March 24, 2009
MOTIVATIONAL BUSINESS KEYNOTE SPEAKER HELP IDENTIFY NEED FOR AFFORDABLE HEALTH INSURANCE
Working for an insurance company part time, I have gotten to see first hand this business, and the ins and outs of it. I have always been interested in becoming an insurance agent. I know that sounds kind of odd, but when I was a teenager, I went with my mother to her insurance agent's office and it really just seemed like a very classy job. To sit around and talk with people about their needs and to help them get what they need. Recently my company had a motivational business keynote speaker come in and speak to everyone. Normally, when they have great stuff like this going on, I usually wind up having a conflict in schedule and can't attend, but lucky for me I was able to go and hear this guy and I was really impressed. He was speaking mostly about affordable family health insurance, which he said is really on everyone's mind these days, and he talked about things that the agents and customer service representatives could do to help these people. He spoke specifically about seeing the needs of the client before they even know they have them, and the one way he said to help the clients is to watch who is not paying their bills on time. By doing this, he said, you can see who may be struggling financially and you can try to address this by down sizing their insurance, before you completely lose them as a customer. He said that many times when people are having financial difficulties they won't just come to you and say that they need more affordable family health insurance. He said they are more likely to be embarrassed about their financial difficulties and therefore they will just slip away quietly.
The speaker said that if you can help them before they cancel their policy or before they allow their policy to lapse, they will be extremely grateful to you and will probably be a customer for life. Identifying the need and helping your customers realize that there may be more affordable insurance options available to them, can make all the difference in their lives and in the quality of your business as well.
Posted by juliusp at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2009
DEBT CONSOLIDATION AT TWENTY?
It seems that more and more young people are accumulating credit card debt.I just can't really understand why it is that credit card companies would offer a student, just struggling to get by, as much credit as they do. Are they intentionally setting them up for failure? Take my friend Beth, she started at school with 5 credit cards, and one of them was American Express and one was a Visa, which I really thought was just a debit card, but it turns out it was a credit card. Now, she blew through those cards really quick with living expenses and stuff for her room, etc. Now she is a sophomore at school and she has already had to go for credit counseling. When she went they basically told her that there is no way that she can truly afford the type of bills that she has run up and now her credit is shot and she has had to get a debt consolidation loan, just to try and pay these bills. When they sat with her and looked at her budget, even they were wondering why it is that the credit card companies gave her this much credit, but honestly, it doesn't surprise me. I even heard a news report about the whole thing and how the credit card companies actually make more money off the bad debt, than on those who have good credit and pay their bills in full every month. I guess it is no wonder that the economy in this country is so truly messed up. In a system where college kids with little to no income can get credit cards with high limits, do they really believe that we will even balance the budget.
Living above our means has become the American way, and unfortunately I personally believe that the only way to truly fix the system, is to move to a cash only system, by which there are absolutely no loans or credit cards. After all, you can't live above your means, if you have to pay cash for everything, can you?
Posted by juliusp at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2009
TV and Insurance
I was watching an older TV show the other day and the grandfather works at an Illinois health insurance company. Every Friday the family sit down for dinner with the grand daughter and they talk about current issues and things like that (the daughter is in like middle school) and then one day the grandfather lectures the granddaughter about insurance and what she has learned in class about it and they have this really long conversation and she seems to be an insurance wizard spitting out information on temporary medical insurance policies and goes on and on about things that I don't even know and I'm pretty sure most grown-ups don't even know.
The whole time my roommate and I sat there watching it and then when the commercial came on we were both like, that is crazy, who is this girl? There is no way she learned all of that information in class. We never learned anything it seems like that has to do with the real world. We learn about diagramming sentences (has anyone ever in their life after that class ever diagrammed a sentence, no I doubt it) and long division (haven't used it once since like 7th grade). But we don't learn about things that you really need to learn like short term health insurance or mortgages or anything that we will actually have to know when we grow up. Instead we sit at a board and we write out verbs and nouns and draw them on a tree like thing with chalk.
The thing I think is the most unbelievable is that we learn in driver's education how to drive and all of those things and the rules of the road but we don't learn important things like what to do when you get into an accident or how to drive in the winter or even how to change a tire. They teach us how not to get into an accident, but sometimes it is unavoidable and people freak out when it happens and they don't know what to do.
I just think that we need to learn stuff that will actually prepare us for real life. If you meet someone who diagrams sentences as their job (not a teacher) or a noun saved a life, then I guess we could justify those wasted days in class.
Posted by juliusp at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2008
DEBT CONSOLIDATION, HELPING MANY PEOPLE OUT
These days many people are considering debt consolidation to help them through these tough economic times. With too much debt, may people are left with few options as to how to pay it off, especially with prices rising. People are losing their homes and are losing their jobs and so there is an even greater need for services like debt consolidation and credit counseling. It seems that for many years now the credit card companies have been extending way too much credit to the average citizens, well above their ability to pay it off. Now people are starting to realize that they are in way over their heads and are seeking help to clear their debt. Many people have considered filing bankruptcy, but the new bankruptcy laws are limiting people's ability to clear debt in this manner.
For me, I just really don't understand why it is that credit card companies have been allowed to extend unreasonable amounts of credit to people. They knew when they lent them these monies that chances of repayment weren't good, so in essence it was just a trap. After all, even someone who is not a financial genius can figure that someone who makes $10,000 per year, can not afford to have $30,000 in credit card debt. That person won't even be able to afford the minimum monthly payments on that size debt.
Personally, I think that what should be done is all credit debt should be wiped clean and then banned. This whole credit scam has allowed people for way too many years to live above their means, and without it we all can only afford what we can afford. Without credit, we wouldn't be able to buy a car or a house unless we had the cash, and then maybe the prices on some of these items would come down to more reasonable amounts. After all, is it really reasonable to think that someone should spend a years salary on a car? Or five years salary on a home? It just isn't realistic and perhaps this is one of the reasons that the economy is so off balance.
Posted by juliusp at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2008
Shopping for health insurance
I told my mom she needed to start looking into insurance. She's in her 50s and though that isn't too old, it doesn't hurt to start working on life insurance and other such things. Plus, her medical insurance had just run out and her car insurance was set to expire in just a few months. She's a woman on the go, so it can be difficult for her to keep track of all of her different insurance companies and keeping her payments timely and remembering what payments go where. It seemed like additional stress that she shouldn't have to deal with.
But getting her to actually start looking for a consolidated insurance plan was like pulling teeth. First came the excuses. She was too busy to go insurance shopping. So we set aside a little time during the week when she was free and decided I'd go to her house and help her out. Once that excuse was removed, she decided that she needed to first figure out exactly what types of insurance she was looking for. So a different afternoon, we sat down together and made a list of her concerns and what she was looking for in an insurance company, and more specifically what types of insurance she needed. Our goal was to find a company that would kill as many birds with one stone as possible (a medical insurance company that also gives life insurance; a car insurance company that insures the house and other possessions). We knew we probably would not find an “insurance superstore�?, but it didn't hurt to at least streamline the options as much as possible and eliminate extras.
Once that was done, she didn't know when we'd find time to actually locate the insurance companies and sign her up for them. So we scheduled two days. I brought her to my house where I have internet, and together we went from website to website, researching different companies, obtaining as many free >insurance quotes as we could, and writing down notes for later. I told her to take the notes home, and review them (and I kept a copy with myself). When she found an insurance quote that was reasonable for all the services she wanted, I would bring her back to my house and we would apply for it online.
The process probably took us much longer than it should have, but in the end I'm glad we dedicated the time we did to it. She ended up finding plans that exactly matched what she was looking for, and I got the peace of mind that she was being taken care of. We both won.
Posted by juliusp at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2008
payday loans
Since I have been taking classes this summer, all of my family updates have by way of big long e-mails from each individual member of the family. I send out my weekly e-mail address to the family and then throughout the week I get a nice slow trickle down of everyone else's issues and thoughts on what I have said. Yesterday I got some bad news from one of my cousins who is actually supposed to be a year ahead of me in school but unfortunately she has had to stop school for the time being to get herself in a better position financially. She doesn't have much money from her parents and the rest of the family can't give her much. She said that leaving school for the year to work and get herself ready to go back is the best case option that she really has. Basically it got to a point where when her workload would increase she either had to decide between working and not doing assignments or taking no fax payday loans to make up for the time until she could afford the bills.
Now I love my cousin and I would help her if I could, but she has never been very good with money. I am glad that she at least turned to a legal or ethic manner of paying her short term bills such as these payday loans. She also had the smarts to start out with the free payday loans and then as she got a little bit more behind in her bills she had to go to the longer rate ones that cost a bit more. This decision is probably what allowed her to stay in school long enough to finish out the semester with good grades. I think if she had chosen some other route this would not have turned out as well as it did. I have always thought highly of her and I am glad to hear that although she is dropping out of school for the time being, at least she is doing it with a little bit of brains involved.
Posted by juliusp at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2008
auto insurance
When researching car insurance there are some important things that you should know. The first thing that you need to research is what type of auto insurance best suits your needs. Once you determine which type of policy you need for example if you use your car for work you may be better suited with a business insurance policy or some companies will offer you commercial car insurance depending on your type of business. If you are not seeking out one of these types of insurance, there are still other things to consider, like whether or not you need collision insurance, comprehensive insurance, rental insurance, towing insurance, glass coverage, etc. Some of these choices will actually be determined by the laws in your particular state, which honestly you should research before determining your coverage choices. I did not list liability insurance, which is normally required by all states and is usually not an option. Then you must determine how much coverage you need. For instance, if you have a loan or lease on your vehicle there will be specific requirements for your level of insurance coverage, but any insurance company should be able to advise you of these requirements. If you have any questions, be sure to ask them and make sure that they are answered to your satisfaction, if they aren't then you are probably with the wrong insurance company. May I advise that if you do have a loan or lease that you definitely take the payoff option that most companies offer. This is a good way to cover yourself as many times after several years of driving a car your loan or lease payoff amount can be more than the amount the insurance company values your car at. When this happens, you wind up making payments on a car that has been declared a total loss, and let's face it no one wants to do that.
After you decide on exactly what kind of coverage you need, then it is time to hop online and research independently the different insurance companies and their rates for the services you desire. It is important that with each company you look at that you enter the same exact levels of insurance for each one. This will give you the most honest look at their rates and will give you a break down of which parts of the policy are costing you more. Cheap car insurance is not easy to find, but it is worth the effort, no one wants to pay too much for their auto insurance.
Posted by juliusp at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2008
debt consolidation
All right, so much about debt consolidators. Debt consolidation is obviously very handy when it comes to paying a lot to all the various creditors, but what if when you pay various amounts to all the different ones, you are able to do that since you might have paychecks coming from various sources, but what if you have used a way to eliminate debt and now have to pay the huge sum of money all at once? That might become very tough. One big thing that scares me personally is that what are some possible pitfalls that I might encounter, for example, if I consolidate? I mean, I have already – I have combined balances from two of my credit cards onto one – but it has not been that long ago, so I still do not know how that is going to play out. The big number that I now have to pay all at once scares me. When I first came to States seven years ago, I had a very vague impression as to what debt consolidation was. I am originally from Eastern Europe, and there, the notion of debt is rather something that people generally do not accept, although, now, it is starting to be more and more popular to use credit (loans) on things like cars, condos, houses, electronics, etc. However, there, people do not live on credit cards. If they have the money, they will spend it, if not, then not. However, here, I notice debt consolidation on credit cards and other line of credit is very common. Apparently, the notion of consumption is very widespread. I understand it, as, personally, I sometimes feel drawn in by the attractive and vivid images of publicity, ads, and so forth. Sometimes it just feels that it is impossible to resist the temptation of consuming, more, and more, and more, and more. However, since, apparently, there is never enough money, consuming more and more and more and more leads to more and more and more and more debt – as sometimes there are not enough hours in a day to get everything done, so here there is just sometimes not enough money to cover all the desired expenses. What’s worse, for me, at least, is that once I start spending more, I start to see that there is much more to spend on – just like the vicious circle. For example, once I realized that sometimes I can afford to spend a bit of money on this and that home essential (like, buying nicer towels, decorating the apartment a bit more, etc), I soon realized that once our apartment looks a bit better, we, ourselves, deserve to rest a bit more, go out a bit more – the list goes on and on and on. These “bits� accumulate – so do the debts.
Posted by juliusp at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2008
debt
What a long day today has been! I didn't get a chance to settle in fully until a little after midnight. Luckily I don't have a lot to do tomorrow, so I figured I'd stay up a little while and watch some television. Normally I like to watch South Park or some similar cartoon like Family Guy if that's what's on. But since I had to restrict my cable channels to save money for gas, I don't have as many late-night TV options as I did before. While this restriction can be slightly difficult to live with, especially in times like these when I really just want to watch a nice wholesome, mindless television program to get my mind off the things I go through on a daily basis, it was a necessary sacrifice that I had to make.
But all I could land on when I changed channels were either paid programs or commercials! I stopped to watch one paid program on some new exercise equipment that was supposed to make you look like a super weight expert within two weeks. The next paid program talked about debt consolidation. I paused for a moment here because I had a cousin who was going through the process of debt consolidation but hadn't been able to really explain what she was doing. The program said that debt consolidation was really just the merging of different debts to make it easier to pay them all off. Of course, the program didn't go on to clarify whether or not these monthly payments were less or more than what a person would pay on average or even whether or not the debt consolidation company would get some sort of profit from it.
I had to change the channel again because the topic was beginning to get a little boring and besides, I don't have credit cards or many financial obligations that would force me to look into debt consolidation. I certainly hope my cousin knows what she's getting herself into because it looks like a huge responsibility. Then again, her irresponsibility with finances, which we all knew about, is what got her in this mess in the first place.
Even though I learned a little something from watching late night TV (go figure), the thought of watching another minute of these mindless advertisements and pitiful sales attempts was horrifying. The few minutes of education I had earned wasn't worth the hour of nonsense I had sat through to gain it. I guess I'll be going to bed now to prepare for a not as busy day tomorrow.
Posted by juliusp at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2008
credit repair
Every so often it is good to remind myself that it is good to be young. Youthful good looks, a fast metabolism, and a set of people who are more than willing to give you everything right there at your disposal are just some of the things that we "young people" can take pleasure in for those years before we become adults. Once we hit that point it is all down hill. The new have absolutely nothing to live for but work and money. Why am I saying all of this do you ask? Well it is because I am feeling great about my youth.
The other day I was online and I was thinking about the dreaded adult years and how I could make them better. I began by asking myself, "what makes adults happy?" The answer came to me pretty darn fast. It is money. No doubt about it, there is nothing in the world like money in the mind of an adult. They just go crazy for the stuff. I personally have no need for it. I mean I am in college, what else do I really need? This moment of clarity lead me to look in to getting a free credit report on myself. I know what you're thinking. "How could he have a credit report if he is still in college?" Thank you mom and dad. When I started school they got a credit card with both our names on it. The last year it switched to my name. Now I have a perfect credit score and about a dollar's worth of debt. Now I just have to ride out this whole college affair and when I hit that brick wall of adulthood and no fun, I will be prepared to live out my long slow decline without having to do any credit repair.
If only I had some way of enjoying these final moments of youth without wasting a second. Maybe I'll try out some new sport like sky surfing or something like that. Something that really pushes you to gray hair and a young demise. It's just a thought.
Posted by juliusp at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2008
Loans
I think that loans are a good idea, but also a horrible situation to have to need one. It is a means to an end, but no one really uses loans like they were meant to be. I do not think many people take out loans with the intention of paying it in full. They either refinance, buy something different, or sell it. You can get loans for just about anything now. Loans for college, homes, cars, furniture, medical and dental bills, boat and rvs, even credit cards are loans. Now that I think of it, we pretty much live off of loans! Now that is scary. I guess loans are better than leases, at least you have collateral and equity in whatever you take a loan out for. Too bad loans aren’t more like bartering. Like you could trade something for whatever you wanted…We got screwed on cosigning a loan, using our own savings as collateral. Of course, my dad said nothing would happen, and we believed him. Of course, we defaulted on the loan and were stuck with it, not him. Even though it was in the companys name, we had to guarantee it, so we were ultimately responsible. We ended up having to file bankruptcy because even the savings we guaranteed it with was not enough to pay it. It sucked. At the time, bankruptcy stayed on your credit for 7 years, then they changed to 10 years. So we are still waiting to be out from under that word! We have great credit otherwise. It is just having the word bankruptcy on your credit report that people don’t like. I have heard it is getting increasingly difficult to even file bankruptcy. I think people have that in the back of their head, that if things ever get really bad, they can always file. But the government is making that more difficult. I do not think there is even a chapter that you can file now that wipes everything clean anymore. It is all restructuring and paying it back over time. Which is good in most situations, but it would have sucked badly if that was our case. Just hope you never get in that situation.
Posted by juliusp at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)