American General Life Insurance Claimant's Statement 2004-2024 Form

Departments of education and school districts always have to make decisions about what to include in their curriculum.  There are a lot of life skills that people need that aren't taught in school.  The question is should those skills be taught in schools?I teach high school, so I'll talk about that.  The typical high school curriculum is supposed to give students a broad-based education that prepares them to be citizens in a democracy and to be able to think critically.  For a democracy to work, we need educated, discerning citizens with the ability to make good decisions based on evidence and objective thought.  In theory, people who are well informed about history, culture, science, mathematics, etc., and are capable of critical, unbiased thinking, will have the tools to participate in a democracy and make good decisions for themselves and for society at large.  In addition to that, they should be learning how to be learners, how to do effective, basic research, and collaborate with other people.  If that happens, figuring out how to do procedural tasks in real life should not provide much of a challenge.  We can't possibly teach every necessary life skill people need, but we can help students become better at knowing how to acquire the skills they need.  Should we teach them how to change a tire when they can easily consult a book or search the internet to find step by step instructions for that?  Should we teach them how to balance a check book or teach them how to think mathematically and make sense of problems so that the simple task of balancing a check book (which requires simple arithmetic and the ability to enter numbers and words in columns and rows in obvious ways) is easy for them to figure out.  If we teach them to be good at critical thinking and have some problem solving skills they will be able to apply those overarching skills to all sorts of every day tasks that shouldn't be difficult for someone with decent cognitive ability  to figure out.  It's analogous to asking why a culinary school didn't teach its students the steps and ingredients to a specific recipe.  The school taught them about more general food preparation and food science skills so that they can figure out how to make a lot of specific recipes without much trouble.  They're also able to create their own recipes.So, do we want citizens with very specific skill sets that they need to get through day to day life or do we want citizens with critical thinking, problem solving, and other overarching cognitive skills that will allow them to easily acquire ANY simple, procedural skill they may come to need at any point in their lives?

If you are not married, and have no dependents, then you don't need life insurance.If you are married and your spouse also works, one year's salary is enough insurance for them to cover funeral expenses, mourn, and move to a smaller home and sell the current house if needed.If you have dependents, and/or your spouse doesn't work, the situation becomes very dependent on your personal finances overall. Assuming you are a one-income household, with two pre-school aged children, you may want to consider a total life insurance value equal to enough money to cover:-Cost of paying off your mortgage immediately-Cost of fixed annuity to pay for annual expenses for your spouse, less housing cost-Children's educational expensesThat's the most common rule of thumb, but you should consider whether it is an outdated notion that your spouse will never be able to work or provide for themselves if you die.Also, whether you believe that parents should pay for a child's college education, or even whether a child needs to go to college (or a state school vs. private school) can impact that part of the equation.As you age, you will likely set aside 529 plans for your kids, pay down your mortgage, etc. In that case, you should adjust the total value of your insurance downward to save yourself on monthly premium costs. The very wealthy self-insure for the most part - you want to move in that direction as your personal wealth increases.Finally, don't mix investments with insurance. Insurance is for protection only. Therefore, "buy term and invest the rest" is the best advice. Whole insurance makes it difficult to remember how much you are spending on the insurance part, and how much you're investing.

Why can’t we reduce the amount of forms we have to fill out in our life?Very rarely does anybody have to fill out forms without a purpose, mostly because once you fill it out, somebody has to process and data entry the thing, and nobody likes doing that for pointless forms.So.. what thing that requires a form do you want to get rid of? Because you don’t just get rid of the form, you get rid of whatever that form is designed to do.You want a driver’s license or license plates? There’s going to be a form, because they can’t give you those without collecting the needed information.Do you thing getting rid of driver’s licenses or license plates is a good idea?When I take my car to a mechanic, there’s always a form to fill out, that lists among other things, the work authorized to be done, the estimated cost, and an upper cost limit they can’t exceed without further authorization (in case problems are found during the work - the additional work may cost more than the value of the car if it’s older. It also limits the ability of shady mechanics to run up the price tag with “Oh, we also had to fix this” claims.I’m personally happy to have my copy of a form that says exactly what my mechanic was supposed to do - it comes in handy if I have to sue them, The fact I have my copy in my backpack seems to keep them honest. Funny, that…Would you think getting rid of that form would be a good idea?When I moved into this apartment building a few years ago, one of the forms I had to sign was a statement by the leasing company that (a) the building was built before 1970 and (b) they were unable to guarantee that there was no lead-based paint. But that disclosure was legally required, because even today, there are *still* cases of 2 year olds finding flaking paint chips, eating them, and ending up severely messed up because it was lead-based paint, and lead is bad for growing baby brains.And although I’m old enough to be retired and wise enough to not eat paint chips, the family upstairs with the small kids is probably at least glad to have the heads-up, and call the maintenance crew at the first sign of flaking paint…Do you think it would be a good idea to let landlords claim “Oh, we told the tenants about known dangers that might be present”? Or make them keep paperwork that proved the tenants signed a form stating they were indeed told?

I’m 57 year old, so I’m more than half-way through with my life. Here are some realistic ways I would fill out the quote “Life is too short to …”Life is too short NOT to eat my healthy homemade brownie for energy. It’s made with lots eggs, of cocoa powder, brewer’s yeast, flax meal, coconut meal, organic oatmeal, and buckwheat. It’s high fiber, high omega-3, and high protein & magnesium.Life is too short to be negative about anything. Being negative and pessimistic DID NOT PAY off for my prior 1/2 life spent.Life is too short NOT to be honest. Honesty saves time.Life is too short to worry. Worrying means I don’t trust in the almighty Creator who made me & will take care of me.

The lawmakers expect a reasonable average person to be able to guide self through the maze of laws and regulations.Still, some people value their time or are truthful about their abilities to comprehend things, and instead of getting a self-taught degree in taxation or legal intricacies of a company formation (and accounting/financial issues associated with that), those people choose to hire a professional specializing in those areas.I am personally an accountant (corporate accounting) which is as far away from personal taxes as you can imagine; my tax returns are tied to my spouse's and due to presence of several items which are not a common occurrence in an average person's life, I am not even trying to complete our taxes.I do my due diligence with all the information gathering, schedules, support documentation, record retention and such but I can't spend days pouring over it all to come up with a final number.So, I pay a professional to be on time, on spec, and on budget.With respect to legal advice, laws in US vary by state, so me being able to spend 3 years in law school, and then more years trying to be admitted to each of the Bar associations, and then have the ability to research cases for precedents - that's just not reasonable.Still, there are others who actually love this process, are knowledgeable, and can tell me a solution to my problem within 20 mins. Isn't this worth my money?

That is to assume there is some form of “purpose” to life. From the point of view of modern biological sciences, life is a form of self-replication that emerges from interactions of the forces and particles that make up the universe. The natural selection process will mean that only those entities with the ability to self-replicate successfully will perpetuate. Such a model does not require “purpose” as such, and what we, as humans may deem to be such, is really a manifestation of the evolved nature of human beings as a social animal. Such a sense of “purpose” may well be essential to our survival as a species, but it comes from within, and not without. In any event, I very much doubt that the nature of human beings “purpose” is to replace ourselves with something that would replace us. However, it should be said that many think this is exactly what we will do by accident in the pursuit of cybernetics. Taken to its limits, this would mean some form of “machine culture” that would self-replicate and we would become irrelevant.Of course many do look beyond the purely empirical explanations of the appearance of life into the sphere of the spiritual and religious. They often do include invoke external purpose from super-natural powers. However, I’m not aware of any major religion which includes, within its creed, that the purpose of humanity is to bring about its replacement with a “superior” from of life which could ultimately achieve some form of perpetual existence. Indeed some expect and ending of the universe with human beings (or at least chosen ones) being absorbed into some perpetual after-life outside our existing material universe. Others have models for perpetual existence largely in the form of life and existence as we see now.No doubt somebody has founded a religion (or cult) of the type you describe, but I don’t know of a signNow one. Perhaps L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology has some elements of it.

Permanent life insurance policies \u2013 universal, whole and variable \u2013 have a cash value. That is, you get life insurance with a death benefit, but part of your premium payments fund a cash account that in theory should grow in value over time. ... But life insurance for children isn't a good investment vehicle.

First consider what you want to achieve, and then commit to it. Set SMART (specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals that motivate you and write them down to make them feel tangible. Then plan the steps you must take to realize your goal, and cross off each one as you work through them.

Vision: The Core of Your Life Plan. Make your vision clear and apprehensible. ... Preciseness. To learn how to plan your life, be precise as much as possible when creating your vision. ... Create a Step-by-Step Plan. Divide your life plan into parts. ... Work with Deadlines. ... Have Rules.

A 5-year plan is a balance of overarching goals and dreams and nitty gritty details. One of your lifetime goals may be to have wealth; your five-year goal is to buy a house. Both are important in developing a plan. First, think about your life as a whole.

Define success. Career success means different things to different people. ... Identify goals and barriers. Organize your to-do list into short- and long-term goals. ... Start tackling potential obstacles. For each obstacle on your career development list, write down the steps you need to take to move forward. ... Re-evaluate often.