browser life

After a flare lasts for awhile, I start to wonder if it's truly a temporary flareup of symptoms or the beginning of a permanent deterioration. It's practically impossible to tell the difference as I've experienced both so many times. Most people with chronic ailments will tell you they have good days and bad days, but to be truthful, they also go through phases where all they get are bad and worse.

So, no, I never did get started on that article, but I've gotten fed up with waiting for my head to clear. I expect to try to tackle writing it sometime this week if I can get a decent opening sentence going. Sometimes, I just have to face the fact that this may be as good as I get and proceed in spite of that.

Did take up a fair amount of time researching life insurance. Yeah, I know, it seems kinda stupid for someone in such dire financial straits to look for yet another thing to spend money on. But in some ways, I need insurance more than someone with ample dough.

When Dan and I were first married, we were sold a policy that was misrepresented to us as a "retirement fund". It was, in fact, a life insurance policy, one that didn't pay out unless you lived to 100 years old, and it only covered Dan when it was supposed to cover us both.

This company had a class action suit against it because of their dishonest tactics. We won, but the settlement only allowed us to convert the policy to an annuity, one that had a hefty surrender fee that luckily was not permanent. Unfortunately, the total value of the annuity was far less than what we had already paid into it.

Well, in 2006, when Dan got the Sioux Falls job and I was stuck in Denver for six months trying to sell the house, our savings account ran dry. We did get an offer on the house just in time, but we had no cash for a down payment on our next home because we took such a hit on the selling price of the Denver home. So we had to cash out that annuity and eat the surrender fee.

A year later, I have nothing that protects my ability to keep this house should Dan die before the mortgage is paid. Yeah, I could try to sell it and move someplace cheaper, but rent won't be much cheaper than a mortgage, and I'd still not have enough via SSDI to live on even if I had no housing payments, not with my medical bills. And I probably wouldn't qualify for housing assistance because so many people on disability here get even less than I do.

So the sensible thing to do would be to get a relatively cheap level term life insurance policy for Dan. He has 30 years before retirement, and we have 29 years left on the mortgage. I checked out the prices, and a policy with a best-rated company would cost us only one-fourth of what that bogus "retirement fund" was draining from us.

Ack. Three days have passed since I started this post. All the stuff I wanted to write seems to have evaporated, so I will just publish this and start a new entry when I can remember what else I wanted to say.

I swear, my mind is like a sieve.