Month: September 2006

A Waste of Time…

Okay…so I have also been wasting some serious time here.
Try it out and see what your best time is. It says if you can get to 18, it says you are really good.
Post your best score here for everyone to see! (and to see mine…leave a comment)

Stupid Man

My first inclination is to begin this entry with a rant regarding how incredibly stupid people in general can be (myself included), but instead I’ll just tell you what happened.
Cell phone rings…
Husband answers, “Hello!”
Stupid man, “Uhh….this is A___. Um…I…uh…we’ve decided not to go with your company’s policy…we’re going to just stick with what we’ve got.”
Husband replies, “So you’re going to stick with what you’ve got?”
Stupid man, “Y-y-yes. We’re going to stick with what we’ve got.”
Husband, “Help me understand this for a minute…we can give you three times the coverage for half the cost….your other policy is going to be VOID in under 10 years if you don’t pay higher than normal premiums,by that time, there’s a good possibility you won’t even be insurable later, PLUS your cash value will be surrendered back to X company, leaving your wife and kids without anything when and if you should die prematurely, and you want to stick with what you’ve got?!”
Stupid man, “Yes. Um…well…I know that if I die, C____ and the kids may not have anything, I mean..my policy may not be worth anything…but we’re gonna stick with what we’ve got.”
Okay, people…help ME out here…of the 68% of Americans that have life insurance, 86% have the WRONG kind. This man has the WRONG kind. He has whole life or cash value…something that builds up cash and was sold to him as an “investment vehicle” for his retirement. What his insurance agent (his uncle) DIDN’T bother to tell him was that the cash that has been building up in his account for the last 20 years would be “surrendered” back to the insurance company when he dies and his wife would only get the face value (which is very low and will not cover her actual needs), if that.
See…he has a “paid up policy”…what that means is that after 20 years, he doesn’t have to pay his premiums anymore…it’s “paid up”. Well, folks…let me tell you something…”paid up” is just another term for (and please excuse the expression, but it’s the only one that fits) “screw-job”.
It means that you don’t have to pay premiums anymore! Yea! Right? WRONG. You tell me…what company in the WORLD do you know of that can afford to do that? NONE, thank you. Is your auto insurance ever paid up? What about your health insurance? Nope….gee…I wonder why? Well, on a life, it’s because the cost to insure as you grow older goes UP.
All that poor man’s cash value will go towards paying his policy when he stops making his payment, hence the “surrender” part. YES…the insurance company will RAID his cash value to pay the premiums…and once that is gone? The policy lapses and he is notified that it is no longer of any value. So then the face amount will be gone…as well as the cash. It’s a horrendous situation and we see it everyday with folks that have life insurance.
Please don’t think I don’t care about this man. I do…he’s been a close friend of ours for 8 years. He started out as ignorant as to how it all worked…then, once we educated him and he made the decision to continue down the wrong path, he became stupid. I believe in what we do for families…and the life insurance is only a small part, but it’s the foundation of the house.
For those of you that have policies…please READ them. If you don’t understand what they are saying, I will be happy to help you translate. If you don’t have life insurance and own a home, have a family, etc…please consider buying survivor protection – but do me a favor…buy term and invest the difference so you’ll have something to show for it when you get old….I can hardly bear seeing people being misled by insurance companies who want to make a profit and couldn’t care less about the little man.
Thanks for letting me vent…this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart – my dad had a whole life policy when he died (it was supposed to be for $50K back in 1979) but my mom never saw a penny of it because it was “paid up” and had already been raided by the insurance company and was worthless. I look back to how we lost everything and had to live with my aunt in Alaska and my mom HAD to remarry in order to make it….I just don’t want my friends to go through that. I don’t want ANYONE else to ever have to go through that.

A Positive Mental Attitude

So I’ve been somewhat busy this week…trying to expand my mind and learn more. I am spending more time reading behind really great business minds (Tom Hopkins, David Bach, etc) so that I can grow as a person.

Lack of preparation in business is only about 20% of why people fail…the other 80% is due to the fact that they never have any personal growth. Most people operate basically on what they can see – they have to see it before they can believe it. It’s what’s underground that creates what is above ground…like planting a seed. It has to be watered, fed, and nurtured.

That’s what I’m doing…I’m in the growth stage…

You Know You’re A Homeschool Mom When…

~Author UnknownWhen a child busts a lip, and after seeing she’s okay, you round up some Scotch tape to capture some blood and look at it under the microscope.

You find dead animals and actually consider saving them to dissect later.

Your children never, ever leave the “why?” stage.

You look at every room in your home to try and imagine how to squeeze in another bookshelf.

You turn your china cabinet into book shelves.

When your teenager decides to take one community college course, and comes home and asks you why the teacher wrote “At” on his paper. (A+)

You ask for, and get, a copier instead of a diamond tennis bracelet for your wedding anniversary.

Your kids think reading history is best accomplished while lying on the floor with their head resting on the side of their patient dog.

Your husband can walk in at the end of a long day and tell how the science experiment went just by looking at the house.

You never have to drive your child’s forgotten lunch to school.

Your child will never suffer the embarrassment of group showers after PE.

The only debate about the school lunch program is whose turn it is to cook.

You never have to face the dilemma of whether to take your child’s side or the teacher’s side in a dispute at school.

If your child gets drugs at school, it’s probably Tylenol.

Your neighbors think you are insane.

Your kids learn new vocabulary from their extensive collection of “Calvin & Hobbes” books.

Your formal dining room now has a computer, copy machine, and many book shelves and there are educational posters and maps all over the walls.

You have meal worms growing in a container….on purpose.

If you get caught talking to yourself, you can claim you’re having a PTA meeting.

Talking out loud to yourself is a parent/teacher conference.

You take off for a teacher in-service day because the principal needs clean underwear.

You can’t make it through a movie without pointing out the historical inaccuracies.

You step on math manipulatives on your pre-dawn stumble to the bathroom.

The teacher gets to kiss the principal in the faculty lounge and no one gossips.

Your honor student can actually read the bumper sticker that you put on your car.

If your child claims that the dog ate his homework, you can ask the dog.

Someday your children will consider you to be a miracle-working expert and will turn to you for advice.

Your kids refer to the neighbor kids as “government school inmates.”

You can’t make it through the grocery produce department without asking your preschooler the name and color of every vegetable.

You can’t put your produce in your cart without asking your older student to estimate its weight and verify its accuracy.

You live in a one-house schoolroom.

Ah…a Clean House and a Day off with the Hubby…

So as you all know, I’m the perpetual procrastinator. Say THAT three times really fast.
You would almost think that I came up with the old motto “Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?” Yes, I’m that bad. If it’s a project I have no interest in, or it’s cleaning…I put it off until I’m going completely nuts living in or around it.

Saturday, I was being lazy and just surfing the net…couldn’t leave my little corner of the world or I might see the chaos of the rest of the house. Never mind the kids had made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning (which really just meant, “here…let me smear that grape jelly so far into the fibers of the carpet you’ll NEVER get it out!”) or that my husband was getting off work at 11 p.m….I simply was not motivated.

Until I went to a function at our church. We were in the midst of a missions conference this weekend and it ran from Friday-Sunday night. Very cool getting to meet missionaries from all over — we had five families in and each was from a different country – Africa, Madagascar, Ireland, England, and Nehru. We even invited one of them to come over to our house on Sunday after the am service.

Which brings me back to my original subject….I cleaned my house after church Saturday night. The kids and I dragged in around 9 pm and after I got AJ and Abby bathed…Katie and I kicked some housecleaning bootay and got it done before dad got home at 11:15. Except for the folding of the laundry…which can just be thrown on our bed and the door closed. That’s what I’m doing today….folding laundry, my LEAST favorite household chore.

Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish when you have the prospect of someone else possibly seeing how you live? Yeah…you don’t like it…you even hate for your husband to see it that way…but you and the kids…you could live in it like that for a bit….but you’d NEVER want anyone else to see the pigsty-i-ness of it all.

I think I need the pressure of company to really and thoroughly clean your home properly….either that, or your computer needs to go on the kaputz.

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