Be forewarned….this is a completely personal rant. So you may want to skip today’s post.
I’ve come to the conclusion that insurance is killing us…financially speaking. I have always been told that we have to carry insurance…”just in case.” And believe me, I understand that your whole world can turn upside down in a heartbeat. I get the “just in case.” Trust me, I really do. We’ve had a one of those occurrences in our house and we just finished paying off that “just in case.” But I also get this. We pay almost 10 grand/year on insurance. (That doesn’t even include car insurance…which is just another “drop in the bucket.”) I’m told that our insurance is “very reasonable.” (And just FYI…that figure does not include deductibles or copays…all of that is on top of this great privilege of carrying insurance.)
Let’s see where else that money can take us. If your family is anything like mine, I’m sure we could all use the extra 10K just to get by. But let’s just pretend that we didn’t need that 10,000 to buy food and provide shelter and clothing. Forget about any luxuries. Let’s say that we just had that insurance payment go directly to our investor so that at the age of 65 (and heaven forbid we might want to retire a little earlier) we can actually afford to retire. I’m sure that you are aware that very few people from my generation are provided a pension plan so we have to save every penny we’re going to need to survive in those golden days of retirement. And yes, we often have options like 401 K’s, but even if you’re lucky enough to have an employer that contributes something NONE of them are contributing everything. And if putting 3 to 5% of your income into one of these plans is going to provide everything that you need…well then let me know your plan options so that I can change ours. And let’s not even get started on social security. Oh boy…let’s not even get started.
So back to my idea. Invest that 10 grand. Now, using my handy dandy little investment calculator. If we invested that 10,000 each year until we were ready to retire at the grand age of 65, we reinvested the interest that we earned and we had a low to average growth rate…we could have well over 1 MILLION dollars towards our retirement.
But “just in case” I’ll give that extra million to the insurance companies.
I think I’ll grow throw up now.
