My Mother didn’t tolerate gambling in any form. I couldn’t even play marbles for keeps. If someone solicited her for a lottery ticket, she simply donated the money to the cause.  Her conviction still resonates in my life choices. Her influence was strongly tested when I found myself in the Florida...

Whenever life insurance is proposed the first two client-questions that inevitably follow are:  first, how much will it cost and then, are the premiums deductible (especially if the client is a business-person).  Let’s deal with the second. In a business situation life insurance premiums are never...

How much is a life insurance policy worth when the insured passes away?  Easy question, right? Just look at the amount of the death benefit on the contract.  Most think that, because the proceeds are received income tax-free, what you see is what you get.  If the policy says $100,000, then the beneficiary...

Much is made of how few taxpayers will pay federal estate taxes since the lifetime exemption was increased by the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017. But there may be more prospects than you think.  In any case, here is all you need to know to get the ball rolling in a discussion with any client: Each...

There’s the joke about the insurance advisor who said to her client:  “I have some bad news and some good news!  The bad news is your premiums will be higher than we thought!”  Client:  “Gee, what’s the good news?”  Advisor:  “It’s because you’re highly rated, so you won't have...

The satirical tabloid is still in publication.  But certainly anyone with any age to their credit remembers the heyday of its popularity back in the 1960s and 1970s when Mad Magazine was on the stands and in the hands of its huge adolescent readership. Its regular features were the stuff of the contemporary...

They say that you ought to think of your life expectancy as a yardstick. If you are age 25 you’ve reached one foot, at 50 you have both feet on the two-foot mark, and at 65 you’re somewhere between 31-32 inches. You get the drift. As you get toward the short end of the stick you start thinking...

Johnny Carson, one-time king of late night television, once quipped, “There’s only one fruitcake in the U.S. and it’s passed around from family to family.” The joke works because many don’t like fruit cake and, consequently, pass on any received to others at the next holiday season. The...