





Heart Attacks






Insurance is about protecting yourself, your family, and your assets.  Otherwise known as “risk protection,” it shields us from the financial devastation that can be caused by unforeseen accidents, unplanned expenses, damages, illness, theft, and losses.  Navigating the world of insurance can be overwhelming, but do not underestimate the impact that it can have on improving your financial health.  After all, there is that old saying: “most of us hate paying for insurance, but how thankful are we when we need it?”

While insurance programs can be a balancing act between being insurance rich and cash poor, the hope is to protect against potential financial losses by off-loading unplanned expenses to an insurance company.  In essence, the entire idea of protection is to use the insurance company’s money as opposed to your own.  There are many different types of insurances- but our goal is to make sense of the coverage’s that could be most useful for you.


Many of the topics that we have been discussing play a major role in helping us shape our finances by taking action. However, goal setting and savings are synonymous for various reasons. What we are saving should gel with our financial needs and goals. Goals help set priorities, because most of us don’t know what we are saving for, or how money fits into our life goals.   “Are we trying to build a college fund?” or “Do we want to buy a home?” or “Is planning for our retirement the most important thing?” If we have a sense of what we want to accomplish by saving our money, it helps to focus on what investment ideas can fit with that need (longer term growth or shorter term needs), our time horizons, and how much we need to put away.  Many people may feel that saving money has some value as it relates to happiness. We’ve discussed plenty of examples where having money didn’t equate to happiness.  Balancing priorities, financial goals, savings needs, and life desires, are key ingredients to personal wellbeing. Your life shouldn’t be consumed by the almighty dollar, or lamenting about how things would be better with a higher paying job, or having more money to spend.  One of the acronyms to goal setting involves taking a S-M-A-R-T approach to financial or personal needs.
By setting goals we have focus and a direction– without them we would wander aimlessly.  Imagine trying to throw a dart without a dart board, or building a house without a blueprint.  Some of the many benefits of setting goals include:
1.   Allowing us to stay focused rather than wasting time. 2.  Helping us to measure our progress while we push towards our objective. 3.  Converting dreams and wishes into something that is real. 4.Goals help us to stay motivated; we are excited to accomplish our objective.


It’s very easy to rely heavily on credit, but remember that the more you charge, the more you owe.  You have to live within your means, and make sure that you are only charging what you can afford to pay back.  Unlike a home mortgage or a car payment, credit cards don’t have a fixed monthly payment that we can plan around.  If you are having to pay a lot of your monthly income to your credit cards, then that should be a warning sign.  Also, the more you charge, the more potential interest you are incurring.  As a rule of thumb, don’t allow your credit card to take up more than 10% of your monthly income.  Additionally, keeping your credit limit low, limiting the number of cards that you have, or using cards that make you pay off the balance every month, like American Express, can help to keep your credit card debt manageable.
Credit scores and credit history are also very important when it comes to debt management.  Our ability to buy a house, get a car loan, qualify for student loans, personal loans, and credit cards are just a few of the many things impacted by credit scores.  The interest rates charged on many things depends on our credit score; the lower the score, the higher the rates.  How we handle our debt has a huge influence on our credit score, so it’s important that we try to follow a few tips:
1. Carrying a lot of debt, especially high credit card debt, hurts our score.  Our level of debt is 30% of our score, so paying the balances quickly or reducing them can help. 2. Late or missed payments hurt your credit scores.  Payment history is 35% of your credit score. 3. Try to keep the revolving debt (credit card, retails cards, gas cards, etc.) below 10% of your total available credit. 4. Taking out loans or keeping credit balances DOES NOT help build credit score. 5. Understand any “enticement” offers, such as charge $5,000 in first 60 days, and we will give you 25,000 reward points.  These cards could be loaded with lots of other costs, such as much higher interest rates, fees for late payments, or rate hikes for over-charging.  Remember, you need to charge to get the offer! 6. Having too many cards creates more temptations to charge more debt, and can become very unmanageable.