Planning Ahead: Looking after Loved Ones should the Worst Happen

It’s probably fair to say that nobody really knows what tomorrow may bring, and many people probably prefer not to think too much about the future, choosing to live as much for today as possible.

Whilst this attitude may be commendable in many respects, it could be argued that to live purely for today is essentially throwing caution to the wind, as any number of life’s little mishaps could come along and change everything.

Indeed, whilst nobody actually likes to consider worst-case-scenarios, it is always best to have plans in place should the unthinkable happen. And this is perhaps most important in a family situation where a spouse and children are relying on one person’s income.

Moreover, many people will go to extraordinary lengths to take care of their loved ones, often working long hours to ensure the best for them. And this is precisely why life insurance is a number one priority for those who have a family to take care of, as it will help immeasurably should the absolute worst-case scenario happen.
There are, of course, different types of life insurance policies, to suit individual requirements. In the broadest possible terms, life insurance can be split into two different kinds. ‘Term life insurance’ plans pay a lump sum if someone dies within a specified period of time, and these are designed more for the main breadwinner in a family, to ensure minimum hardship for those who rely on a regular income. Options can be added to such policies for an additional fee, such as critical illness cover should the policyholder suffer from a serious ailment that renders them unable to work.

Then there is what’s known as ‘permanent life insurance’ which is designed to last an entire lifetime and assures a cash payout at the end of the policy. The nature of such policies is that they obviously must always pay out, therefore the premiums are always much higher than a term life insurance policy, so it’s certainly worth thinking about what will provide the best cover given the individual circumstances.

And as with anything in life, it’s always worth shopping around to find the best life insurance deal before committing to anything. Of course, even if a life insurance policy has been in place for a number of years, at the very least it is still worth shopping around to compare life insurance policies to see how much could be saved, as many companies have reduced their premiums in recent years, due in part to advances in medicine and longer life expectancies.

Families will find it hard enough to cope with the grief of losing a parent or spouse, without the burden of a financial crisis thrown in as well. Life insurance offers that little extra peace of mind, and should the worst happen, the family will get through it with minimal disruption to the other aspects of their lives.

Daniel Collins writes on a number of topics on behalf of a digital marketing agency and a variety of clients. As such, this article is to be considered a professional piece with business interests in mind.

Sparring over healthcare

Given that pictures are so important for TV it is perhaps funny that I sometimes form such strong mental images of the people I am going to interview. On my way to Ghent, to film ahead of today's European Commission proposals on healthcare, I imagined the Italian gentleman I was going to meet ahead of his hip operation. In my mind's eye he was a rather wizened, bent chap in his 80s, wearing a dark green checked suit and for some reason an alpine hat.

Paolo Bolaffio turned out to be rather different - a muscled, vigorous man in his 50s in shorts and a sports vest, who tells me he is an international sportsman, a three-time world karate champion, who it turns out has established his own school of the martial arts. But he's done his hips in, and an earlier operation hasn't helped.

So he's come to a clinic along Ghent's leafy millionaire's row to be put right. Now, in Italy, and I presume in most EU countries, you can get hip operations as part of the national health service or its insurance-based equivalent. Ever since 1998 the European Court of Justice has been making rulings, on the grounds of free movement, that patients have the right to get their money back for healthcare received abroad within the EU that they could, in theory, have got at home.

But Paolo tells me the Italian government couldn't tell him if he would get at least some of his money back. "I just went there and asked and they said they would have to think about it. They're still thinking. They say they have the summer time, vacations, and lots of things to do. That's the problem." And they didn't want him to have the op before they had made their decision.

"They said: 'You can't have the operation until we give you permission. If you do it first we don't feel like giving you the money'. So I told them the doctor said I needed it urgently. But they said: 'We don't care. You can only go once you have the permission, because of bureaucracy, and we'll tell you in August or September'." So he probably won't get any money, but he will have the operation.

It's exactly to make the rules clearer after all the court cases that the European Commission has been working on new laws. In fact they have been working on them for five years now. Their plans were meant to be unveiled just before Christmas, when I wrote a couple of articles about the ideas. But the directive was pulled at the last minute, apparently because of objections by the left and some nation states.

We will know the exact details later today, but it will still say that member states have to reimburse the cost of any healthcare that would be provided in their own country, but in the case of hospital care they can insist that the patient gets approval from the relevant authority if "member states can provide evidence that the outflow of patients resulting from the implementation of this directive has such an impact that it serious undermines the planning and rationalisation carried out in the hospital sector".

Whatever this means I am sure many governments will try to prove that their planning would be seriously undermined, so they keep control of the situation.
A lobby group for patients' consumer choice, Health Consumer Powerhouse, very much welcomes the plans. But one of its directors, Kajsa Wilhelmsson, says they have been watered down. For instance, a reference to getting your money back in three weeks has totally disappeared.

Get a Travel Insurance Policy To Protect Yourself From Trip Risks

If you are thinking about traveling whether it is to another state or to another country, there are some precautions that you need to take; the most important of which is to purchase travel insurance in order to be protected in case any unexpected event or accident threatens to ruin your trip. Travel insurance will protect you from these unforeseen events and reimburse any costs that you may incur in due to them.

There are many things that can happen during a trip that can imply additional, non foreseen costs like accidents, emergency medical or dental bills, theft, luggage loss, cancellation, delays, etc. All these events result in additional an non expected fees and expenses that can add up to the overall trip costs if you do not have proper insurance and can even ruin your vacations if you are not covered.

There are many different travel insurance products but not all of them adapt to any circumstances. Thus, it is a good idea to contact good insurance brokers and tell them about your needs. They will be able to customize a product suitable for your trips’ particularities and will also find you an insurance company that is both reputable and competitive so you can get the best deal available.

If you do not want to resort to the services of a broker, then you can do some research yourself by looking for travel insurance quotes on the internet with your favorite search engine. You need to compare the results and contact the insurance companies informally. Remember not to sign anything till you have compared at least three different options because there are many unscrupulous agents out there searching for their next rip off victim.

Focus On the Coverage Rather than On The Price

When it comes to insurance, you should never purchase it focusing your decision on the price of the policy. Instead, you should concentrate on the coverage that the policy provides and only after selecting the proper coverage for your needs, you should then shop around requesting insurance quotes from different companies but specifying which kind of coverage you want.

After all, an insurance policy is useless if it does not cover what you want and purchasing travel insurance only implies that you will be protected against certain risks included in the policy. If just for the sake of bargaining you end up closing on a deal with a limited coverage that does not include a risk that you will be running you may end up with a useless policy or at least, you will be under-covered.

There are predefined packages that include travel and life insurance for those who travel frequently. These products can be advantageous as all the costs that are not related to the risk (i.e. administrative fees) are shared and not charged twice. However, if you have specific needs, if you run additional risks (visiting war-zone countries, epidemic zones, etc.) it is wiser to have your insurance broker customize a policy specifically for you.

About the author
Lara Sawyer is a professional loan advisor used to solving bad credit problems and helping people secure home loans, car loans, personal loans, unsecured credit cards, home equity loans, refinance mortgage loans and plenty of other financial products. Whether you want to learn more about Bad Credit Personal Loans and Unsecured Loans or find information about other loan types, just visit: http://www.fastguaranteedloans.com/

Husband sentenced over Nisha murder

A cheating husband who had his special constable wife killed so he could start a new life with his mistress is being sentenced at the Old Bailey.

Nisha Patel-Nasri, 29, bled to death after being stabbed with a 13-inch kitchen knife at her home in Wembley, north London.

Husband Fadi Nasri wanted her dead to pay off spiralling debts of more than £100,000 with the couple's £350,000 life insurance policy.

The Lebanese-born limousine hire boss was secretly leading a double life and "spending money like water" on his Lithuanian mistress Laura Mockiene.

In May 2006, the day after he and his wife's third wedding anniversary, he left her at home alone to meet her violent end while he went out to play snooker.

She was stabbed by violent, powerfully-built nightclub bouncer Jason Jones, who was given the job by Nasri's friend, drug dealer Rodger Leslie.

Nasri, 34, of Alderman Court, Barnet, north London, Leslie, 38, of Chesterfield Flats, Bells Hill, Barnet, and Jones, 36, of Hathaway Crescent, Manor Park, east London, were found guilty of murder by an Old Bailey jury last month.

All three are being sentenced.

The court heard that Nasri had been meeting Miss Mockiene for weekly sex sessions in hotels and even took her on a secret holiday to the Egyptian pyramids in the months leading up to the killing.

But his business was in trouble and he could not afford the lifestyle, so he killed his wife to pay for it in what police called "the final betrayal".

Treasurer kept city finances shipshape

KEVIN SWAYZE
RECORD STAFF

CAMBRIDGE

Frank Gowman's first stint as a city treasurer saw him working hard to justify a local government amalgamation, cracking numbers to make things look fiscally benign in a controversial merger between Sarnia city and Sarnia township.

"I was supposed to prove amalgamation was good," said Gowman, 56, who retires Friday after 18 years minding Cambridge's books. "I proved the taxes were going to go up (in the township) . . . The township opponents used my study as their main weapon against it." He left Sarnia as Queen's Park ordered the merger in 1991, when offered the job as deputy treasurer in Cambridge, close to friends and family.

Ever since, he's been on the other side of the amalgamation debate, consistently doubting promises that mergers mean tax savings for Cambridge residents.

He's consistently pushed for intermunicipal co-operation to save on taxes and improve services. Gowman cites the Waterloo Region self-insurance pool he helped set up as an example of how working together saved millions over the last decade. Over the same time, other Ontario towns and cities saw private insurance premiums soar due to natural disasters around the world, he said.

"I knew within the first week it was a good move," Gowman said of moving to Cambridge. He praises the positive, "team management culture" he sees getting things done inside Cambridge City Hall.

His career plan was always to take over from treasurer John McIntyre at his retirement. Instead the job was thrust in his lap in 1997, after a heart attack killed the city's first treasurer. Deputy treasurer Steve Fairweather has already been chosen by city council to replace Gowman.

Gowman was born in Brantford and lived near St. George for a about a year, before the family moved to Goderich, then to Cambridge for Grades 1 to 3 at Highland Public School.

After that, another move took him to Wallaceburg, where he attended high school.

He was studying math at University of Waterloo when he met Rosemary, whom he would later marry. The math teacher at Galt Collegiate Institute plans to retire on the same day as her husband.

Originally, Gowman thought he'd have a career in computer science, but in his third year he turned to accounting. All three of the couple's sons -- Richard, David and Paul -- took up the career torch in his stead.

"They didn't have a choice with me and a mom who was a math teacher," he laughed.

In 1976, Gowman started his first job as a junior chartered accountant at a private firm in Sarnia. In 1984, he took a job at Sarnia city hall as director of treasury services. Then he jumped to Cambridge.

"I've always appreciated the frankness and direction you have given to council over the years," Mayor Doug Craig said to Gowman last Monday, at the treasurer's last council meeting.

He praised Gowman and his department for helping keep council on track to retire the city's debt and financing the city's new $30-million city office building without any new debt.

While the four-storey office building earned Gowman warm words, it wasn't his favourite city project. His fear of heights prevented him from visiting his fourth-floor office while it was under construction. Now, four months after the building opened, he remains leery of some of the panoramic views from the windows.

Quick to laugh and full of self-effacing jokes, Gowman has the ability to make an eye-glazing city budget spring to life by comparing it to a family's household finances. What's good for one is good for the other, he said.

There's nothing wrong with debt, he said, so long as it's used judiciously as the tool it is. It's financially unhealthy to use it as a crutch to carry you from paycheque to paycheque -- or to feed interest payments that inflate the cost of civic projects.

In retirement, Gowman plans to continue his passion for curling, a sport he started at age 15 in high school. A skip at the Galt Curling Club, his teams have won provincial seniors championships.

Now, instead of walking to work, Gowman has time to go mountain biking on the trails near his Preston home, or play tennis at Victoria Park. He and Rosemary have no plans to sit on the front step and count the cars passing by.

"It's the choice, the ability to do what you want." Once, of course, he completes a year-long kitchen renovation Rosemary has ready for him to start next week.

kswayze@therecord.com