Many years back, I used to sell Life Insurance. It was a brief period in my life and was possibly the one job where I made the worst financial returns in my career – but also one which was an exceptionally satisfying job I ever had. Surprisingly the reason for both was the same – I insisted on selling only two type of Insurance Plans: one a pure Life Insurance plan (if one dies, his family gets a significant Insurance pay-out) and another a Pension Plan (which covers the risk of living too long- but that’s another story for another post). Neither of the plan types make any decent commission for any Insurance Agent!
The first plan is very different from other more popular (but expensive) Insurance plans (which are actually long term Savings schemes) which have a very low Sum Assured but pay out a decent Maturity Value after 20 / 25 / 30 years. The pure Life Insurance Plan covers risk only, has a very low premium and is the safety net that can protect one’s family in the scenario of an unfortunate event. Logically, it is the one plan that a family man needs to buy if he never does any other saving or investment ever again in his life. Obviously one would think it must be selling like hot cakes; any Insurance Agent will tell you this is the one most difficult plan to sell!
Don’t get me wrong, no one doubts how necessary Life Insurance is and how important it is for the bread-winner in a family to get himself (or herself) insured. And yet, people put it off for the most mundane of reasons – “maybe next year”, “I have enough Insurance” (when they are actually referring to a Savings plan), or the worst “If I live through those 25 years, then I won’t get anything”! The real truth is while everyone knows how important it is and would advise their best friend to go for it, very few people buy a pure Life Insurance plan for themselves (unless hounded by a angel Agent like me) for one simple reason: no one believes that anything bad, leave alone some fatal thing like death, can happen to them. I mean we all know it is inevitable but we all believe that somehow we are going to escape it.
Okay, let us get to something less morbid now. Information Technology. Something similar in the field of IT is IT Services Continuity (call it IT Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Management or Business Continuity “Plan” whatever makes you comfortable).
It doesn’t matter what name we call it by. A good many, if not all, of us sincerely believe that it is a necessity. From Strategic perspective to Operational. From Best Practices perspective to Risk Management. Whether it is the Business or the IT Departments, it is no one’s argument that BCM is not required. And then when it comes to the crunch, how many times we have heard all those excuses for putting it on hold, doing it some other time, waiting for some other day, waiting for when we have some time and money to invest … Isn’t it the same syndrome – it won’t really happen to me?
The first plan is very different from other more popular (but expensive) Insurance plans (which are actually long term Savings schemes) which have a very low Sum Assured but pay out a decent Maturity Value after 20 / 25 / 30 years. The pure Life Insurance Plan covers risk only, has a very low premium and is the safety net that can protect one’s family in the scenario of an unfortunate event. Logically, it is the one plan that a family man needs to buy if he never does any other saving or investment ever again in his life. Obviously one would think it must be selling like hot cakes; any Insurance Agent will tell you this is the one most difficult plan to sell!
Don’t get me wrong, no one doubts how necessary Life Insurance is and how important it is for the bread-winner in a family to get himself (or herself) insured. And yet, people put it off for the most mundane of reasons – “maybe next year”, “I have enough Insurance” (when they are actually referring to a Savings plan), or the worst “If I live through those 25 years, then I won’t get anything”! The real truth is while everyone knows how important it is and would advise their best friend to go for it, very few people buy a pure Life Insurance plan for themselves (unless hounded by a angel Agent like me) for one simple reason: no one believes that anything bad, leave alone some fatal thing like death, can happen to them. I mean we all know it is inevitable but we all believe that somehow we are going to escape it.
Okay, let us get to something less morbid now. Information Technology. Something similar in the field of IT is IT Services Continuity (call it IT Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Management or Business Continuity “Plan” whatever makes you comfortable).
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