Showing posts with label Insurance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Insurance. Show all posts

Sunday, September 6, 2009

The Gluttons of Wall Street morph into vultures circling to feast on your life insurance policy.

{{Potd/2006-07-2 (en)}}Image via Wikipedia

George Carlin said it best " It's a big club and you're not in it".

They feasted for years on your mortgage, and now the gluttons of wall street are morphing into vultures as they ready themselves and high end investors, to feast on your life insurance policy. Vultures or Vampires? It's hard to say, one will eat your flesh and one will suck your blood.

Sometimes I have to wonder if Wall Street and Bay Street serve any good purpose at all, except to siphon off value from the blood, sweat and tears of average workers and small businesses.

On Sept 5th, Jenny Anderson of the New York Times laid out in an article how Wall Street investment bankers are getting "back to business as usual" as they have, after searching high and low for another carcass to munch on, finally found one big enough to possibly fill their insatiable appetites for at least another few years, or until the next fiasco breaks.

I guess $38 Billion per day, every day, during the last quarter, just wasn't enough for Goldman Sachs to live on. After all, they are paying billions to their executives in the form of bonuses, so I guess they have bills to pay just like the rest of us. It is definitely a problem of perception I believe. Their perception is a return to "the good old days", while our perception is a return to uncertainty, bankruptcy, lost homes, lost jobs and lost dreams.

After selling billions in Credit default swaps, $2 Trillion in Exotic Derivatives no one could understand, and Mortgages sold to people who couldn't afford them, then packaged up by investment bankers who sold them to unwary investors in pieces and insured by foolish insurance companies like AIG, you would think that another scheme of the same sort, with potentially huge numbers (The market tops out over $26 Trillion so even a small piece of it will be enormous), would be out of the question at this point in history. However, if you are a vulture, you don't really care who's carcass you feed on, only that you feed!

People who own life insurance policies depend on them for much of their retirement income. It is precisely those who are targeted. The tastiest morsels are those middle class families with family members who are ill, or financially bankrupt who decide to "sell" their life insurance policy to make ends meet while they try to pay exorbitant fees for their health care, as their insurers abandon them.

Apparently, the ones who die the soonest, are the best food for these vultures!

You may have even noticed some of their offspring, invading those town hall meetings about health care and squawking about socialist medicine being their ruination.

Ruination indeed. Ruination of the middle class, instigated by the vultures of Wall Street.

Updates: Oct 11 NYT - Have the Banks no Shame?





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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Is your credit card company charging you unnecessary "balance" insurance?

A diagram showing the front side of a typical ...Image via Wikipedia


"Look After the Pennies and the dollars will look after themselves"!


That is a mantra that I have preached on these pages and, once again, it will prove it's worth to you if you take this simple suggestion to save yourself "thousands" of dollars on your credit card bills.


The truth about credit card balance insurance. - If you have recently obtained a credit card, you probably have unwittingly purchased this insurance and it will cost you literally thousands of dollars over years. (On average approx $300 per year) Many of you don't even know that you have this insurance, or that the premium is being included in your credit card balance every month, unless of course, you are watching your pennies.

Here it is in a nutshell! When you apply for a credit card, and you are approved, you may or may not hear the selling agent say to you that there is included a "one month free" premium for "balance insurance"! It will usually be blurted out quietly, almost as an after thought along with the caveat that it can be canceled with a phone call. In 95% of these case, it is completely unnecessary and here is why!

Firstly, it is not balance insurance. It is "payment" insurance. You must lose your job to collect on this insurance. Then, it only pays your "monthly payments" and not your balance. For instance, if you lose your job and have a balance of, let's say, $5,000, the insurance will pay your monthly payment until you are again gainfully employed. However, credit card policy stipulates that, if you don't pay off your balance every month, they will charge interest (often 19% or more) on the "entire balance". In other words, that interest will probably add more onto your card than the insurance paid off "and" it is repeated again the next month.

This, coupled with the Nonsense of keeping a credit card balance , will cost you dearly over time. Banks and credit card companies brag to their shareholders about making billions from this lucrative insurance. However, it is only lucrative for them, and not for you. Do yourself a big favor right now.

Call your card company and ask if you are paying for this insurance. If you feel you don't need it ( everyone's circumstance is different) Cancel it immediately and then, if you are as incensed about it as you should be, demand they pay you back every sent of the premiums you paid without knowing you were even paying them. Your retirefund demands it!

They may or may not pay you back, but with the millions who are unwittingly paying for this service that most don't need and didn't ask for, it is usually cheaper for the card company to just pay back the 1% who demand their money back and keep the controversy to a minimum. They make a lot more money that way.

"Look after the pennies, and the dollars will look after themselves"!



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