In previous blog “What makes you middle class and remain?”, I mentioned “Insure yourself in some cases even before investing for unexpected life events” and you may wonder why I said that when the conventional wisdom is invest your money in 401K.  This blog applies more to couples and those with kids, but also see why later you should also apply if you are single. Let me paint a recent scenario that happened to a friend of mine that is really quite tragic but probably all to common.  My friend which happened to be my old manager that provided me my first job in IT, had developed colon cancer, and it just happens that my colleague where I work now was also very close friend of my old manager, and he told me that he had passed.


Whoa, that hit me like a ton of bricks because I hadn’t been in touch since I had left that job for new job and I was thinking to myself man what happened, he was still young, didn’t smoke or drink, was a good weight, ate healthy, and exercised. We frequently took long walks together for lunch.  All this didn’t matter and part of the tragic part was although my friend was very very intelligent the only life insurance he had was the insurance you get a work for like one year’s salary.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s better than nothing; however, he was the primary bread winner for his family as many of my Indian buddies are for their families.  His wife was a homemaker and he had one teen child and another young child. Like many of us in the middle class, we rarely have financial literacy and often don’t realize we could have done differently until it’s too late.


He may not have been able to overcome the cancer, but he could have left his family in a much better situation in his absence if he would have acquired a simple term life life insurance policy independent of his work’s policy. This would have enabled his family to continue to keep as close to possible their current standard of living.  A drastic miscalculation or lack of financial literacy!  I had a great deal of respect for my friend and I’m sure had he known better, he would have chose better because he loved his family.  During that time we worked together, I didn’t even know a lot about life insurance, but when I came to find out about this protection, I took action to insure myself even though I was single.  I did so because I intended to have a family in the near future and the thing about life insurance is you want to get when you are younger and healthy because it will be cheaper, but once you get sick, you could either be uninsurable or the premiums you would be charged would be cost prohibitive.


So, if you are reading this, hopefully you can take heed and act before an untimely death occurs.  If you are currently without a term life insurance policy and you meet the conditions I mentioned earlier, and you have discretionary income each month, consider employing it toward this end.  If you invest in your 401K and have no money left over, then perhaps you should stop investing in 401K and insure yourself because it is not guaranteed that you will make it to retirement and dying is, but when it will happen is the unknown.  Hopefully, you now understand why i stated the following earlier “insuring yourself in some cases even before investing for unexpected life events”.  Your family will be on much better footing by doing the latter.  For my late friend, I am doing my best to ensure that I raise awareness for those who don’t know the benefits of life insurance and to encourage them to protect their families and their financial future!