MichaelFliegelman.com

It’s an unfortunate fact that many policies will simply not perform as their policy owners expect them to, and yet;

—- Many policy owners, insured’s, and trustees are not aware of the risk that the policy they own, will not remain in force for their entire life.

—- People manage their Investments, they  manage their real estate – but when it comes to their Life Insurance – they buy it, and then rarely look at it again. More often than not, this “hands off” approach will create an under-performing policy that can expose them to significant financial risks they haven’t even considered.

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And Money Is Not Math!

 
Years ago most companies would provide retirement plans that guaranteed an income for the rest of your life. These plans were called Defined Benefit Pension Plans and when you retired they gave you a percentage of your income for the rest of your life.
 
Many of these types of pensions have gone away, replaced by a 401K where employees put their money into the stock market for the most part. Some people still have another type of defined benefit pension plan in essence, called Social Security. When they retire at age 65-67, they get social security income which continues for the rest of their lives, but this usually represents only a small percentage of what is their required annual income.
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Money in Motion

Taking care of first things first, our prior blogs talked about the importance of the Protection and Savings levels of the model. In the fifth and last part of our Financial Organization series, we deal with the third level, Growth.
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The Importance of Saving

In our last blog, we talked about the logical process of dividing each of the three model areas, Protection, Savings and Growth, into nine sub-areas, or “drawers”. We also listed all the common errors in the 9 Protection Drawers.

In this blog, we are going to take a look at the common mistakes in the Savings drawers.
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How safe is your Wealth?

The proverb goes “A “Picture is worth a thousand words” and the truth of that proverb is very clear once we’ve created the game board or visual picture of our client’s financial model.  As explained in our last blog, the model breaks down people’s wealth into three areas, Protection, Savings, and Growth and creates a visual representation of these areas.  It’s a very logical process, dividing each area into nine sub-areas, or “drawers”.  Once established, we open up and look inside each one of the 27 drawers to see what is in place, and what may need to be updated and/or changed.
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Winning the Game – Developing a Financial Strategy

In our last blog, we talked about emptying and organizing the financial “junk drawer” into a working model. Once that is done, we have the beginnings of helping people move from where they are to where they want to be in life. It’s the starting point; the baseline. When you go to the doctor you get an EKG which becomes the base line for all changes to medications and treatment protocol. Improvement can be measured from that baseline which makes it a very scientific approach. In that same way, we create a financial baseline from which changes, protocols and improvements can be determined.
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When we sit with clients initially, we find that most people have what we call the financial “junk drawer.” What does that mean? It means they don’t have an organized approach to making money decisions. Their decisions are made throughout their lives, at different times, with different objectives, sometimes with different advisors, and all coming from different places and biases. What they usually ends up with a feeling of disorganization, a lack of a cohesive overall strategy, and a feeling that things are out of control or unmanageable.
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Jonathan Gassman

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in the Future:

Everything you need to know about succession planning

Your business goes on from day-to-day without anyone knowing what would happen tomorrow if you were suddenly no longer able to manage the business. Without you, what would happen to your business?

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A Life Success Tip: All Humans Need Time Alone

The need for privacy is a fundamental physiological need like social contact, hunger, or thirst. All organisms need downtime, time out from a normal schedule to relax.

Usually, the greater the stimulation by others, the greater the need for privacy or downtime. Continuous stimulation – parties preceded by meetings, followed by family gatherings – produces a need for solitude to compensate. Continuous stimulation is like forcing yourself to eat a big meal right after you have just finished one.

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With regard to financial matters, most people do things in a vacuum.  They talk to all the right people:

• Attorney
• Life Insurance agent
• Banker
• Investment Advisor
• Property and Casualty Agent

But each professional will answer questions and give advice based on their discipline which may differ from another professional’s answers and advice.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the individual professionals.  Sometimes sports teams acquire great players, but the players don’t work well together because they each see the game from their own perspective.  The individual efforts are outstanding, but from the team perspective everything is disjointed and unproductive.

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A Life Success Tip:  This Too Shall Pass

How often have you found yourself in the midst of a period in your life where things don’t seem to be going the way you would like? And if you are like most people you suffer through these periods.

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Advisors discuss how families can provide at-home care for a loved one—and defuse sibling rivalries that often result.

By Ben Mattlin

Source: Financial Advisor – November 2010

In November 2009, the National Alliance for Caregiving, an independent nonprofit coalition based in Bethesda, Md., conducted a study of caregiving in the U.S. The survey, conducted in collaboration with AARP and funded by the MetLife Foundation, found that the number of Americans who look after a disabled person age 50 or older had jumped 28% since 2004 to 43.5 million.

That’s about 14.5% of the U.S. population, or almost one in every seven.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, given the aging population. Yet this may be only the cusp of a swelling tide that some dub a crisis.

“America’s 78 million baby boomers will begin turning 65 next year at a rate of one every 10 seconds, [or] 3 million to 4 million per year,” says Claudia Fine, the chief professional officer at SeniorBridge, a national geriatric-care manager headquartered in New York City. “These are the best-educated, richest and healthiest seniors the country has ever seen, but they’re still aging.”

A Life Success Tip: 10 Rules for Being Human

1 - You will receive a body – you may like it or you may hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period in this lifetime.

2 - You will learn lessons – you are enrolled in a full time school called life. Each day you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons, or you may think they are totally irrelevant and unnecessary.

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Life Success Tip – Keeping an Eye on your Credit Report and FICO Scores

An area that is often overlooked until it is too late is our credit reports and FICO scores. Here’s a suggestion that could head off any potential problems in being approved for a mortgage, refinance or any other type of loan. At least once per year (every six months if possible) click on the link below to be able to arrange a viewing of your combined credit report from the three major Credit Bureaus. Look for reported lates that need to be dealt with as well as whether closed accounts and paid off leases have been removed from the report. These things lower your FICO scores, which is what lenders look at to determine your credit worthiness.

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