Insurance, Investments and Group Benefits

Throughout Life Insurance Awareness Month in September we offered simple tips for first-time insurance buyers. Now we turn our attention to helping those with the foresight get life insurance to ensure you continue to enjoy the benefits that true peace of mind brings. Owning life insurance is not like owning a house or a car – you don’t have to watch it every day. However, it is often a decades-long investment and you should check under the hood every so often.

With that in mind, here a few common pitfalls you can avoid:

The next retirement myth is an example of an inter-generational issue. It also goes back to the issue of when to start making and funding plans for retirement. 

Retirement myth #10: I’m too young for critical illness or long term care coverage

As Life Insurance Awareness Month 2020 draws to a close, we want to offer one last tip for the first time life insurance buyer and that is to choose an insurance company that you feel conformable with. Things you might want to consider are:

Now that you’ve crunched the numbers and learned the lingo, you need to think about which type of life insurance policy suits you best. There are two basic categories of life insurance: term insurance and permanent insurance (sometimes called “whole life”).

We’ve done the “why” and the “how” of owning life insurance, this week it’s time to look into the “what” as in “what are they talking about?”

Last week we went over the question” Why do I need life insurance?”. This week we’ll tackle the “how” – as in “how much life insurance you and your family need”. This is a fairly straightforward process but requires some legwork and university-level math skills (that’s a joke, BTW).

If the past 6 months has taught is anything, it’s that you can never be too prepared for the unexpected. For many of us across Canada, that has meant taking a hard look at the emergency response plan we have for our families and our futures. We think that plan should include some form of individually owned life insurance.

Thinking about buying life insurance can be overwhelming – especially when it’s your first time. There are a lot of choices out there and many factors to consider. Our goal is to make your insurance shopping experienc

e as painless as possible. To help ensure that you navigate your journey successfully, we are going to share a simple tip every Tuesday during September to get you started.

Without any further ado, let’s get started with our first tip.

Things often go wrong or take an unexpected turn even though you carefully planned what you were going to do. Robert Burns’ famous line basically said that the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. That extends to intentions of staying on the job or finding paid work later in life. Here's retirement myth #9:

Retirement myth #9: Go back to work when there are not enough retirement savings

At the risk of sounding nitpicky, governments don’t pay for anything. Working Canadians do. Taxpayers do. Taxes are directed to certain areas of need. Growing needs and rising costs means that there isn’t enough public money to go around. That reality is hitting retirees and will hit them harder as time goes on.

Retirement myth #8: The government will take care of any medical expenses

The outbreak of COVID-19 is having a significant impact on all Canadians. According to a Mar. 25th news release by the Dept. of Finance, "The Government of Canada is taking strong, immediate and effective action to protect Canadians and the economy from the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic. No Canadian should have to choose between protecting their health, putting food on the table, paying for their medication or caring for a family member."