realLIFEstories
Youth Is No Excuse
Help your young clients accept their mortality and arrange for their survivors’ needs.
Julie Britt
It’s easy to understand why a successful,
healthy young man in his 30s wouldn’t
think about dying and the need for life
insurance. Unfortunately, we can’t predict our demise.
Grace Antares, branch office supervisor at World Financial Group in Portland,
Ore., had to get tough with her young client, Tim Craven, who was more interested
in tax-favorable retirement investments than
in life insurance. At 37,
the highly compensated Intel engineer and
his wife, Debbie, were
expecting their first
child.
Life insurance? He
had a $200,000 term
life policy through his
employer. At their first
meeting, Grace warned
him that such a small
policy wouldn’t cov- Grace Antares
er his family’s needs.
“Yeah, I probably need
more, but I’m young. I’ll get to that,” he
said.
Months later, Grace ran into Debbie,
who told her that Tim was at home re-covering from a car accident. “I got upset
with him,” Grace says. “I called him and
said, ‘ Tim, do you remember that discussion we had about life insurance?’ Debbie
had just given birth, and I said, ‘Where,
exactly, would your family be right now if
you had not made it out of that car wreck?’
And he said, ‘Oh, my God; you’re right.’”
He immediately scheduled an appointment with her to discuss life insurance.
“Unfortunately, too many people ... get
into that situation and don’t have a wake-up call like a little car wreck that rearranges their priorities,” Grace says.
Tim purchased an $800,000 variable
life insurance policy from Western Reserve Life that would provide death benefits or the retirement income on which he
had been more focused, Grace says.
Just in time
Four months after Grace delivered the
policy, Tim was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was told he had six
they held, that at least one parent should
be in the home with the child and not
raise kids in day care.”
Without the insurance, Debbie, who
had never worked, would have been
forced to seek employment. If she had
managed to find a job, even though she
had no marketable skills, she would have
had to leave Maggie in a costly day-care
“IT ALLOWED THEM TO CARRY ON WITH
THEIR FAMILY THE WAY THEY WANTED
TO, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT THE
ONLY WAGE EARNER IN THE FAMILY
WAS GONE.”
—GRACE ANTARES
months to live. He said,
“Thank you for saving
my family, as I have no
idea where we would be if
you had not made me sit
down and put the right program together,” Grace says.
Western Reserve advanced Tim and
Debbie $500,000 from his life insurance
policy just months after he purchased it,
Grace says. The couple bought a house
with cash and paid off their debts. Tim
lived a couple of years longer than his
doctors expected, so he, Debbie and their
daughter, Maggie, lived debt-free in their
new home during Tim’s last days.
Upon his death, Grace helped Debbie invest the remaining Western Reserve benefits and his employee benefits
so she could stay home with Maggie. “It
allowed them to carry on with their family the way they wanted to, in spite of the
fact that the only wage earner in the family was gone,” Grace says. “It was a value
center, Grace says. “It would have been
a family absolutely lost. They probably
would have slipped into poverty never to
emerge out of it.”
Share your stories
Grace has used this cautionary tale to
train other agents. “I think the important thing for agents is to be able to understand those kinds of stories and be
willing to share them with other families, because none of us knows when our
number’s up,” she says.
This is a challenge for advisors, because people see life insurance as an expense. “The truth is, that’s our job. Any
time you put together a comprehensive
strategy for someone, life insurance has
to be the foundational piece, before they
do anything else, working with their existing budget,” Grace says. “It’s a tool to
help hold a family together and to stem
the tide of families that drop into poverty
as a result of poor planning.”
