Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Importance of Life Insurance

I must admit that preparing for the future isn't always something I put as a first priority. When money is tight, its easiest to just think about the present and not about possibilities of what may happen, the “what ifs” and all that. Preparing for the future may seem like a luxury that you can't afford if you're too short on cash, and yet, not preparing for the future can be disastrous from a financial perspective.

One of the biggest situations in which this is true is the concept of life insurance. To find out about your options, click here to read more about Life Insurance from Suncorp.

I never really understood how important life insurance could be until a family member was saved from total chaos and poverty because of their forward thinking in getting life insurance.


This family had 4 little kids, and the mother was a stay at home mom, while the father worked in construction. Through his company, he had life insurance for himself.

One day, the husband went out to work in a city a few hours from where he lived, and got a cut from something on the job. It started looking funny, and he got it checked out by the doctor, who gave him a tetanus shot and took a few other precautionary measures, and sent him off.

Unfortunately, he went to bed and never woke up. Something about the cut caused his life to end when he was just in his early thirties, leaving his wife a widow who needed to take care of their four little children.

Emotionally, I can't even begin to imagine what his wife went through- one second she was a married woman with a wonderful, supporting husband, while she stayed home to take care of the family, and the next second, she was a widow, responsible for raising and supporting her children and home, entirely on her own. To have to worry about finances on top of everything else could easily to push someone over the edge, something that someone in her position could ill afford to do.

Fortunately, her community stepped in to take care of her for the first little bit after the devastating accident, but they could only pitch in for so long. But at that point, her husband's life insurance kicked in, and she was able to just worry about getting back on her feet emotionally and adjusting to life as a single mom, without needing to stress about finances as well.

Her husband's life insurance was literally a life saver, helping the family manage in such a hard time. When I think about what she's been through, it makes me realize the importance of preparing for the future and even things that would seem like unlikely scenarios, because the future isn't certain, and while we can hope that everything will always work out beautifully, we can't count on it being so, and life insurance can make a huge difference in people's lives.

See my disclaimer.