A product I hope I'll never need.

Life insurance is one of the few products I hope I will never need, and yet I consider it to be one of the most important parts of my financial plan, my own and those that I build for my clients.

It sounds contradictory, and I haven't been able to compare myself for a long time. I've been paying for something I don't want to use. If I had said the same thing about investing, I'd sound crazy. But with insurance, that's exactly why I have it.

I've signed hundreds of contracts in 13 years in the business, and I've sat with a part of them at a time when they're full. These are meetings that nobody forgets. Nobody solves their income. They figure out if the family can keep the living, if there's a year to get out of work and if there's room to compare. And it's three reasons I pay for the insurance.

I don't have it because I want to make money off it.

Life insurance is not an investment, and it always strikes me when someone counts it like that. I hear it in meetings to this day: how much I put in and how much I get back out of it. But that's not how it works, and if it works, it would be a poorly built product.

The purpose of insurance is to protect the income and standard of living of the family when something unexpected comes along. Serious diseases, disability, long work incompetence or in the worst case of death. It is not about making money on insured events. It is about not adding to the difficult living situation financial problems, because the two things add up very quickly.

When I sit down with an entrepreneur and we talk about what the uterus would do if it fell off for six months, it's almost never a problem that the family doesn't have anything to eat. The problem is that it starts to sell. First it touches the reserve, then it hits the investments that went away for years, and then it finally comes up to the apartment or share in the company. Insurance doesn't do anything for you.

I can't get it for myself the moment I need it the most.

This is a thing that most people don't realize until they stamp on it. The insurance company assesses your health and other risks when you sign the contract. Not when something happens. That order is the whole spell and the whole problem.

If you already have a serious diagnosis, the insurance company can eliminate some risks, raise insurance premiums or refuse you to insure completely. It's not malpractice, it's mathematics. But for a particular person at the table it means one: a door that was opened a year ago is no longer open.

I met it more than I wanted to. The person who put it off for years because there was no time or wasn't an opportunity, it comes when he's already got something to say, and I have to tell him that whatever we negotiate today will have a lockout on exactly what he's afraid of most.

That's why quality assurance is solved when you're healthy and when you least want to do it. That's when it looks the most useless and that's when it's the most valuable.

The best script is the one where I never use it.

This may sound strange, you've been paying for something for years that you may never need, and the best possible outcome is that the money is so-called forfeit, but that's exactly what it does to protect against risk.

Just as you don't put your seat belt on because you want to crash, you don't negotiate life insurance because you want to get sick. You pay for the fact that if something happens, you're not on your own and you're not dealing with it from the monthly budget that doesn't work at the time.

And I think here is the greatest value that the family can barely talk about. They're not the money that they might pay you once. It's the peace that the contract gives you today. The client who knows that his family will stay on for two years without them is decided differently. He invests more boldly, takes risks in business more calmly and less often at night counts variations.

What's really going on at that table?

The most I could figure out was a family where there was a serious illness. A man in his 40s, two kids, a mortgage, a small firm that was on top of him. Diagnosis came from day to day and asked him a question they hadn't asked until then: how long he would last if he hadn't worked for six months.

The payout didn't change the diagnosis, and it didn't change how hard it was that year. It changed one thing: they didn't have to make a decision about sales yet. They didn't have to figure out if the company would close or if the buyer would be looking at the worst possible time. He could have been treated and she could have been with him.

That's the whole point of the product, not getting rich, not winning something, just taking down the parts that can be dealt with by money and letting the family have the strength to do it.

A question most people don't know the answer to.

When I ask if someone has life insurance, they almost always come in. When I ask how long his family would feed what they have agreed, it happens quietly. And that's not a call. It's logical, because that question is almost never received.

The contracts were usually negotiated before flights, in a different life situation, in a different income and often before the mortgage and before the kids. The amounts remained, the life moved. It's not that anyone neglected it. It's that life changes faster than the contracts.

So instead of just asking the question, you know how long your current insurance could provide for you and your family in a blackout? Not if you have something. How many months will it last.

If you know, you have cash. If you don't, it's the cheapest thing to find out in one afternoon.