There’s a strange contradiction about insurance. It’s an annoying burden every month when the time to pay the premium comes around but, if the worst should happen, it’s a wonderful thing to have had that insurance policy in place. With the family budgets really tight as the recession shows little sign of going away, the monthly bank statement shows the insurance instalments disappearing. You look at your own health. That’s great. You have never had a day of serious illness in your life. It’s the same for your partner. You cannot avoid feeling a little resentful. All those dollars, every month. And then there’s an accident or one of you does unexpectedly fall ill. It’s then you discover whether that plan you have been paying into is actually worth the money.

In all the insurance markets, there is one underlying truth. The insurance companies are for profit and they will always act in their own best interests and not yours. For planning purposes, you should always assume there are better ways of doing things than the ways suggested by your own insurer. Let us take the question of the cash value in permanent life policies. All these policies have a value. If you approach your insurer and ask how this value can be realized during your lifetime, two answers are given. The first is the option to surrender the policy. This is an early termination of the policy. Thus, the insurer is no longer obliged to pay the sums estimated or guaranteed at the end of your life, but pays you a proportion of those benefits based on the amount you have paid in. The second option is a loan. This can either be a loan of some or all of the cash value, or it can be a free-standing loan with the cash value account used as collateral. Obviously, loans come with interest obligations attached. Borrowing your own cash value attracts a lower rate. Free-standing loans have higher rates. What, if anything, is wrong with these options?

Somewhere in the dim and distant past of learning English, an idiom surfaced referring to gift horses and their mouths. The translation is that, when someone gives you a gift, it’s ungracious of you to publicly examine it too carefully. Yet, in the case of Prop. 17 which appears on the ballot in California, we should perhaps open the horse’s mouth and examine it’s teeth. It may prove to be an old Trojan horse and a gift we should reject.

Why be suspicious? Because the force behind Prop. 17 is not a consumer advocate, it’s the Mercury General Corp. Yes, friends, we’re supposed to believe that an insurance company wants voters in California to pressure lawmakers so that the insurance industry can give millions of dollars in discounts to policyholders. There’s another of those idioms that comes to mind at this point. It’s something about pigs suddenly sprouting wings and taking to the air in the joy of flight. Indeed, so committed is Mercury to Pro. 17 that it’s paying millions of dollars in TV ads to persuade everyone to vote for it. Bless its little cotton socks. It’s trying so hard to do right by Californians.

Tips you can use car insurance rates comparison

There are so many ways that you can use to keep your auto insurance rates down and some of them you can use at the same time as other discounts to maximize your savings.

Here are some things that you can ask your

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