car-driving-012

Unclaimed life insurance benefits

5 reasons your life insurance benefits might go unclaimed Sometimes life insurance benefits are left unclaimed after a policyholder dies. This is an unfortunate problem under any circumstances, but especially now, when many people are struggling financially. What is more, this is an easily preventable outcome. 1. The life insurance company and the policy owner have lost track of each other The main mode of contact between you and financial institutions (banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, investment management companies, etc.) is by “snail” mail. As with anyone with whom you wish to keep in contact after you move, you must tell them your new mailing address or they will lose track of you. The U.S. Post Office will only forward first-class mail for a year to a forwarding address, and the sender is not aware that the mail is being forwarded to a new address as the Post Office does not inform the financial institution of the change. If you move, immediately inform every financial institution directly of your new mailing address, including your life insurer. Of course, the same principle applies to other forms of communication: tell the life insurance company of new phone numbers (including your mobile number), email address, etc. 2. The life insurance company doesn’t know the insured has died Life insurance companies typically do not know when a policyholder dies until they are informed of his or her death, usually by the policy’s beneficiary. Even if a policy is in a premium-paying stage and the payments stop, the insurance company has no reason to assume that the insured has died. Moreover, there are policies that have benefits called cash values, with an Automatic Premium Loan (APL) feature. An APL policy borrows money from the cash value to pay a premium due if the money does not come in by the end of the grace period; thus preventing an unintended lapse of the policy, which would have the disastrous effect of loss of the entire death benefit should the insured die after premiums due were not paid. Under an APL, the policy would continue in full force until all of the cash value had been borrowed, at which time it would lapse. Also, many policies are in a stage in which no premiums are due. Some life insurance is bought with a single premium or a small number of premiums due (such as 10 or 20 annual payments), but the insured might live a long time after the premium payments end. Thus the life insurance company would stop sending premium notices after all premiums were paid. Moreover, there is no master list of who is alive and who is dead. The Social Security Administration has the closest thing to such a list—a file on its income beneficiaries (those receiving retirement or disability income from Social Security) to record those who are alive and who have deceased, so as to avoid making payments that are not legitimate—but this does not cover everyone. Millions of people, in fact, are not covered by Social Security (federal employees, state employees in four states, railroad employees, etc.), and therefore would not appear on this list. Employers who sponsor group life insurance to active employees will notify the life insurer if a covered employee dies. And, it is possible that the deceased would also have individual life insurance policies with the same company that issues the group policy, but this becomes less likely when people switch jobs but do not switch individual life insurers. Remember to provide your beneficiaries with the name and contact information for your life insurance company, so they can report your death and file a claim. 3. The life insurance company is unable to locate the policy’s beneficiaries There might be one or both of two problems in this scenario. The first is that the descriptions of the beneficiaries might be insufficiently precise for the life insurance company to locate them. This would be the case, for example, if the beneficiary designation says “my wife” or “my children” without naming them specifically and, ideally, providing a Social Security number and a current address for each one. Be sure to provide detailed personal identification information about every beneficiary to each life insurer from whom you have coverage for death benefits so that they can easily be located and their identity confirmed. The other problem is that, even if the company knows who it is looking for, it may be very difficult to track down a beneficiary, especially as it may be many years, or even decades, since the policy was taken out. Keep in mind that, for privacy reasons, until the death occurs, the life insurer cannot even respond to a beneficiary’s inquiry as to whether they are a beneficiary or not. 4. Beneficiaries don’t know that a life insurance policy exists under which they are beneficiaries It may come as a surprise, but sometimes beneficiaries do not know that they are covered by the insured’s individual or group life insurance policy. The insured may have a variety of reasons for keeping this information secret from the beneficiaries, but an unfortunate consequence is that the benefits could end up unclaimed because no one actually realized that they could make a claim. I Tell the beneficiaries of your life insurance (both individual policies and group coverages) that when you die they will be entitled to death benefits. And provide them with the name and location of the life insurance company as well as the policy number. 5. The original life insurance company no longer exists or cannot be located The name of the company that sold the original life insurance policy may have changed, possibly making it more difficult for the beneficiary to locate the insurer in order to make a claim. Life insurance companies are not any different from companies in any other industry in this respect—but the multi-decade length of the contract can transform this type of normal corporate development into an extra hurdle for beneficiaries. >>Read more
>>Read more
Philippines orders more than 25 million people into lockdown over Easter as Covid-19 cases soar

The Philippines orders more than 25 million people into lockdown over Easter as Covid-19 cases soar. Millions of people in the Philippines won’t be celebrating Easter as normal this year after the majority Catholic country imposed a strict lockdown in the capital and nearby provinces. Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque announced the lockdown Saturday after the country reported 9,838 new Covid-19 cases — the country’s highest single-day increase, according to official state media Philippines News Agency. The Philippines has reported more than 720,000 coronavirus cases, including 13,170 deaths, making it one of the worst affected countries in Asia. The country has seen a steep rise in daily reported cases since February, and the country is now reporting more than 9,000 new cases a day. There are more than 105,000 active cases, according to the Philippines’ Department of Health. More than 25 million people across Metro Manila and nearby provinces Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal will be affected by the lockdown. The lockdown begins Monday and runs until April 4 — or Easter Sunday, a day when Christians often celebrate with special church services. Religious gatherings are not allowed during the holy week. That’s a blow for the Philippines, where more than 90% of the population are Christian, according to the CIA World Factbook. The measures include a curfew from 6 p.m. until 5 a.m. — tightened from the previous 10 p.m. curfew. Gatherings of more than 10 people outside are not allowed, and non-household members cannot gather indoors, the government said. Diners are not allowed to eat in restaurants, although take-out and delivery services can go ahead. The Philippine National Police has deployed thousands of officers in checkpoint areas to help enforce the rules, according to a PNA report. Vaccines are being rolled out to medical frontlines, and last week the Department of Health urged people who were not health care workers to refrain from jumping the queue. “Do not worry. Our goal is still to ensure that everybody will be vaccinated. But while we do this, the government is prioritizing healthcare workers as they are the most exposed and the most at risk of getting Covid,” National Task Force Against Covid-19 chief implementer and vaccine czar secretary Carlito Galvez said. “More vaccines will arrive, we are sure of that. We just have to wait for our turns to be vaccinated.” Source: CNN.com
>>Read more
7 Essential Insights For SEO Client Reports

What goes into making the perfect SEO reports for your clients? If you’re managing SEO for clients, then you know how important it is to deliver accurate and insightful reports. You’ve done the work, now you have to show it. Your clients rely on you to give them the relevant information they need to make informed decisions about their marketing efforts going forward. The SEO report is their (and your) roadmap. Getting it right every time is a matter of creating a system you can consistently mimic for each client. So, what goes into making perfect SEO reports? These are the seven essential elements you need to consider 1. Traffic: Sources Is increasing organic traffic to their website your client’s main goal? Start your SEO reports with traffic. If using Google Analytics, you’ll also want to utilize the Source/Medium section of the traffic report for this part of the report. It will provide you with more information on where your visitors are coming from, helping your client determine where they should spend their time and money. Ensure that mobile sources are also included in this part of the report since mobile phones made up about 63% of organic search engine visits in 2021. To get there quickly, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. 2. Conversion Rate & Progress On Goals Massive flows of site traffic are great, but if you don’t know what your visitors want or how they want to be engaged with your content, then even all the traffic in the world won’t help you get very far. In other words, if you can’t convert your visitors into customers, no amount of traffic will help you. Conversion rate is probably one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to your clients, so tuck this near the front of your report for easy access. Once you’ve discovered the conversion rate, you’ll be more equipped to explain what comes next in the report and describe why they’re seeing certain insights and data points. To demonstrate conversion rate to a customer, select certain goals that you want to track as “conversions.” In this example, one non-profit client used landings on their “Thanks for the donation!” page to track completed donations. Google Analytics will count each landing as a donation, helping to complete the goals on the Goal Completion portion. To get to Goal Completion, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview. 3. Top Performing Pages You probably know where your visitors are coming from, but it’s vital to learn where they’re heading on your site. If someone arrives at your site organically via Google, that’s awesome; however, if you know they clicked on your most recent blog post, that is way more valuable. You always want to include top-performing pages so your client knows what’s working and what isn’t. There are usually lessons they can learn from pages that are doing well and apply them to pages that could use help to attract (and keep!) traffic. One way to pull data from Google Analytics to illustrate this is via the Landing Pages section. To get there, first, go to Behavior, then Site Content, and Landing Pages. You’ll see which URLs are hot and which ones aren’t quite. 4. Page Speed Insights Take a quick break from Google Analytics for this part and head over to a tool called PageSpeed Insights from Google. It’s a completely free tool that will show your clients how fast their pages are loading and any performance issues they may be able to fix to improve their results. Sometimes, it’s something as small as a video with a file size that’s too large. This simple quick fix can get your pages up quickly. Page speed hasn’t always been a high priority, but as user expectations are becoming more and more demanding with their online experiences, getting your pages to load quickly is paramount to keeping visitors on your site. Google even tells us that the probability of someone bouncing off a website increases by 32% if load time goes from a one-second load to a three-second load. 5. Bounce Rate And Dwell Time Knowing that visitors have come to your site, clicked on certain pages, and in some cases, converted is incredibly helpful. But to complete the full picture, your client needs to know how long people are staying on their site and how many of them are clicking away after the first landing page. Dwell time is the time someone spends on a website page when they come from an organic search. Are they exploring other pages from there, or looking for a quick answer? A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, though. If their landing page was one chock full of internal links to other pages on your site and they bounced quickly, it probably means they’ve moved on to exploring these outbound links. In this section, focus on bounce rate for core site pages with rich content like videos. They should be staying for a while to consume the content. 6. Rankings And Backlinks Backlinks can be powerful tools for websites struggling to make progress in their SEO rankings. You can find many tools to track links you have, which is helpful because it can identify potential SEO opportunities. If you’ve helped your client get backlinks as part of your SEO strategy, this section of the report is where you’ll show their impact. As for rankings, you should include where the site ranks for keywords that you’ve determined are most valuable to the client. Just keep in mind that rankings are no longer the end-all and be-all of SEO – we now know that countless factors, such as history, user geographic location, and personalization can all impact rankings. 7. Recommendations And Next Steps Recommendations may not be the first thing that springs to mind when underneath a mountain of data, but recommendations and next steps are ultimately what the client is looking for at the end of this >>Read more
>>Read more
How can I save on long-term care insurance?

The tips below will help you save money wisely, but don’t rely on price alone. Key factors in choosing a policy Company financial stability – Because you may not collect for decades to come, be sure to buy from a company that has been around for some time and is financially stable. You may want to look up, from an independent rating agency, the financial strength ratings of a company you’re considering. Percentage of income – Keep the premium for your long-term care insurance policy to 7 percent of your income, or less. For example, if your monthly income is $4,000, the long-term care insurance premium should not be more than $280 per month. (This is what the National Association of Insurance Commissioners recommends in its Model Regulation for Long-Term Care Insurance.) Another expert advises that the income to use in this calculation isn’t your current income, but your expected income in retirement since that’s the income from which you’ll be paying premiums for most of the policy’s existence. Other ways of saving Find out if long-term care benefits are available through a group policy from your employer. Employers might subsidize the cost, lowering what you must pay. Check whether you can add long-term care benefits as a rider on an existing life insurance or annuity policy. These “combination” arrangements can save because the insurance company gains operational savings that it can pass along to you. Buy a policy with the longest waiting period you can afford. For example, choosing a 90-day period instead of a 30-day period can cut the premium by 30%. However, if you do need long-term care services, you should save some money to pay these costs until the waiting period ends. If both spouses of a married couple are considering buying long-term care policies, look into buying one joint policy for both of you. Such a policy pays when either one needs care and can pay for both, if necessary, up to its benefit limits. If you’re still looking to trim the premium further, consider buying a policy that will pay most, but not all, of the average nursing home costs in your area. For example, if a nursing home room now costs $120 per day, buy a policy that pays $100 per day. However, be sure to buy an inflation-protection provision. Check with several companies and agents, comparing both benefits and costs. As with other types of insurance (and many other purchases), comparison shopping can save you money. Just be sure you’re comparing policies with similar provisions and companies with comparable financial strength and service records.
>>Read more
How do I pick a life insurance company?

The annuity business, like the insurance industry itself, is very competitive. There are hundreds of insurers and many different types of products available to you. Before buying an annuity, contact your state insurance department to see whether it offers an annuity buyers guide for your state. There are four important things to consider: Financial Solidity – Select a company that is likely to be financially sound for many years, by using ratings from independent rating agencies. State insurance department license to do business Make sure that the insurer you select is licensed to issue annuities in your state. Ask whether the specific type of annuity you are considering is available in your state. Service Expect excellent customer service. Your insurance company representative should answer your questions promptly and provide useful information that addresses your concerns. This way, you can make a well-informed decision on the annuity that best meets your needs and objectives. Choice of investments and riders Some insurers offer annuities with an array of investment choices and a large variety of riders. Compare these options. Some options may increase the price of the annuity. Decide on an annuity that best meets your needs.
>>Read more