than others. After a serious injury, many people are so thankful that they're still alive and they fail to realise that the other party are responsible for their debilitation. Hit them where it's going to hurt them with an accident compensation claim!

Many people brush off this fact and just want to get on with their life as it was, but soon find out that recovering is easier said than done. Unable to return to work, or even play with their kids in the back yard, the thought of filing a compensation claim becomes more and more plausible, and rightfully so.

How Do I Make Those Responsible Pay?

Simple enough, you file an injury compensation claim with a compensation solicitor, but it is always not so simple. Whether filing a claim against a business, insurance company or individual, you need someone who understands the details and is willing to go the extra mile to gain you the compensation you deserve.

Those responsible will have solicitors on their side, working hard as well, so choosing a representative for you will be the most important decision in the initial stages and can make all the difference in the world for your final outcome.

Is This Just About Money?

If your solicitor is only interested in the bottom line, then you're in for a big surprise. It not just about money; it's about make those responsible, responsible.

This may sound like an obvious statement, but it is very true. If there were parties or individuals whose negligence has caused you injury, then it is your absolute right to demand and receive full compensation for what you have been put through and an accident compensation claim is the way to do it.

There are plenty of solicitors out there, promising the big bucks, but they don't understand their client's troubles, and it is these solicitors who can cost you your maximum compensation. A solicitor who truly cares and wants to ease the suffering for their clients will inevitably fight harder and win bigger payouts with better verdicts.

Do You Deserve It?

Many people are weary of filing an accident compensation claim because they don’t want to be though of as a 'gold digger' and see many of the solicitor's as 'ambulance chasers', but reality couldn't be further from the truth.

The truth is that you are injured, your injury has left you many number of life-altering challenges, rehabilitation is costly and takes time, and you wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for someone else's stupidity.

The question isn't 'why do I deserve compensation for this', but 'why don't you deserve compensation for this?'

You've been seriously hurt by someone and you are somehow left alone in the cold to deal with it yourself. Many people find themselves in this situation, and choose to take the path of injustice and not get the compensation they deserve.

Why???

Money Won't Change Everything But Can Help

While a large compensation victory won't take away the pain you have felt, or somehow cure you of your debilitation, but can take away one of the biggest stresses in this time of need...

The last thing an injured person needs to worry about throughout their recovery is money. Financial difficulties add enormous amounts of stress and can seriously undermine the recovery process. However, if known properly, you can place your compensation claim's financial stress on a personal injury solicitor.

Any and all medical/physiotherapy bills, along with missed time at work and general mental anguish and family stress should not be on your shoulders alone to bear. After all, it's not your fault you're in this situation, so why should it be your responsibility to pay for it?

Do the right thing, and get what you deserve. Make today, the day you take back your life.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

A CPA Talks About Buying Life Insurance

Not everyone needs life insurance. The first thing to do is make sure you need it.
Life insurance is really meant for your family members or other dependents who rely
on your earnings.

Why You Buy Life Insurance

You buy life insurance so that, if you die, your dependents can live the same kind of
life they live now. Strictly speaking, then, life insurance is only a means of replacing
your earnings in your absence. If you don’t have dependents (say, because you’re
single) or you don’t have earnings (say, because you’re retired), you don’t need life
insurance. Note that children rarely need life insurance because they almost never
have dependents and other people don’t rely on their earnings.

Life Insurance Comes in Two Flavors

If you do need life insurance, you should know that it comes in two basic flavors:
term insurance and cash-value insurance (also called “whole life” insurance).
Ninety-nine times out of 100, what you want is term insurance.

Term Life is Simple to Buy and Understand

Term life insurance is simple, straightforward life insurance. You pay an annual
premium, and if you die, a lump sum is paid to your beneficiaries. Term life
insurance gets its name because you buy the insurance for a specific term, such as
5, 10, or 15 years (and sometimes longer). At the end of the term, you can renew
your policy or get a different one. The big benefits of term insurance are that it’s
cheap and it’s simple.

Cash Value is Trickier

The other flavor of life insurance is cash-value insurance. Many people are attracted
to cash-value insurance because it supposedly lets them keep some of the
premiums they pay over the years. After all, the reasoning goes, you pay for life
insurance for 20, 30, or 40 years, so you might as well get some of the money back.

With cash-value insurance, some of the premium money is kept in an account that
is yours to keep or borrow against. This sounds great. The only problem is that
cash-value insurance usually isn’t a very good investment, even if you hold the
policy for years and years. And it’s a terrible investment if you keep the policy for
only a year or two. What’s more, to really analyze a cash-value insurance policy, you
need to perform a very sophisticated financial analysis. And this is, in fact, the
major problem with cash-value life insurance.

While perhaps a handful of good cash-value insurance policies are available, many—
perhaps most—are terrible investments. And to tell the good from the bad, you
need a computer and the financial skills to perform something called discounted
cash-flow analysis. If you do think you need cash-value insurance, it probably
makes sense to have a financial planner perform this analysis for you. Obviously,
this financial planner should be a different person from the insurance agent selling
you the policy.

What’s the bottom line? Cash-value insurance is much too complex a financial
product for most people to deal with. Note, too, that any investment option that’s
tax-deductible—such as a 401(k), a 401(b), a deductible IRA, a SEP/IRA, or a Keogh
plan—is always a better investment than the investment portion of a cash-value
policy. For these two reasons, I strongly encourage you to simplify your financial
affairs and increase your net worth by sticking with tax-deductible investments.

If you do decide to follow my advice and choose a term life insurance policy, be sure
that your policy is non-cancelable and renewable. You want a policy that cannot be
canceled under any circumstances, including poor health. (You have no way of
knowing what your health will be like ten years from now.) And you want to be able
to renew the policy even if your health deteriorates. (You don’t want to go through a
medical review each time a term is up and you need to renew.)