 | Charlie Traffas has been involved in marketing, media, publishing and insurance for more than 40 years. In addition to being a fully-licensed life, health, property and casualty agent, he is also President and Owner of Chart Marketing, Inc. (CMI). CMI operates and markets several different products and services that help B2B and B2C businesses throughout the country create customers...profitably. You may contact Charlie by phone at (316) 721-9200, by e-mail at ctraffas@chartmarketing.com, or you may visit at www.chartmarketing.com. |
What's New
2002-02-01 15:35:00
A 'Boomer's' look
I am 58. My wife is 56. We have three grown children who are now out of college, married and raising their own families. We are both in excellent health. We began seriously working on our retirement about 15 years ago. We plan to work another 7 years. By that time we should have paid off our mortgage and should have a guaranteed income of somewhere around $3,500 per month, which will include our monthly IRA withdrawals. These two IRAs now total approximately $76,000 now and hopefully will be close to $100,000 at the time they begin to withdraw income. Each of us has a life insurance policy with a death benefit of $10,000. We have approximately $60,000 in mutual funds that have averaged a little over 11% return for five years (1994-1999). The past two years brought the average annual return down a bit over 4% for the same period of time.
Recently we read an article entitled 'Long-Term Care… It's not for Everyone'. The essence of the article was that instead of plowing money into a Long-Term Care policy, it would be smarter to invest the money in the stock market or some other interest-bearing fund. This way… "the money would be available if needed, but would not be lost as it would with insurance." Why would we not do this instead of buying a Long-Term Care policy?
For the last several months we have had many questions about the need for Long-Term Care insurance. Most of these people (when they tell us) are in their late 40's to early and mid-60's. Although each question is worded differently they all deal with the same issues. Rather than provide an answer to each of these questions, we thought it might be more helpful to share the following situation that was recently addressed with a couple contemplating whether or not to purchase a Long-Term Care insurance policy. Due to the comprehensive nature of this situation, I feel it offers lots of answers to lots of the questions we have been receiving.
