Category: guest blogger

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Reynold Jones

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Life: Top 5 Reasons to Insure Yours

Life insurance. Have you stopped reading yet? What about financial struggles for those you love? Are you interested now? As a topic, life insurance probably ranks with death and taxes on the fun-o-meter. But, this is Life Insurance Awareness Month.  It’s an important topic because life happens. So, keep reading.

First, a few facts:

• Roughly 30 percent of households had no life insurance coverage in 2016.
• Only 44 percent of all households had individual life insurance in 2016 a 50-year low.
• Four in ten households with children under 18 say they would be in financial trouble if the primary wage earner died suddenly.
• Another three in ten would have trouble meeting monthly expenses beyond a few months.

Here are my top 5 reasons you need life insurance:

Number 5: You have a family. It’s a no brainer if this is you. If you’re not there to bring home the bacon, they might not starve, but they sure may struggle.

Number 4: You have debts. If you die, your estate must pay your debts before your family receives anything. Life insurance will cover those debts so your family doesn’t have to.

Number 3: You rent – don’t have a mortgage, you still pay rent. Who will cover the rent if you’re gone? If you have a life insurance, it’ll be covered.

Number 2: You have a job. No kids, no mortgage, live at home still with the parents – good reasons to not worry about life insurance, you say. But, what happens if you’re unable able to work long-term? Income protection, another form of life insurance, can help make sure you can afford the lifestyle you’re accustomed to living.

And, the number 1 reason …  Peace of mind!

Let’s face it, life happens. It throws curveballs, fastballs and wicked knuckleballs at you all the time. Finding even just a little peace can be elusive. Life insurance is a way to make sure you, and your loved ones, will be financially ok no matter what.

In short, you’re paying the insurer for a financial peace of mind.

Peace!

Reynold Jones is a member of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors – Texas. Reynold advises clients on ways to meet their insurance and financial planning needs.

Prepared by Lone Rock Strategic Communications

I’m starting to struggle with aging. People in my parents’ generation tell me I’m laughably young, but maybe it’s the beginning of the process that startles you the most. Seeing your cheeks get lower and your eyelids loosen seems off somehow—like it’s not really you in the mirror.

Each year of my twenties felt shorter and shorter, and I’ve struggled to keep up with the changes, both in my appearance and in my understanding of how life works. It might be because I have a deep sense of identity diffusion—I see myself across a wide range of ages and roles.

I am still two years old, five years old, twelve, and sixteen. I’m getting my driver’s license, laughing on merry-go-rounds, and hugging my parents goodbye at the entrance to my dorm. I am a college student; a teacher; a young professional starting his career. I’m still that kid working in a three-job frenzy between smoothie making, door-to-door sales, and substitute teaching, trying to make it to my first apartment. I feel a deep connection to every friend I’ve had since elementary school. I remember vividly everyone I’ve been in love with.

When I look in the mirror, I expect to see all those iterations of myself looking back. They should be carved into the flesh somehow, stored in the hard drive of my skin. Instead, I see the weight of sadness and loneliness. Maybe that’s just how aging looks. Or maybe it’s how the world looks now.

My parents and grandparents never looked that way to me. My teachers didn’t. Wrinkles were marks of maturity and experience when I was a kid. Kind, thoughtful creases made you trust somebody.

I really don’t mind looking older, in the way they did—where your eyes are still young.

I don’t mind looking older. I just want to look happy. I want to look like me.

I know it sounds crazy to talk that way six months before thirty—yeah, you can laugh if you want—, but my generation lives in a universe where our sense of image is heightened. Our friends—real or imaginary—live on our computer screens, where their vlogs and pictures are carefully moderated to demonstrate consistency. Change in appearance means unfamiliarity to viewers—which means fewer subscribers and less affirmation.

It’s even more pronounced for movie buffs and Netflix binge-watchers, whose unconscious idea of normalcy is situated around the Hollywood ideal. Actors spend a chunk of their salaries on looking the same throughout their twenties and thirties—keeping their skin taut, eating on customized nutrition plans, and maintaining a physique that would be otherwise unsustainable outside of work as a professional athlete. Just look up pictures of Stephen Amell “letting himself go,” where he looks better in his mid-thirties than I looked at twenty-two.

Not to mention the fact that actors are more emotionally dynamic, more vulnerable in their performances than most people are in real life. Add that to life in a heavily isolationist society, and we often feel more connected to the images we follow than we do to our colleagues and friendship circles in the real world. Your sense of beauty becomes sharply focused.

It’s no flak against guys like Amell—more power to them, and the rest of us should do what we can to take care of ourselves. It’s just that a nine to five imposes certain limitations. Even entrepreneurs have to put in their hours.

As the generation that pioneered virtual community, I guess it’s up to us to solve its problems. You can’t get ahead of time. It moves forward—and backward—too quickly. But maybe you can keep up. Maybe, if you cultivate a sense of presence in the now, you can feel like things are the way they’re supposed to be.

I hope so. I hope I can figure out what the changes mean. I hope there’s not really some universal standard of beauty that I’m moving away from. Above all, I hope I can enjoy the time I have while I’m learning.

 Guest blogger

We grew up camping. I remember summer evenings, holidays, church retreats, and youth group gatherings on my family’s property out in East Texas. We would shoot fireworks on the 4^th of July, play paintball with the youth group, cook over the open stove and play hide and seek in the graveyard. We would have family reunions under a giant oak tree, being sure to avoid the open-air well that may or may not still be functioning. That property is where I learned to drive a car, where I first drove a stick shift, and where I learned to drive a motorcycle. Our dog is buried there. So many important memories in my life stem from my connection to that piece of land.

But it’s not just my life. I’ve heard stories of cousins, uncles, aunts, my parents, my grandparents, and their families and extended families with incredible memories of a farm in Enloe, Texas. While some of my family members actually have lived, and still do, in Enloe, I’ve learned over the years how important it is to still be connected to land somewhere. While I don’t personally own land, I cannot forget the feeling of what it’s like to sleep under the stars, to eat over a fire, and to sit around late at night, hearing crickets and frogs, telling stories as the crisp night air sets. You can’t forget roasting marshmallows, coffee in a percolator, and the wet mist of the grass.

To me, this lifestyle is vital to my health. I’m a city-dweller. A suburbanite. It’s hard for me to understand what it’s like to grow food, to till the land, and to be subject to nature. We spend much of our lives actively trying not to connect to the land—we buy from grocery stores and probably haven’t seen what many produce items actually look like in the ground, we cook with an electric burner, we have air-conditioning that keeps us from smelling and feeling the wind’s breeze.

It’s interesting—every time I “go camping,” I feel revitalized. While I’ll probably never live on a farm, I hope I can at least stay connected to the earth.

AJ

Stay and Play: Balancing Life, Work, and Family

I am employed at a university with a fairly structured work schedule: a 9-5 job. My wife is a full-time graduate student, which amounts to basically a full-time job with zero pay. I also have a 20-month-old daughter, someone I love to be around and only wish I could be around more. In Illinois, where we live, the median cost of child care per child is $12,697 for the whole year, one of the highest in the country.

In our current situation, all this means that my annual income of $43,000—or $24,000 after taxes, health insurance, social security, retirement, etc.—must support rent, food, transportation, and, of course, child care. We live in the wealthiest county in the state, and so our extremely simple apartment costs $1000/month, leaving us with $12,000 to spend on food, transportation, and, of course, child care each year, or another $1000/month. Gratefully, our childcare costs are only $8000 a year. My gross income is too high to qualify for federal assistance, and so, what does any father do when trying to provide for his family? Get a second job.

I have a Master’s degree in teaching and so recently picked up teaching classes in the evenings at local community college. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 7:00-9:50pm, I drive ten minutes to College of DuPage, the largest community college in the United States, and teach. Two semesters of teaching will give us enough to pay for childcare.

But, this all came to a head last week when my 20-month-old ran to our front door at 6:40 as I was leaving for class, and screamed, “Stay! Play!” It was an entirely harmless request—a very genuine appeal from a daughter to her dad. But, it was also harmful…to me, at least. Working 9am-9:50pm means that I don’t see my family, don’t get to spend time with my daughter, and hardly eat. All so that my wife and daughter go to school. I realize that this is only a short season in life where we’re in this situation, I know there are other solutions out there, and I know other families have it much worse than we do, but seeing your daughter—who only has a 100 word vocabulary—muster up the two words whose combination could move mountains was devastating to me.

My hope is that one day I will be able to find a balance between life, work, and family—the last of which ought to take primacy.

Guest Blogger AJ

Why we chose life insurance

I’ve always been a little skeptical about purchasing life insurance. The reasons not to were convincing to me for a long time:

1. Why spend money that I may not ever get back when I could be using it now? This is the “hedging your bets” argument.
2. If I were to die, shouldn’t my extended family and friends come around my immediate family to take care of them?
3. Once my family does get the death benefit, won’t 99.9% of it go to taxes anyway?

But, despite these reasons, we decided to finally purchase life insurance for two important reasons:

1. Family income: We realized that even though tax must be paid on interest income, the money from life insurance provides vital supplementary income for daily living, college education, and other big expenses such as purchasing a home so that family can be a bit more stable. (I did learn that life insurance proceeds are NOT subject to Federal Income Tax).
2. As an investment: There are some policies out there—such as cash value life insurance—that allow money to grow over time, while simultaneously providing a death benefit in the event of death. There are reasons to invest in traditional accounts—IRAs, 401Ks, etc.—but we felt we had exhausted these enough that we needed another investment vehicle. In other words, we were going to invest anyway; why not allow it to also provide a death benefit?

Why are you choosing to purchase life insurance? Why not?

Guest Blogger: AJ

A Power Rangers Review by a Shameless, Raving Fan of the Original Series (with mild spoilers)

Overall: I really liked this movie. I was surprised, but the “dark and gritty reboot” spin didn’t mess it up for me. It was fun, funny, nostalgic, and its own thing at the same time. The whole “power of friendship” thing really worked here. In most movies, that sort of theme comes across as cheesy, but I understand now why they made the Power Rangers the “troubled teens” in this version. It gave them room to grow as they found family with each other. They took the basic structure of a Power Rangers episode and fleshed it out with meaningful characterization. Almost like they threw a little “The Breakfast Club” in there, which is never a bad thing. Power Rangers 2017 is cool movie in its own right, and if you’re a fan of the original show, it delivers in the throwback elements, too. It WAS darker and grittier, but it still FELT like Power Rangers.

For all you 90s kids out there, here’s a little breakdown of the morphinominal (and not-so-much) aspects of the movie, complete with a few unqualified, nostalgic references juuuust for you:

Liked:

1) Bryan Cranston as Zordon was AWESOME. He worked on the original show, and Billy Cranston, the Blue Ranger, was named after him. And yes, he nailed the Zordon vibe. So great!

2) Billy was on the autism spectrum, and he was easily the best character in the movie. He was legitimately funny. RJ Cycler did a pretty good job acting as this character, too. Really cool move by the filmmakers.

3) Jason grew from a character who is very different from the cool, staid, humble leader of the original series into someone who is closer to that character by the end of the film. It gave his character a lot of depth. But I still miss Austin St. John. #You’llAlwaysBeMyHero

4) Naomi Scott. Her Kimberly was very close to Amy Jo Johnson’s. The subtle details of her performance made this feel like Power Rangers more than anything else in the movie did. She anchored the show. And I just really like her as an actor. She was in Terra Nova, another one of my favorite nerdy shows–incidentally, also involving dinosaurs.

5) Alpha says “Ai-ai-ai!”

6) Rita says, “Make my monster grow!”

7) Jason says, “It’s morphin’ time.”

8) Defeating Rita a la Team-Rocket’s-blasting-off-again.

9) Kimberly cliff jumps — a throwback to the coolest scene from the original movie.

10) There are mature themes, but they are handled appropriately for a movie aimed at this age group. They don’t gloss over things, but they aren’t showing the intimate pictures, etc. It’s clear what’s being discussed, but it’s also clear the film is not about sensationalizing kids. (Except maybe that swimming scene at the beginning. They show Kimberly in her underwear, which seemed a little out of place in a movie targeting a younger demographic.)

11) Zordon and Rita were Rangers. This fills in a lot of questions from the original about how Rita acquired the Green Power Coin. And it sets up the sequel nicely.

12) That mid-credits scene . . . “Tommy Oliver,” with the legendary jacket draped over the chair.

13) Best part: Y’all. There was a cameo. They said there wouldn’t be, but there was. I’m not gonna spoil it, but . . . I almost screamed.

Didn’t Like:

1) Rita’s whole dominatrix outfit thing. Or her general, creepy vibe.

2) Zords were weird. (Why did the Mastodon have six legs?)

3) Goldar was weird.

4) Alpha was weird.

5) Zordon was a Pin Art 3D

6) The original theme played at an out-of-place time.

7) There were no beepers. Alas, the 90s, you are no longer with us. 🙁

8) Billy: “We’ll call it a . . . a MEGAZORD!” (Not the exact quote, but basically.)

9) Bryan Cranston never told the Rangers that he is the one who knocks.

Mixed Feelings On:

1) The Command Center was okay.

2) The struggles piloting the Megazord reemphasized the Power of Friendship rule and addressed a major plot hole in the original version. (How did the Rangers learn to pilot a giant mech in two seconds?) The suit interface with the Zords helped explain that, too. Still, I kind of wanted the Megazord to throw back to the TV show–lightning sword and everything. 3) Zack’s subplot–taking care of his sick mother–was wonderful. The cultural aspects of his role were very respectful and well performed. He genuinely felt like an Asian-American student with a foot in the culture of his upbringing and a foot in American youth culture. His performance also carried all the frustration and posturing that often comes with living in two worlds at once. I loved Ludi Lin’s character through and through–I just wanted more of him. 4) Trini was also a fantastic character. Unfortunately, just like in the original show, we didn’t get to zoom in on her as much. My favorite scene of hers scene was at the campfire when she gets really vulnerable. It was so well done. Becky G had the most difficult role to play, and she might have been the best actor on the show. She sold me on Trini. Again, I really wanted more of her. Conclusion: 7.5/10 Power Rangers 2017 was great. It was a fun ride, a well-paced story, and it had some solid actors that made the characters relatable and believable. I think Millennial fans of the original, teens, and kids can all find something to enjoy about it. I’m excited to see where they take the franchise from here. If you’re taking your kids to see it, be aware that there is darkness, creepiness, and mature subject matter including death, sexual attraction, sexting, and how generally messed up teenagers can be to each other. But there’s also a lot about self-forgiveness and the benefits of community that’s pretty–well, powerful. Be prepared to talk to your kids about this stuff. Or don’t take them if you think it’s not right for your family. But the reality is, this is stuff that teenagers deal with, and I think the movie presents it in a way that you can have a great conversation about it. All in all, if you’re looking for a fun, spring action flick, Power Rangers is a good one to see!

Guest Blogger: JJ