Remembering my father and the gift he left us
By September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, and each year around this time I write about the importance of making sure your family is correctly covered should one of you pass early and the other is left to cover the household bills alone. This usually corresponds with benefit election season in the workplace, and we encourage you to let us look at your benefit packages with you before just clicking the same buttons as last year.
But when I started writing about Life Insurance Awareness Month this year, what first came to mind is that we just passed six months after the death of my father. Our family still greatly misses him, and each of us is grieving in our own way. What we’re finding, though, is that life goes on. Even my mother realizes that she has a future, but it looks different.
Despite that grief, we’re all so glad that dad had a life insurance policy. Death brings all kinds of bills, and it can make for a financially stressful situation. But due to my dad taking out that life insurance policy on himself, financial stress has not been something my mom’s had to worry about.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the first part of this year’s life insurance thought to thank my father for being a reasonable person who loved his family enough to make sure that we were taken care of. I can tell you with complete certainty that, at the time he took out the policy, he had no intention of dying at 80.
I know I’m not the only one who’s lost a loved one in the last six months, and while I grieve for my father, I have a different kind of empathy now for each one of you. I never thought that I’d be at the age where I would consider searching through the obituaries for old classmates, neighbors, and coworkers, like I saw my father do when I was a kid. But since this experience, I’m actually considering looking at the obits every now and then just to make sure I keep up with those folks (in a morbid kind of way.)
I can also completely understand the frustration of paying for and dealing with insurance. I hear all the time about how the insurance company didn’t fully cover a roof or a car, and then premiums went up after the claim went through. I’ve been right there with you in that frustration. But I do know that my mom was paid on my dad’s life insurance in less than 30 days. That check hit her account at a time when there were a lot of bills to be paid surrounding the celebration of his life.
So what I ask each of you is, do you know for certain that, if something happened to you, your loved ones would be taken care of? I’m not just talking about insurance, but a full plan for your family. Because eventually it will. What we pride ourselves on as a team here at Family Financial Partners is that we take great care in putting plans together for our client families while knowing that every year they will change as life happens.
As your financial planning team, it’s our number-one obligation to ensure that a plan is in place for how you’d like to take care of those left behind. For those of you in regular meetings with us, I know we’ve had that conversation with you. But if you’re someone who only has a relationship with us through this newsletter and you don’t know if your insurance setup is enough, reach out to us and allow us to review your situation. My hope is that it is a short conversation and we can assure you that everything’s ok. But if it isn’t, we’d love to help you remove that worry, be it mental or financial, from your day-to-day life.
Article by David Smyth, Senior Partner at Family Financial Partners — a financial services firm in Lexington, Kentucky.