It’s no surprise that in today’s difficult economy, many people are finding it hard to make room in their budgets for the basic essentials in life. This is no different for business owners trying to do the right thing and maintain their health and life insurance plans for their employees. Life insurance and health plans are costing more and more each year with many plans becoming simply too costly to keep for many smaller businesses. When it comes down to a matter of dollars and cents, many business owners are faced with the decision of cutting life and health insurance coverage for their employees instead of laying off some of those employees to keep costs down.

Economy, Rising Life Insurance Premiums Squeeze Employers’ Bottom Lines

The hard economic conditions that many businesses face now are directly related to stagnating sales and industry slumps that affect a business’s bottom line and operating costs on a weekly basis. The only way that many businesses – especially smaller ones with 2-30 employees – can handle the matter, is to really take a long, hard look at what’s important.

(more…)

We’ve all heard the main and obvious reasons to quit smoking. Heart disease and cancer are two of the biggest killers of people in our time and two of the most preventable as well. World Health Organization studies indicate that if left unchecked, smoking could easily wipe out more than a billion people in this century. If the Titanic sank with all hands every 24 minutes for the next 100 years, that would be close to the number of deaths from smoking.

Three quarters of smokers today are trying to kick the habit which is up 32 percent from twenty years ago. The reasons for quitting have only gotten more prevalent as health issues have connected cigarette smoking to everything from diabetes to blindness and everything in between. It’s not just about heart disease, stroke and cancer anymore. Now, the health issues associated with smoking can even harm your children and those around you. Here are a few other quality of life issues associated with smoking that you may not know about.

(more…)

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company’s LifeBridge program is a philanthropic program intended to help provide education to children of working parents. Since 2002, MassMutual has been offering free ten-year, $50,000 term life insurance policies to eligible families. In order to qualify, says MassMutual, a family must be in a good health and earn between $10,000 to $40,000 a year.

Any benefits paid through LifeBridge are distributed into a trust, which pays for the educational expenses of your child. Should your income go above the income limit after you qualify for LifeBridge, the life policy will still remain in effect and the only exclusion is in the event of suicide within the first two years of the policy.

Whether you’re a full-time or part-timer working parent, you may be eligible, but you should first check with MassMutual. Since the program started about 9,500 free policies have been issued totaling about $450 million in coverage. Since its inception, the LifeBridge program has paid on six claims through the program.

photo credit: atennies94

Divorce is a difficult time for all parties involved, and as you gather together and divvy up what’s left in the wake of your separation, life insurance is something that will become an inevitable issue. Before proceeding with divorce papers, it is important to reassess life insurance coverage levels, whether it can help to protect income received from child support payments or save money by changing the term of coverage.

One way to save money on life insurance is to purchase term life insurance instead of a whole life policy because of its impermanence. Term life policies allow for flexibility once the dust clears and enables both parties involved to move on with their lives.

(more…)

Even though the recent tough economic times have made it hard for most Americans to think well about their financial situations, they haven’t put aside their life insurance plans. Many policies are now cheaper than they’ve ever been and many investment losses in portfolios can be written off.

Even though many people buy life insurance in connection with major life events such as births or marriage, many people don’t take the time to evaluate their policies on an annual basis. Because of this, people are paying more for life insurance plans than the same or similar plans that are currently available on the market.For example: Norman Melnick, one of the creators of the Magic Marker, was overpaying his life insurance coverage by over $4,000 a year. Over ten years, Mr. Melnick would have saved $54,336 in premiums to receive the same exact coverage!

(more…)