#32 - What Insurance and Estate Planning Have In Common
Reluctant Executor News
Think about the times you planned ahead for something. Was it a vacation? A major event like a wedding? Moving to a new city? Building a house? All of these are generally thought of as something fun, or a new and exciting chapter of your life.
But what about the unpleasant things we know lie ahead? Many of us don't want to plan for these, and understandably so. Building a house may be one of the most frustrating things you'll ever do, but the reward is huge. What's the reward for something like insurance? Typically something bad has to happen before you think about an insurance policy. But once you realize the recovery with a policy won't be quite as bad, you breathe a little sign of relief.
Estate planning is another type of insurance policy. It doesn't directly pay out cash, but it will provide other benefits that make dealing with a loss just a little bit easier.
LinkedIn post from February 13, 2024
Who remembers 007 373 5963?
A good friend of mine in high school kept writing this number down as his social security number when applying to colleges. He is a smart guy, was applying to schools for pre-med, and is now a doctor.
Most of us can easily rattle off our social security number, birthday, address, and other data that is our own.
How about for your parents? I'm guessing you can quickly recall their birthdays, but what about their social? Phone number? Address?
Unless they are still in the same house you grew up in, it can be difficult.
Now imagine if you're so preoccupied with something else, like grief, and you have to provide this information many times over.
Relying on your memory can lead to mistakes, which then can compound.
A better solution? Write down critical information early, and have it available to copy when you need it.
That is the point of creating an Estate Map. You may not need it for decades. But when you do, you'll be thankful that you already spent the time making it.
If you need help getting started, you can download a free template.
Oh, circling back to my friend. Fortunately he wasn't dealing with grief while he was applying to colleges.
007 373 5963 is the cheat code to get straight to Mike Tyson in the classic Mike Tyson's Punch Out video game.
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LinkedIn post from April 23, 2024
Do you prefer working long hours with tight deadlines and little room for anything else?
Or do you try to avoid those situations by planning ahead?
Google's head of search recently said teams working to fix Gemini AI image recognition models stepped up from working 100 hours per week to 120 hours.
That's going from over 14 hours per day to over 17 hours per day. All 7 days of the week.
Leaving 7 hours each day for sleep, eating, health, hobbies, and family.
Sometimes things go wrong and long hours can't be avoided.
But most of the time planning ahead will pay dividends down the road.
I wonder if the Google employees working 120 hours per week were the same ones that designed and signed off on the models originally.
Could someone have planned better up front, saving a different team hours of exhausting work later on?
The same thing applies to estate planning with your family. You spend the time up front creating an Estate Map in order to save your family stress and exhaustion down the road.
Have you ever had to work longer hours because of suboptimal planning by a different team? Tell your story in the comments on LinkedIn.
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Estate Map
Taking out insurance policies to protect your family in emergencies is a great way to create financial protection. But you're still left with the work, and the multitude of paper cuts, to put pieces back together.
Reluctant Executor can help you create an insurance policy for this work. Our Estate Map template is a free resource that can help you document the things that will cause these paper cuts after a loss. You can download an Estate Map template to get started, or schedule a call for one-on-one guidance.