Budget Your Life - Build Your Lifestyle Ceiling

I want to take a brief moment to wish a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Kemp & Associates!

As we approach the holidays, it’s both a delightful time to spend with family and friends, and a time to step back, count our blessings and reflect on how fortunate we are. It is also a time when your budget may become slightly tighter. This leads into our next topic, which is the lifestyle ceiling¹. 

My family has been busy helping our oldest son get ready to attend college. It has been a great time to instruct and reflect with him, and it has also given me the opportunity to take a step back and remember what it was like for my wife, Shelley, and I when we attended college. If we go back 25 years when I graduated from high school in 1983, college wasn't a guarantee. If we go back 50 years², college was a luxury to some, maybe even akin to winning the lottery or striking it rich. 

Determining the “Right” Amount of Life Insurance

According to a recent study, Americans are more concerned with being able to pay their mortgage and other bills today than they were a year ago. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that consumers protect their financial security.¹ Life insurance is one tool that can provide this kind of protection. The fundamental question is: what is the “right” amount of life insurance?²

Retirement and Life Only Pension: Part 2

When planning for retirement, challenges can arise. In the previous blog post we discussed the issues that may arise with life only pensions. In some cases, a life insurance policy purchased prior to retirement can be a great solution. Life insurance policies can potentially provide the security you need to cover several scenarios.

•       If the retiree pre-deceases their non-working spouse, the non-working spouse should have enough life insurance in place to purchase a pension, annuity or investment that will give them income for the rest of their life. 

•       If the retiree and non-working spouse both die, the life insurance policy should be structured so that their children or heirs can benefit.

•       If the non-working spouse passes away first, the retiree has several options.  They can keep the life insurance policy and use it for charitable estate planning, which would include gifting for charities, their community or their children or heirs.  They can also cash it out and, in our example, increase their income from $700/month to $1,000/month plus depending on whether there's any cash value in this policy. 

Retirement and Life Only Pensions: Part 1

When it comes to retirement planning, most people just want to provide for their loved ones.  In this blog series, we’ll discuss some ways you can make sure they’re taken care of.

A life only pension is a pension that is designed to pay out for the rest of your life only. These benefits apply whether or not you’re married. If you take a life only pension from an institution and you are married, have a significant other or children, “life only” means it will pay only for the rest of your life and that's it. If you pass away the next day or you never collect, it will be absorbed back by the institution and nothing will be paid to your spouse, children and/or heirs.

Product Performance vs. Personal Discipline

As a financial planner, I often hear people talking about the latest investment portfolio or the latest product on the market. While product is important, I believe that the most important piece of financial security is personal discipline: how you handle your life circumstances and how you will react to inevitable market volatility.

What does this mean? Well, imagine you found a magical product that earns 10% a year. You still could have other areas that need to be taken care of, such as insurances in case of death or becoming disabled, health insurance, auto insurance and having emergency cash set aside to allow that magical 10% product to grow uninterrupted.