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Your life insurance monthly premium can start looking less and less appealing once you've retired. It's a scenario Dan Simon, a retirement planning adviser with Daniel A. White & Associates in Middletown, Del., has seen quite often, even with his own parents. "The cost of the insurance had risen to the point where it was getting unaffordable. They were wondering do we really need to keep this coverage now that the kids are all grown up?"
If you stop paying your premiums, you lose your life insurance coverage, and your heirs wouldn't get anything back for what you've paid in. If you cancel a policy that has cash value, a reserve of money built up in some types of life insurance, the insurer sends you a check for that amount, though it will be far less than the listed death benefit.
Over the past 20 years, a third option went mainstream: selling your policy to a company, a practice known as a life settlement, with the buyer getting the death benefit when you die.
SEE MORE Don't Fall for That Life Insurance Ad on TV
"It's kind of morbid when you think about it. A group buys boatloads of policies from people that have fallen on hard times and can no longer afford their insurance," profiting from the seller's death, says Simon. "In theory, they want you to die tomorrow. If you live another 20 years, it's a bad investment for them."
Selling a life insurance policy generally isn't a great deal for you either, and there are better alternatives worth exploring. Simon finds that people typically turn to selling a policy when they're desperate. Usually, it's because they've spent down their other retirement assets, or they might be dealing with high medical bills. "It's a measure of last resort, like taking a reverse mortgage. I rarely see them working out well for people, and they could en
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If the goal is to find stocks to buy when prices are lower rather than higher, it stands to reason that the time to go looking for the best stocks to buy is right now.
After all, the market is off by more than a fifth so far this year, which means it's probably safe to assume that most investors are fearful. And if most investors are fearful, well… doesn't Warren Buffett say that this is the time to get at least a little bit greedy?
SEE MORE 11 Stock Picks That Billionaires Love
Finding quality stocks to buy when seemingly everything is selling off is easier said than done, of course. And if you're looking for help from Wall Street analysts, good luck. There's a saying about analysts: "In a bull market you don't need them; in a bear market you don't want them."
That's far too harsh as an assessment - but understandable as a sentiment. It's well known that Wall Street analysts are reluctant to slap Sell calls on the stocks they cover. There are a number of reasons for this reticence, but that's a discussion for another day.
Perhaps less well known is that analysts are also pretty stingy when it comes to bestowing the highest conviction Buy recommendations on the names they follow.
As of Sept. 22, only five stocks in the S&P 500 carried consensus recommendations of Sell or Strong Sell, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. At the other end of the ratings spectrum, 392 of the index's 500 stocks had consensus recommendations of Buy or Strong Buy.
That's far too many Buy calls, to be sure. We know for a fact that the vast majority of stocks turn out to be duds. Research shows that the entirety of the $75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth created between 1990 a
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