April Marks Financial Literacy month which we love to celebrate.  It is a chance for us to make a case for insurance as part of your financial literacy.  Not for personal gain but because it is absolutely necessary as a part of this process.  Often we think of financial literacy and planning as a way to make your money work for you and make more money but that’s one piece of the equation.  Before you get there you need to protect yourself, your lifestyle and your family.  This starts with buying insurance to prevent the bottom from falling out from underneath you, building a reserve fund, paying off debts and proper budgeting before the investing piece.

Insurance is step one which is why we covered the types of risk you need to protect against in January.  But to recap we are looking at Immediate Risk, this is your Auto and Homeowners/Renters or if you’re a business, your General Liability and Professional Liability.  Reason being, these are the required pieces of insurance because this is where you carry the most amount of risk and a bad day could be catastrophic to your financial plan.  

Then it’s Long Term Risk, this is your Umbrella Insurance, it’s highly unlikely you will ever use this policy but if you ever do it’s going to save your financial plan because whatever has happened has fully exhausted your underlying policies or in some cases, like the Nationwide product, there are holes in your underlying policies that the Umbrella will cover  Also in this category is Life Insurance which protects your family if you were to die (and the amount your company gives you is not sufficient) o if you become terminally ill and you get the Long Term Care Rider. Then there’s Disability Insurance which is self explanatory and annuities that will protect you if you run out of your retirement savings.  These as you can see are low likelihood but as you can imagine the coverage is life changing if you ever have to use them.

Having a base like this circles back to our St. Patrick’s day story.  Insurance is natural for human cultures.  We do it on a daily basis and cultures that place weight on this are able to survive even the worst of slavery and diaspora. You can see this with the African American slaves brought here, the Jewish diaspora, and the Irish diapspora as well.  These cultures prized social insurance and faith. Community is paramount and they had each other to fall back on and there was faith (not necessarily religious) to creating a better future.  Such a social network kept people served as insurance that they had people to fall back on and their faith gave them something to strive for.  Without this people have nothing to work for and if bad luck were to strike they are left in ruin. 

I know if you’re reading this you have faith in creating a better tomorrow, so let us help protect that dream.