good plan, just one nit to pick. Unless you can use the life insurance to pay for the healthcare it shouldn't be counted toward your net worth - after all, you're really only worth whatever assets you can spend or dispose of, and you can only spend the life insurance when you're dead, so that's your beneficiary's net worth ;)

True, in most cases. Me, I have a policy that was made upon my birth, paid in full. Now that policy is worth some bucks and I can "borrow against the interest" at any time. And I can honestly say as one who has borrowed it dry a few times, it replenishes itself fast.

So say you are in that health situation and you are lucky enough to have a policy like that, that is money you could feasibly use to pay the medical bills. That's what I was looking at.

That's incorrect. There are different forms of life insurance, and some of them can be used as savings vehicles. I'm using one now to partially fund my son's college education (partial in that there are other mechanisms doing the same thing). It's generally referred to as "whole life", which means that it never expires. You can "borrow" against it, although the insurance company is generally the "lender" and "loans" the money to you at no interest but deducts the amount from your benefits. In the long run, it actually saves them money since these policies are constantly growing.

I'm not a life insurance guy, but I've bought a bunch of it in the past 10 years.

Read again sir ;) I said Unless you can use the life insurance to pay for the healthcare

You need to be clearer in what you mean - there are insurance products out there (besides typical health insurance) to pay for long term healthcare. Proceeds off of life insurance can be used to pay for ANYTHING since you get cash and as such should be counted for net worth provided it's not term life insurance.

With this "clarification" your first post looks clear as mud. :rolleyes:

I'm sorry that you are having difficulty with this concept. Some life insurance only pays out if you die. Period. The money is not available to anyone unless you die. This life insurance cannot be used to pay for medical expenses (unless used, after the person dies, to settle the bill with the hospital). It should therefore not be counted as part of your net worth, because YOU aren't worth that. Your estate WILL be worth that, AFTER you die. You cannot count potential net worth as net worth - otherwise I'm a potential millionaire, why can't I get that Ferrari on credit?

Other life insurance policies do, as you noted, allow you to borrow against them at 0% interest so that you can get hold of cash. Those policies can be used to pay for healthcare, here, now, while you're still alive. That, then, is part of your net worth.

Long term healthcare policies are obviously there to be used to pay for health care, and so do not fit my initial argument, which regarded life insurance policies that pay out only at the time of death.

Great post Lindy. I struggle with the notion that while even producing or contributing nothing some notion of entitlement exists.

-bear

Beyond a certain income level, taxes are more or less voluntary. If you're really rich, you can hide your assets offshore or use one of the many, many loopholes that Congress has provided you. Corporations, which are individuals under the bizarre reasoning of our legal system, have it even easier.

So in effect, you're saying that we can't try to tax the rich because they might do what they're doing now. I fail to see how the rest of us would be any worse off even if your predictions are correct.

Okay....three of you have repeatedly posted the same, "10 men went to lunch", widely emailed and blogged "story". The background is that your article appeared in the February 23, 2002 issue of the Lakeshore News - Salmon Arm, B.C.

"It was written by Ron Adams, a local financial advisor who writes a regular column in the paper. Ron is sometimes a little irreverent and ruffles many conservative feathers in town but he is often entertaining and usually gets straight to the heart of the issue.":

<b>Now....here is the problem you are overlooking by dismisssing the premise of this thread's OP, simply by posting, three times, the five years old, anti-progressive taxation sentiments of a Canadian financial advisor. My problem is that you refuse to react to the US wealth redistribution trend. I've described the problem, with the data that supports the disturbing trend, below. The solution was not to shift the tax burden even more heavily onto those who "enjoy" a steadily shrinking portion of total US wealth, and wage stagnation, to the benefit of those who have experienced a doubling in their annual incomes, between 1979 and 2003.

Your sentiments are a prescription for turning the US into a place like Mexico City....kidnappings of the wealthy, the expense of body guards and heavy security to shield the "haves" from the "have nots", and the lessening of the ability of the "haves" to come and go as they please.

People get angry when the wealthy become too successful at concentrating the wealth, and hence the political and financial leverage of a country. When the "have nots" get to the point where they decide that they have nothing to lose, they begin to act like it. If you do not have anything to add to this discussion, kindly stop reposting the Ron Adams article.

Instead, please tell us how "tax reform" that shifts the tax burden, in any way, to the people who have benefitted the least from economic growth and prosperity, and away from the people who have a virtual "lock" on the increased wealth, is of any benefit, to anyone. Tell us how the growing disparity can be slowed or reversed, without political interference. Tell us how people who experience the loss of representative government, because it has been bought and co-opted by the richest, will sit still, trusting that the "system" will solve the problem...no matter how bad things get for them.

In a hunter gatherer society, if one hunting unit developed a weapon that allowed that unit to take...say 8 out of ten of the game kills on every hunting trip, and that unit refused to share it's bounty, and it became more and more difficult for every other hunting group to find and kill enough game, even to subsist, what do you think would happen to the unit with the superior hunting weapon that refused to share it's out of proportion food supply with the less successful units. We enjoy the resource that the hunter gatherers did not have. We have a government that can respond to inequities in the social structure, especially if the inequity is influenced by the buying of the power and influence of the government, by the wealthiest few.

The "rest of us" will not sit still and idly observe the richest one percent continue to take an increasingly large piece of the pie, and buy legislation to lower their proportion of the total tax burden as they grow richer, and while our wealth barely increase at all. You can repost Ron Adams' article as often as you like, but it does not acknowledge, accept, or offer solutions to the problems of growing wealth and political influence inequity that the Bush tax cuts are aggravating...
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<b>The findings above are supported by data available of the CBO.gov website:</b>