Planning With Purpose, Empathy & A Dash of Tom Waits

The phone's off the hook, no one knows where we are

It's a long time since I drank champagne

The ocean's blue, as blue as your eyes

I'm gonna take it with me when I go

As the warm days fade and the dark nights come early, I am left with more quiet, reflective time than usual. My kids are no longer kids, but rather young adults doing what young adults do. They are working hard, they are studying, and they are spending time with their friends and their significant others. They are making lives for themselves and as a father, it is a joy to watch. As I do this, I reflect upon the life that my wife I and have built. My dear Kathleen, the young girl that I met at 15 in 1985. Holy sh*t, time does go by. As I reflect upon that time together, we have accomplished a lot. Moving forward, we will set out to accomplish so much more. These are our dreams, our family's dreams and, with a lot of love, hard work and luck, we will see them through. I am not writing this to be braggadocios, but because I know that many individuals and families have similar dreams, similar aspirations. Families like ours have set goals such as saving for college, retirement and planning long term care strategies. These are non-negotiables for us and come hell or high water, they were going to be achieved. Achieved by us, the core five, but also achieved through associating with the right people, our dear friends and family, achieved through our faith and by planning ahead with two of the perceived "dirtiest words" in the English language, life insurance.

Having been an advisor with a tremendous independent financial planning firm for over two decades now, I can say I have leaned from some extraordinary planners. I was 30 years old with a baby and a mortgage when I took that leap of faith, and the non-negotiables were much less secure. That’s where and when I was introduced to the power and purpose of insurance.

Old long since gone, now way back when

We lived in Coney Island (or Hoboken)

There ain't no good thing ever dies

I'm gonna take it with me when I go

If we as a collective have learned anything over the past 18 months, it is that life is uncertain. While beautiful and rewarding, life is unpredictable. Having planned for many families over the past two decades, I am very proud of the work that my colleagues and I have done. Young families, older families, each with their own set of non-negotiables, have turned to us to help secure a more certain tomorrow. Our comprehensive planning processes have not only helped them articulate their goals but have allowed us to qualify and quantify what it will take to help them achieve them. For many of our clients, the resources were in place and simply needed to be organized and allocated in the most efficient manner. For others earlier in their career, the objectives were doable, but the resources are still on the come. That, my friends, is where life insurance really rose to the task. Virtually all of families that I have worked with have articulated short, intermediate, and long-term goals and for each of those goals, life insurance played an instrumental role in securing a favorable outcome. Whether having the ability to pay off a primary mortgage or a mortgage on a vacation home, paying for education or guaranteeing that a substantial income would survive even if that breadwinner did not, life insurance is/was there. Estate planning and life insurance are inextricably connected to our clients' dreams of living with purpose and leaving a legacy. When properly designed and implemented by a team of professionals, a plan can help create and meet dreams and non-negotiables in very impactful ways. I urge you to reach out to a planner, if you have not already done so, because, as we all know, life is not always certain.

In a land there's a town, and in that town there's a house

And in that house there's a woman

And in that woman there's a heart

I love I'm gonna take it with me when I go

I love being a husband, father and a planner. I love helping people make their dreams a reality. For those of you who haven’t read my blog before, I also love music. Tom Waits is an American treasure and a brilliant mind. I think he speaks to me because he is an empath, he writes from the heart and he and his Kathleen (Brennan), write from the shoes and through the eyes of the individuals they create. They are a tremendous partnership, and they know that life is much more than flesh and bone and that we are all just passing through. The beauty is that with planning, we can control the controllables and where we can’t, there is always life insurance.

Written by: Rob Armstrong

Tom Waits: Take it with Me

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Kathleen Brennan / Thomas Alan Waits