“Seize the day! Today is a gift. Today is the only day you have. You may be given another day, but you won’t know until it comes. All you can do is be prepared for what could happen.”
– Kyle J. Christensen
By Kyle J Christensen, Founder, Principles-Based Planner, Unique Advantage
Unique Advantage Monthly Client Email – November 2024
According to my search on Google, the first person to coin the phrase, “timing is everything,” was William Shakespeare in the play Julius Caesar. Whether that is true or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether it’s right or not right. My recent brush with death has taught me that it is right.
Some of you may already know that about a month ago I started getting pressure in my chest and pains down my arms to my elbows when being physically active. Long-story short, I had 99% blockage in a major artery in heart (the Lateral Anterior Descending artery). Prior to that, I had never had any sort of major health issue in my life. I’ve never had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, heart palpitations, A Fib, or anything else. I’ve never had a broken bone or surgery of any kind. I’ve had stitches once and a lot of sprained ankles. But nothing crazy. My health was, according to insurance companies, almost perfect (I’m slightly overweight, but still qualified for the very best rating on my most recent life insurance application last year).
On October 18th, I went in for a Left Heart Catheterization where the cardiologist shot dye into my arteries to check for blockages. A few minutes into the procedure they found what they were looking for and immediately proceeded to insert a stent into the blocked artery to open it back up again. I was awake and aware during the entire procedure. As soon as the stent was placed, I felt the pressure in my chest go away entirely.
Suddenly, after the experience I had related to my heart, I am now uninsurable, at the age of 48.
A lot of people ask me how the experience has changed my mindset. I tell them that I look at every day now as “borrowed time”. I could have easily died. In fact, a heart attack caused by a blockage of the LAD artery is called a “widow-maker,” because usually it results in death. I am lucky and extremely blessed to be alive today.
I look at my time differently. I never was never much of a person who wasted time (except as a child and teenager), but now I am even more intentionally about how I use my time. I know that any day could be my last.
As it relates to personal finances, there are a lot things that have to be done ahead of time, before you know you need it. Insurance is a prime example of that. In Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Who Took My Money?, he emphasizes “the first rule of insurance,” which is that you can’t get insurance when you need it. You have to get it before you know you need it. This is why advertisements for insurance that tell us that we should “only pay for what you need,” are ludicrous. When you know you need a certain insurance, it’s too late. When you know, the insurance companies know, and they won’t give it to you at that time.
We all live life thinking we have more time. We’ll get to certain things later in life. Estate planning is a good example of that. What if you don’t have a “later?” Some of you reading this letter probably don’t have a “later.” You just don’t know it right now. Some reading this letter will die before the average lifespan of an American. Some will become disabled. Some will get in a serious accident. Some will have their house damaged by fire, or tornado, or earthquake, or hurricane. Some will get sued. Some will lose their jobs/income. Some will get divorced. Some will lose a child. Some will become seriously ill.
How do you feel about your plan right now? Is your protection against all of the things that could happen where you would like it to be? If not, now is the time to change that. Not later.
When I was seriously close to dying, I thought about my situation. I thought, “I’m so glad I live the principles I teach.” Financially, my family would not have had any concerns at all. My wife wouldn’t have to worry about one thing financially. Why? Because I follow the principle of Maximum Protection. As a part of that principle, I had my maximum life insurance in place. My estate planning was complete and up-to-date. I have documents that have all of my passwords, account information, and everything else she might need in a place she knows. She knew who to talk to regarding our finances if I wasn’t here. All of this has been planned out.
One of the questions I ask clients as they go through the Initial Phase of the Principles-Based Planning Process, is why most people don’t have their Maximum Protection. There are essentially three reasons they usually don’t:
1) They don’t know their options. People are extremely uneducated about their insurance and legal protection options. This is simply not part of the formal education most of us receive. And most parents do a terrible job of teaching their kids about it (and in most cases, they probably don’t know either).
2) They think it will cost too much. The truth is, people don’t usually know their options, and as such, they don’t know what it will really cost. For the most part, insurance and legal protections aren’t fun subjects and they protect against things that we all hope won’t happen to us. So, the easiest thing to do is not deal with it. Ignore it. It’s much more fun to talk about investments, right? One thing I’ve discovered with people is that they will find a way to pay for the things they really want. So, maximum protection is rarely truly about cost. It’s much more about desire.
3) They don’t think it will happen to them. If someone thinks that nothing bad will happen to them, then any cost is too much. One time, a long time ago, I worked with a psychologist who said that he didn’t need disability insurance. He justified it by saying that he couldn’t see how he could get so injured or sick that he couldn’t perform the tasks of his job. And as for mental illness, he felt that only weak-minded people became chronically depressed or anxious, or had PTSD. He literally told me that he could do therapy on himself. The reality is, I can’t work with or reason with people who think they are invulnerable. Not to be too harsh, but anyone who thinks they are invulnerable is a fool.
Every adult person in the U.S. should look at each area of insurance and legal protection and ask himself/herself, “Would I be satisfied with the level of protection I have if this thing occurred?” For example, “If I got sued today because I seriously injured or killed someone in a car accident (that I caused), would I feel as protected as I would want to be with the levels of coverage I have currently?” “If I became too sick or injured to do my job, what amount of my income would be replaced, and would I be happy with it?” “If I were to die tomorrow, will things go the way I wanted to them to go (estate planning), and would I have as much of my income replaced to my spouse as I would have wanted?”
Seize the day! Today is a gift. Today is the only day you have. You may be given another day, but you won’t know until it comes. If things aren’t the way you would want them to be, please don’t delay. Invest the time to make changes. Make sacrifices if necessary (i.e. cut out a few times eating out per month) to set things up properly, to get your maximum protection. I cannot emphasize this enough! Your life could change on a dime! You don’t know when things will happen or how they will happen. All you can do is be prepared for what could happen.
Now, with all of this said, some of you might be thinking that if you get your maximum protection, you won’t have money to invest. If that’s true, which it likely is not, then you have to choose your priority. I would also say that if that’s your situation, you will likely never become financially free, because you won’t have sufficient funds to invest to ever become financially free. And even if you did, you will eventually lose it, because life always throws us curveballs. People who don’t have proper protection lose their wealth. Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing, says that everyone should have three plans. The first plan is to be secure. The second plan is to be comfortable. The third plan is to be rich.
If you want to move on to the rich level of investing, you are going to have to invest much more time than you do at the other two levels. Most people do not go beyond secure and comfortable because they are not willing to invest the time. That is a personal decision we all need to make. At least the person has a plan to be secure and/or comfortable. There is nothing more high risk than a person who does not have those two basic plans, who is focused only on becoming rich. (p89 – underline added for emphasis)
There is an order to things, a priority. The “plan to be rich” comes after the plans to be secure and comfortable. Foolish people jump straight to the plan to get rich, without doing the first two. They are, as people say, “setting themselves up for failure.”
If you are married to someone that you feel has over-emphasized investing and becoming rich, and underemphasized the secure and comfortable plans, please have a conversation with him/her. Blame me! Not to be overly dramatic, but your future may be at stake here. It’s like building a house on a crummy foundation. It simply, over time, will be a disaster.
I realize that we aren’t made of money and that we all deal with somewhat limited resources. We have to pick and choose and prioritize where our money is going to go. This is why tracking all income and expenses is important. We should make sure we know exactly what is coming in and what is going out, at all times. We cannot afford to be the people who say, “I made X amount of money throughout my career, and I have no idea where it all went.”
Principles are essential in our lives to help guide our choices. This is why we take a principled approach to our finances. The principles we adopt help us make the right decisions, which predictably lead us to the best outcome we could have. Multi-billionaire, Ray Dalio, emphasized this in the first few paragraphs of his book, Principles:
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions and have better lives as a result. (Introduction ix-x, underlined for emphasis)
My hope is that the message of this article will help you make important changes to your financial plan so that you are as prepared as you could be, so that when things happen to you that you are in the best position you could be. I’m grateful that I already believed in this, prior to my own personal death-defying situation. I’m grateful that my financial situation, my plans to be secure and comfortable, are exactly how I would want them to be at this time. Timing is everything!
Sincerely,
Kyle J. Christensen
P. S.
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