Comment Re:Life insurance can be weird (Score 1) 94
Just be aware that "large enough to be taxed" is multiple millions. So you're probably still better off sticking with the 401k for the moment.
Just be aware that "large enough to be taxed" is multiple millions. So you're probably still better off sticking with the 401k for the moment.
No, term life insurance is the most common these days because, at least initially, it's the cheapest option.
Its worth noting "whole life" isnt actually very common any more universal-life is and those contracts can be structured a lot of ways. There are lot really good tricks you can do with life insurance.
True, I was going for a short summary though. A really good insurance policy will be flexible like you say.
Now that the littles are in grad school and we've got enough saved to retire if we need to, we don't see the point of life insurance. What risk am we protecting ourselves from? I wonder if the paper addresses that scenario.
That's a good question. The general answer would be that it doesn't until your estate becomes large enough to be taxable - then the insurance policy makes sense again because life insurance payouts are to the individual, not the estate, because they aren't in the estate, that's less taxes you have to pay, even if you end up paying out a bit more in premiums for the life insurance, you save more than that in taxes.
Crap, forgot to bring it back around:
Because they're investing the money you're paying them, they can indeed pay out more than the raw amount you invested, because there may be 30-40 years of interest/returns in there.
While true for most insurances, life insurance can be a weird thing. Yes, life insurance can literally pay out more than it takes in. To know how takes a bit of a primer.
First, you have two major types of life insurance: Whole and Term.
Term life insurance is like car or house insurance - It covers a period of time, the term, and you're done.
Whole life insurance is insurance that you expect to have until you die.
What is actually going on with whole life insurance is that it's actually term life insurance plus an investment portion.
So let's say you get a $100k whole life insurance policy. After like 10 years, while you get a combined bill, in the insurance company's records, they've saved up $20k for when you eventually die, and they're only doing an $80k term policy now. Note the phrase "saved up".
Eventually they have $100k invested, at which point a number of things can happen, depending on how good of a company and contract you got. This can range from them still charging you premiums (bad!) to your premiums stopping, they'll pay out the $100k when you die, to even paying you $100k if you reach, say, 70 years old and haven't died yet.
The latter used to be pretty common when saving for retirement was very difficult, you had to be pretty wealthy to invest in the stock market, etc...
You'd buy a whole life insurance policy that paid out when you were 65 or so, and use that to retire on.
To assert histrionically that air everywhere is catastrophically bad all the time because a COUPLE OF DAYS across the span of a year are hazy due to entirely natural events is so hyperbolic as to be worthy of ridicule.
Well, it's a good thing that I'm not asserting that, now isn't it?
And yes, "all safety is a compromise", I never mentioned otherwise. I'm not sure why you're bringing up zero levels of PM2.5, I never mentioned anything about that.
Jousting with a strawman might be fun, but maybe you could engage me? I'm a much more difficult opponent, in that my arguments aren't hyperbolic or ridiculous, thus much harder to argue against.
Or, to rephrase my argument: That you can't see haze with the naked eye does NOT mean that your air is "perfect" most of the time. PM2.5 is invisible to the naked eye. So there can be a lot more of it around than you realize. And the negative effects are seen mostly as a mix of long term stuff like cancer and shorter term stuff like asthma.
Smoke is actually mostly larger particles than 2.5.
Maybe of the slashdot population, but for regular users? Most of them don't really know how to make a throwaway email address, and private browsing mode isn't actually private on the distant end.
I'd flip the percentages. 90% would not, either out of ignorance or laziness.
Email address, IP address, browser cookies, etc...
That's installing a VPN, not using a completely disassociated email address and browser.
Uh, while yes, we more obviously used the barrels of guns for native americans, the fact that blacks specifically are often located in the crapiest most polluted plots of land was arguably ALSO at the point of a gun.
Or are you forgetting that for a while it was literally illegal for them to live anywhere else, due to zoning, covenants, and such? Segregation was a hell of a thing.
Ahem - "may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties."
In other words, if they can get your name from somebody else, such as google, they can add it without you doing a thing.
How many people are going to sign up to a site and automatically use a different email address and anonymizing browser that can't be associated back to them?
"Perceptible haze" is considered emergency levels of crap in the air.
"Concerning" amounts of PM2.5 are undetectable by the human eye.
Yeah, News at 11...
Just like how we pushed the Indians onto reservations that was the least desirable land around, we also tended to push blacks into the areas right next to industrial zones and such.
The problem we're discovering though, is that this is something of a false economy, making it hard for them to pull themselves out of poverty due to being sick and even mentally damaged because of the pollution.
Don't forget things like the union protesting that they didn't get a proper go at the job, so you have to advertise it internally again, even though you know darn well that there isn't anybody with the qualifications.
Roughly, the job I'm talking about is 99% military who retire or separate and come back to the same job as a GS making 50% more. Normal GS need not apply, they lack the clearances and training.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.