Leslie Scism
speaker
504 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2017
last heard May 2023
Leslie Scism’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · More Middle-Class Americans Are Signing Up for Life Insurance · 1 Jun 2021
podcast
I'll just save on my own and then there'll be money for my spouse to take care of the children.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
The most basic type of life insurance is what's called term life.
This is a policy that pays out a death benefit if the insured person dies during the period of the policy.
That's why it's called term life.
Terms usually run 10 to 20 years later.
The buyer pays a set amount per year.
This is, as it is the most basic type of insurance, it is typically bought by young people, younger people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s when they are raising children, bought by a mother or father or both parents, so that if one of those wage earners die,
there would be a large sum of money that would be available to help that surviving parent pay the mortgage, pay college educations, or cover costs that would otherwise have been funded through the earnings of the parent who's now deceased.
The sale of life insurance to individual households has been declining since the 1980s.
That corresponds with the rise of mutual funds as a way for families to invest any extra dollars they have.
That is the rise of 401ks and other tax advantage savings programs.
So as of the 80s and the 90s, a lot of people who ordinarily would have bought life insurance
turned to the mutual funds and their 401 s as a way to save for the future, increasingly people began to worry more about outliving their savings than dying prematurely.
And it was so easy for
people to start to invest through mutual funds to get to the stock market that many thought, well, why do I need to pay an annual amount to an insurance company?
I'll just save on my own and then there'll be money for my spouse to take care of the children.
The problem is many people don't really become rigorous savers or they can't possibly save as much money as they may need if the death occurs sooner rather than later.
The pandemic really brought home to people that death can occur in unexpected ways.
Showing 241–260 of 504 · page 13 of 26
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