We just got sad
news that our friend, Dr. Pan, has passed away due to metastatic cancer. Within less than a year of diagnosis, he unfortunately
lost his life prematurely. He was just in late 50s. Lao Pan was a very caring man, loved to make and help friends. My condolences to his
family for the huge loss! Wish Lao Pao all the best in haven!!
No question it is a huge loss for Lao Pan's family but more sadly it has also been an overwhelming financial drawdown to his family and I somehow feel a bit guilty for the situation they are facing. Lao Pan’s wife was
my wife’s good friend. They loved to discuss health topics, e.g. how to maintain good health with diet, exercises, and good
life styles. Since Lao Pan was the main bread earner in the family and his wife did not have a full time job, she was also very keen to learn anything related to medical and life insurance. Because she knew that I had done some deep research on life insurance for some time and was working with a good reliable agent for our policy, she wanted me to talk to Lao Pan, hoping I could also make him interested in it and talk to my agent regarding life insurance. But I didn't get a chance to do so. For one reason Lao Pan thought life insurance was just waste of money and would rather save the
money in the bank for retirement. I guess this is not something unique to Lao
Pan but quite a popular opinion for many people. Also, he simply did not believe much about the information from an agent as for him, it was just a marketing pitch. He certainly had a point as unfortunately most of the information we got from agents is either misleading or misunderstood even by themselves. I thought there was no rush and we had more time to discuss about this. But unfortunately
the tragedy hit him suddenly without any early warning. Even worse, in the last few months of his life, they had to
spend a great deal of their life saving to meet all the costly expenses related to
his treatment and care. His family has suffered not only the loss of him but has also been hit very hard financially! I only wish I could be a bit persistent and "pushy", and maybe Lao Pan could have changed his mind and had got a good life insurance in place that could have greatly helped them in this crisis!
You may ask, this is
kind of rare chances and why bother to worry about it. I used to have a similar
mentality and even hated life insurance since I have also been burnt before. But now I realize, after some detailed
study and learning, that life insurance is actually a great wealth building and
protection vehicle but only if it is set up appropriately. Even better, it is
not only a great and efficient vehicle for transferring assets to our next generation,
it can also be a great strategy to grow the wealth during our life time that
can be used in a tax-free format when we need it. I talked about the great benefits of life insurance before and you can see here. To me, a good and
appropriately set up life insurance can do a lot of good things to me and my
family during my life time as well as after I’m gone. It is true that life
tragedy is extremely rare and most of us will probably never experience it
during our life. But just like we need home owner insurance and car insurance,
we are not having it to hope disasters will happen ever to us. Rather we just want
to make sure, in case such a disaster occurs which is often critical and
devastating, we are protected. Same for life insurance as no one can know for
sure if and when a tragedy may occur to us. And it is even better with life
insurance that there will be no waste at all for the money we put into it as
sooner or later, we will not only get all the money back but much more (several
times more) will be returned to us either during our life time (as living benefits) or after we are
gone (as death benefits). That’s why it is a no-brainer to me now to “save” money in a life insurance policy
that can be used for any purposes at any time, just like a saving account.
And at the same time, it will really help to protect us if in case we run into
some unfortunate tragedy like critical illness or life threatening diseases or
car accident etc or even get into some legal troubles. There are simply too many risks out there that are far beyond our
control but I feel more comfortable and safe by knowing that I’m well protected with the
same money that is equally liquid as the money in a bank account, which would otherwise just be eaten away by inflation and taxes if only sitting in the bank. I feel sorry
that I did not discuss too much with Lao Pan about this topic before as I didn’t want
him to feel as if I was a bit intrusive to his personal life and choices. But I’d
think he would probably feel regret not having some protection in place during
his last part of life. That’s why I’d like to take the opportunity to share my
thoughts here about the importance of having an appropriate life insurance in place. I wish all my friends out there wouldn’t feel regret when a critical need is showing up and have sufficient economic support in place when needed, especially if it does not waste anything for having such a plan set up. The most important thing is that it must be set up appropriately to avoid being trapped into something that dose not make economic sense. My suggestion? Be open-minded but also be cautious. Find reliable sources/agents to learn more and you will be greatly rewarded! I hope my friend Lao Pan's tragedy can serve as a wake up call for many of us to seriously think about how to efficiently protect ourselves and family in case a tragedy indeed unfortunately hits us!
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