Safely Prosperous or Really Rich: Choosing Your Personal Financial Heaven

Chapter 12

Thinking the Unthinkable

You have life insurance, homeowner's insurance, medical insurance, and so on to compensate you in case of common but unforeseen events. But there are other worst-case events no traditional insurance can protect us against, for which we have to create our own insurance. The prosperity or wealth strategies in this book can be endangered or totally aborted by such unexpected events. Here is the insurance you need, and why you need it.

America has never been more vulnerable to such unthinkable surprises, nor have they ever been more likely, and they are always to the downside. Here's a list:

• Unexpected loss of income. You can lose your income and your retirement if you are laid off because your employer is threatened by a recession or depression, sudden interest-rate changes, supply problems, war, unexpected changes in regulations or tax laws, the death of a founder, a hostile takeover, sudden foreign competition, corporate misjudgments, wildcat strikes, hurricanes or earthquakes, power-grid failures, terrorist attacks, or an underfunded pension plan. Your employer might sell out to another company, and your department might be wiped out or transferred to Saskatchewan. You may have gone to work for a big company for safety and security, only to find out there is no security when other people can make unilateral decisions about you unrelated to your competence.
• An attack by terrorist-inspired and -financed hackers that disrupts the economy and ...