Fiscal Fitness For Spring: Financial Expert Gives Tips to Spring Clean Your Finances & Shares Why Auditing Insurance is Crucial
Your house isn’t the only thing that needs a good scrub down and sorting this spring. Spring cleaning is no longer limited to household chores. It’s time to bust out the books and tidy up your finances! Right now, people across the country are crunching numbers, gathering records, and preparing their tax returns. It is the perfect opportunity to put your accounts in order and save money in the process. According to financial expert David Kottler, one of the most crucial, and often missed, financial items that needs spring cleaning, is insurance.
“Each year people actively lose endless sums of money by simply neglecting to spring clean their insurance accounts. The problem is, barely anyone knows where to start…”
…says David Kottler, who as a financial planner with over 24 years experience, has seen the unfortunate effect of careless accounting.
So where should your financial spring cleaning begin?
Locating your insurance policies is the first step. Thousands of individuals have life insurance policies they are not aware of. Billions of dollars in life insurance benefits stemming from long neglected or unknown life-insurance policies are everywhere. At one point, it was estimated that at least $10 billion in life insurance policies nationwide had gone unclaimed or unpaid. And that only includes universal and variable life policies. If all life policies were to be included, the number of policies that were lapsed would have a face value of $112 billion!
“It’s an enormous waste of resources. Consider the positive impact this cash could have for retiring seniors to help them offset their living and increased medical expenses. It would ease the burden on our government relative to health care and social security,” says Kottler, who urges people to audit their accounts this spring to ensure they do not become part of this statistic.
Next on the spring cleaning list is clearing the clutter. Be sure to identify current policies and keep them together.
Get rid of old policies whose terms have lapsed. Next, you should determine your life insurance needs and keep the appropriate coverage. The majority of life insurance policyholders have policies laying around that they are simply never going to benefit from. In the U.S. alone there are around 330 million policies with a total value that reaches over $18 trillion, but 90% of them will not last to maturity. Of course, that’s a big way insurance companies make their money. The company collects premiums for years on 100% of their policies but pays nothing on the majority of them.
“Hanging on to insurance you don’t need is like betting on a poker hand you know you aren’t going to win. There’s just no reason to do it. Make clear what you are trying to protect,” says Kottler.
The amount of insurance coverage depends on how much your family will need if your income is lost. As with anything in life, this can change over time as the kids grow up or you are divorced. You may no longer need that old term policy. You may have significant cash value in an old whole life policy that you can receive now. Continue to ask yourself if your financial needs are being met, find financial problems before they happen, and evaluate insurance options to see whether an alternative can better meet your specific needs.
Kottler is on a mission to empower Americans to fulfill their life’s journey both philanthropically and financially. He has information and advice for financial spring cleaning for all individuals, encouraging them to meet their family and financial legacy goals. David Kottler is a national speaker, author, and entrepreneur who combines his legal and business experience to help his Americans fulfill their life mission both philanthropically and financially. Also known as “The Insurance Dr.” Kottler draws on his 28 years of financial planning experience to create gamechanging results for his clients through his innovative “True Value”TM life insurance review process. Over the past few years, he has generated over $30 million dollars in cash and tax benefits for his clients. bmd
Courtesy: Value Walk