I joined my local chapter of the Business Network International (BNI) a few weeks ago. I hope to write a review of it after a few more. It’s an interesting group. Everyone has a specialty: real estate agent, painting, flooring, electrician, etc. Every person specializes in one thing. I’m actually there for my dog sitting business. Providing my services as a blogger doesn’t have a local demand. Also, they already have one person who can create quick websites for local businesses. The group can only have one member per specialty because the goal is about them referring business to each other. It works well for most of the group and I may be a customer of most of them due to our rental properties.
Anyway, this story isn’t about my (or anyone else’s) BNI group in general. Instead, it is about one specific story that a lawyer shared. He said that he recently had a client close on a $700,000 house… and it came up later that the client didn’t buy home insurance. He had never heard of something so crazy. Me neither. Whenever I’ve had to buy a home, I get a mortgage so it’s really owned by the bank. I can’t think of any bank in history that has lent out money for a mortgage without requiring the home (their interest) to have insurance.
It was a shocking moment for me on the call. I think most other people realized how crazy it was, but it was hard to tell on Zoom.
That brings me to today’s title topic, plugging your financial holes. Most of us have them. I’ve been writing about personal finance for 15 years and I still have to put together some critical estate planning documents. Just last week, after four years and dozens of hours of calls, I finally got umbrella insurance. That was a weird situation where none of our regular insurers would sell us a policy until they had all our insurance business – but they didn’t offer the insurances we needed in every state we needed it in. More than a few of the tenants we’ve had didn’t have renter’s insurance when we asked at the time of signing the rental agreement.
The most common holes are in those areas I’ve covered insurance and end-of-life documents. It’s easy to miss them because they don’t impact your day-to-day finances. Other than those big ones there are small ones such as money leaks. These would include those unused streaming or magazine subscriptions. Money leaks are annoying, but at least they are usually very quick to fix.
So take a little time today to reflect on if you have any personal finance holes. If you do, write them down and block time off in your calendar to help make sure you get it done.
A financial hole we didn’t fix until I was in my 50’s was to buy life insurance for me away from my employer. It was really stupid as I work in IT and have just dodged many layoffs at my company over the years. Outside insurance is a better deal over time as the work insurance goes up and up as you age.
One hole we missed was life insurance for my wife away from my work. She’s is a healthcare professional but only works part time, so from a pure numbers perspective we don’t really need that much. We had two policies on her from State Farm, along with spouse insurance from my work. But when you buy a 20 year policy you don’t think about that you will eventually hit that 20 year mark. We went into the marketplace to buy insurance on her, she’s fit, good BP, etc. but she has one anomaly in her health history, and that has scared off all the life insurance companies. Even a letter from a specialist saying it’s not a problem did not help. So we only have the insurance through my work and paying the “month to month” rate on the expired 20 year policy(which shockingly hasn’t gone up as much as was forecast). We’ll do that for a few more years.
So my advice is to make sure you buy life insurance that will get you all the way to the point that you won’t need it.
That’s a good one. I didn’t have life insurance until we had a a kid. We’re about halfway through our 20-year and I’m not sure if we’ll buy more when it expires. At that time our kids should be in college, with college costs covered. We should have enough worth that if either one of us (or both) died they would be financially fine.
Sounds like you have a good plan. Our long term plans with our now adult children hasn’t worked out exactly, so we are still providing some support, primarily from my wife’s part time income. We will probably drop insurance on my wife in a couple of years, probably when she hits 65.