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If you love your credit card rewards, tell your lawmakers, "Hands off my rewards." Tell them to oppose the Durbin-Marshall Credit Card Bill. I'm not supposed to be recording a podcast at this moment. And the reason I'm not supposed to be recording a podcast is quite simply that today is not a scheduled podcasting day.

On the contrary, today is a scheduled consulting day for me. And at this very moment in which I am now recording a podcast, I am scheduled to be speaking to a client of mine. A client I've worked with a couple of times and I am supposed to be reviewing a whole life insurance policy that a family member of his owns in response to some questions that he has about what he should do with it in its current condition.

The reason I'm not speaking to this client, however, is simply this, he's dead. A couple hours ago, when my automatic scheduling system sent him a reminder of our call today, I received an email back from his wife informing me that he died unexpectedly of a heart attack last night.

Young man, new father, I really like him, I really like his wife. I've enjoyed interacting with them and working with them. It's quite out of the blue, quite unexpected for him to be dead. He himself is a physician, so it's even more unexpected that a physician would die of an unexpected heart attack.

And so since I got that email a few hours ago, I've been thinking about them, praying for her and for her family as they grieve and mourn for their loss. But whenever tragedy strikes, I like to do my very best to try to redeem the tragedy and get something good from it.

When we have failure and when we have tragedy and disaster, I believe that one of the ways that we can glean something positive and redeem the tragedy is to try to learn something. And while I don't know necessarily, well, actually, I do know. I've been, let me answer, I wasn't going to go into this, but let me start with this instead.

I would say there's two things. I want to honor him and his life by talking about financial planning for death and life planning for death just in a fairly straightforward ad hoc way. But we'll start first with what I myself have been thinking about. I've been researching recently advanced screening, and as I myself am getting older, I'm paying a lot more attention to my health conditions and health screenings and trying to get involved with more advanced screenings.

Because early detection of disease is one of the most reliable ways that we can prevent untimely death. And so just in passing, I would encourage you that one of the first things that you can do and should do when you hear of somebody who has passed away unexpectedly, right out of the blue, is to say, wait a second, why did he not know?

And what if that's the same for me? When's the last time I've had a cardiac exam? When's the last time I've done a preemptive screening for early cancer diagnosis? Am I on track of my own health analysis? Am I taking care of, or am I just ignoring these things and letting the problems pile up?

So that would be the first thing that I myself am doing in response to what this man is facing. But I do want to, in the context of radical personal finance, take a moment to talk about financial planning and take a moment to talk about it in the context of how suddenly important it can be.

The first lesson that you should take away from anyone's unexpected death, and the first question you should have, is just simply, did he have life insurance? More importantly though, I want to ask you and say, do you have life insurance? Do you have life insurance? Years ago, I first became a life insurance agent and life insurance salesman.

And at the time, when I was 23 years old, I had no real appreciation for my job. In fact, I had more scorn for it than anything else. I signed up to sell insurance because I wanted to be a financial advisor. I didn't really care about insurance. I just wanted to be a financial advisor.

So I wanted to do stocks and bonds and do all that cool financial stuff. And yet, the best pathway into that business that I could see was to start by selling life insurance. For the uninitiated, insurance and investment planning really collaborate really beautifully, both in terms of impact in a client's life and situation, as well as in terms of a financial structure for a financial advisor.

Young people who are not yet earning a lot of money and haven't yet accumulated a lot of money generally have a need for significant amounts of insurance. Life insurance, disability insurance, health insurance, property and casualty insurance. There's lots of insurance needs. As they get older and accumulate more money, that's where investment planning becomes relevant.

For a financial advisor, the commission structure and payout structure of both of those products works really well together. When you sell an insurance policy, ordinarily you receive a large upfront commission with very modest ongoing commissions over the life of the policy to keep it in force. And then with investment planning, ordinarily when someone is very young and their account values are low, there's not really any ability to profitably make money.

But as their account values grow, there's a good chance to make money. And so you can start off in the financial advice business. And you can start off in your 20s or your 30s. You can sell lots and lots of insurance. That puts food on your table, allows you to accumulate clients, and then you grow with your clients.

And as they grow and they accumulate more capital, if you also can provide financial planning and capital management services, then your compensation can continue as you provide the fullness of services. But I never appreciated the value of life insurance when I was young. I saw it as something I had to do.

I didn't want to be in sales. I didn't want to sell life insurance. Ooh, icky, because life insurance agents are aggressive and all this stuff. I had these weird concepts. I was not mature enough and psychologically prepared to sell life insurance. I didn't appreciate it. I was not into it.

I just hadn't ever seen it, the impact of it. I hadn't ever needed it. And I had no conviction about the value of it. But I had an intellectual appreciation as far as how it could be useful, and so I started selling insurance. And as I started selling insurance, my appreciation of insurance changed.

One of the first things that happened for me was that I bought my own insurance policy. I figured I can't be selling stuff to other people that I myself am not willing to do, so I wrote myself a million-dollar life insurance policy. And I was unmarried at the time, didn't have any children, so I wrote myself a million-dollar life insurance policy.

And like any smart, young, single man, I made my parents the beneficiary of it. It took a few months, and as the months went by, I started to realize how cool it felt to know that if I died, my parents were well taken care of. I'd never thought of it before that.

I just wrote the insurance policy because I figured I should own my own product. But then I realized that's really neat. And I realized I, as a single man, I have an obligation to my parents. As a young man, I have an obligation to my parents to care for them as they age.

That's the responsibility of a child. As children, we are all responsible to care for our parents as they age. And yet, if I die, and I'm not here, and I can't do that, what's going to happen to them? And I realized that having a million-dollar term life insurance policy was just an amazing way to do that.

The premiums were, I think, 40-something bucks at the time, and it just felt amazing. Super cheap, less than the cost of a cell phone bill, and I can make sure that my parents are taken care of. That was a first indication. Then, of course, as I went through life stages and got married and had children and started changing things, and I realized how powerful it was to be able to assure or insure, in this case, to insure my wealth building for my family.

I had big dreams and ambitions, but as so many of us find ourselves often, I was behind on my promises, behind on my ambitions. Life wasn't going how I wanted to, and I've always taken great comfort in the fact that by owning insurance, even if I can't get caught up, at least my family's wealth is assured.

Properly insured, excuse me. I usually avoid the word "insured," but in this context, of course, it's the appropriate word. And as I went on and sold more life insurance, I started to hear more and more stories. I've shared stories I've shared before on the podcast. I had a friend of mine, similar thing.

He was a young guy, had his first job, single guy, and I sold him a disability insurance policy, a friend of mine from college. He needed a disability policy, and I was like, "Listen, you ought to get a life insurance policy. I wouldn't say you need it, but let me tell you why I like having it." So he signed up and got himself a life insurance policy.

A few months later, he calls me up and he says, "You wouldn't believe what happened to me." He was up fishing on the Gulf Coast, and he was out on this boat by himself, and he slipped and he fell, and he about killed himself, just barely didn't. But he was lying there injured in his boat way offshore by himself, and he said, "You know what?

I felt amazing knowing that I have life insurance to protect my parents and family." I had a client of mine who I had sold policies, proper policies, good term policies for the father and for the mother. And I had also sold the client child policies. And at the time, I didn't have a deep conviction about child policies.

I felt like, "Okay, they're kind of nice to have," but I always had this little question of, "Am I just trying to pad my sales numbers by selling them four policies instead of two? Am I just trying to pad my commission, or do you really need child policies?" And I felt like, "Okay, I can see the value in them," but I always questioned, right?

As a salesman, you always question, "Am I doing the right thing? Is this really the right thing, or am I just trying to serve myself, be self-serving by making a commission?" So I sold this family four life insurance policies. They had two children and two adult policies. But the guy was a contractor, and his business was way up and way down.

He didn't have a great financial management. And so after, I don't remember how long, but sometime later, the policies ended up lapsing because he went into a bad financial spot, and he wasn't able to pay the premiums. And they went broke with some of his contracting business that got broke.

And at the time, I didn't pursue it very aggressively because I felt like I was self-serving. I felt like, "Well, I'm just trying to keep business on the books for me." I figured I was probably right that I'm thinking about him, but I figured I'm just trying to keep business on the books for me.

So in those days, I didn't fight super hard when somebody would lapse a policy. As an insurance agent, you get a notice of policy is behind, and you should call your clients. I didn't fight super hard, though, because I didn't have a lot of conviction about life insurance. Anyway, those policies lapsed.

And about a year later, the guy's son was murdered, literally murdered, in his front yard. And my heart sank, and I asked myself, "Did I do everything I could have? What do we do here? Did I do the right thing?" And as time went on, I started paying a couple of death claims here and there.

And most of them didn't come from my own book of business, because my book of business tended to be fairly young and fairly healthy. But most of them came from clients of the company that I worked with. And over time, paying death claims made me realize what an amazing asset life insurance is, that it is right there when you need it.

And when the worst happens and somebody's dead, it brings an enormous sense of comfort to those who have it, knowing that I don't need to worry about the finances, at least not right now, at least not this week, at least not this month. And today, I guess if I wanted to say, today, I think I could happily build a business and just be a life insurance agent and not do anything else.

When I think with my current conviction of now being older, watching people die, experiencing that, going through it with people, I now understand the conviction, the personal sense of meaning and satisfaction that a lot of old life insurance agents have. And it's a very, very special product. So it's not the only thing that matters when you're thinking about death, but it's certainly something that matters a lot.

And one of the great conundrums that has not been solved is simply this. I know the American numbers. The American population continues to be woefully underinsured with regard to life insurance. It's one of those things that people always mean to do, they mean to do, they've been intending to do, and yet they don't just quite ever get around to doing it.

There's a saying in the life insurance business that insurance has to be sold, that you need someone to come along and kind of poke you and say, "Hey, do you want to buy insurance?" And again, I think back to myself at 23, I didn't understand that lots of people were going through life and knowing that, you know what, I'd like to buy some insurance, but yet it just wasn't important enough to them to go and do it.

It's very unusual. There's only a small portion of the population that is actually the kind of men and women who are go-getters, who will get up and go and do what needs to be done and be proactive about this stuff. All of us are there. I think of myself as pretty proactive, but I'm not as proactive as I should be.

There's all kinds of things on my list, but I just kind of don't do it until I'm poked. So I now understand that the job of life insurance agent is really, really useful, really important to society because life insurance agent calls you up, stumbles by your office, talks to you and kind of pokes you and says, "Hey," jumps out of the bushes, as I like to say, jumps out of the bushes at you and says, "Hey, do you want to buy insurance?" And some people say, "No, I don't want to buy insurance." But what I learned over time as a life insurance agent is there's lots of intelligent people who say, "You know, maybe I would.

Let's talk about it." And boom, you got a life insurance sale. But it's just number 14 on the list instead of number one on the list until somebody comes along and makes it number one. So if you've been procrastinating and you know that you need to get some insurance, you know that you'd like to get some insurance, and you just haven't gotten around to doing it, well, consider this Joshua jumping out of the bushes at you and saying, "Hey, do you want to buy insurance?" And I don't hold an insurance license anymore.

I can't sell the stuff. But I would encourage you, look around and find an insurance agent and call them up and say, "Hey, I'd like to buy some insurance. Let's talk about it." It will bring an enormous sense of comfort and confidence to you and to your family. It matters.

Even if you can't have a ton of insurance or even if you don't want a ton of insurance, let's talk about some details on how to actually do this. The first thing is that people try to think, "How much insurance should I have?" And the answer with life insurance planning is basically that the more the better.

Now, the formal correct way to figure out how much life insurance you have is called a needs analysis. And a needs analysis is fairly simple. What you do is you sit down and you think about how much money you would want to have available for your loved ones or your dependents if you died.

And you go through a few different categories. The first category is usually debt. You try to figure out how much money would you like to have paid off. So for a lot of people, something like, "I'd like to pay off the mortgage," is a really big priority. Because as a father, it makes me feel good to know a debt-free house.

In the state of Florida where I'm from, with a debt-free house, as long as there's no mortgage on it, they can't kick you out as long as you're not on an HOA. And so I can know that my family has a place to live even if they don't have anything else.

So you calculate how much debt you would want to have paid off. The second thing you do is you go through various lump sums. So you would say, "Do I want to set aside a little bit of money for my children's college education? And if so, how much? Or do I want to set aside a certain amount of money for funeral expenses or a special anything, a special trip to remember me by?" And then the third category is income for your loved ones for a certain amount of time.

And so you might say, like me, where you say, "I don't want my wife to ever have to marry for money or ever to have to go and work for money if she doesn't want to. So I want to make sure she has a lifetime income that's set aside so that she's financially independent for the rest of her life." Or you might want to provide your children with a lifelong income.

That's how you do a formal -- excuse me, not lifelong, but usually income until they're graduated from college. That's how you do a formal needs analysis. Now, when you do a few hundred of these, one of the things you quickly find out is that they're all about the same.

And the reason is simply that most of us have a lifestyle of expenses that is related directly to how much money we earn. And most of us have an ambition or a set of needs related to how much we want to actually -- what we want to have for our family that's similar to our lifestyle right now.

If I currently make $100,000 a year, I wouldn't put in my life insurance needs analysis the idea that I want my wife to earn $200,000 a year. Ordinarily, I would say, "Well, I'm gone, so she'll probably have fewer expenses and the house is paid off. So maybe if she's got $50,000 a year or $65,000 a year, that would be enough to see her through." So the point is that you can just estimate this.

And when you do this, you'll always find that the numbers wind up being somewhere between about 10 and 20 times your annual income of life insurance. So if you earn $100,000 a year, you should probably want to have about $1 million to $2 million of life insurance. And you can do the math from there.

And then conveniently, this is basically the assumption that the life insurance companies have come to as well. And based upon their financial underwriting limits and their risk profile, this is about how much life insurance they will give you themselves. It is up to about 20 times your income, sometimes a little higher.

But when you go higher than that, you often have to provide extra justification as to why you're asking for that amount of life insurance. So when you own life insurance and that's the amount that you choose, you're going to feel pretty good about it. But the truth about life insurance is that it really is one of those things where something is better than nothing.

If you should have $1 million of life insurance, but all you actually have is $50,000 because you sign up for the $50,000 or it's just given to you as part of your job, that'll be really useful. That'll be really wonderful. So when your wife is grieving after you've had an unexpected heart attack, at least she knows that I've got enough money to pay for some final expenses, some funeral expenses, and I've got enough money to see me through a few months if I take a few months off from work to grieve and figure out what am I going to do next.

And then it just goes from there. Every additional amount of insurance helps because it helps to create more time. When somebody dies, the most important thing that the family needs is time to make good decisions unaffected by intense emotions with proper counsel from others. So the normal advice that I or anyone else would give to somebody who has just lost their spouse is to simply say don't do anything.

Just stay where you are. Stay in the house. Keep the kids in the schools. Just don't do anything until some time has passed so that there can be time to grieve. And you'll often hear people say something like a year. And so I like that advice. I think it makes a lot of sense.

There's nothing magical about it. We can't prove that it's actually correct. But what happens is when someone dies and everyone is experiencing trauma and emotional pain due to the death, that's not an ideal time to be pulling the children out of private schools and moving out of the neighborhood where all of our longtime friends are because we can't afford our house anymore.

Now, some people have to do that. And if you don't have life insurance, a lot of times people have to do that. They always have. And your family is probably going to make it through. But it's really nice when they don't have to. So if you don't have life insurance, get some.

Try to get 10 to 20 times your income of total amount of insurance. If you need insurance, then you want to go out and get term life insurance. Term life insurance is the tool that we always use to solve for life insurance need because it's the cheapest up front and it covers the most amount of money if you die unexpectedly.

It's not the best insurance for the long term. And so that's where you get into all kinds of insurance products that also have their place, variations of whole life insurance and universal life insurance and cash value life insurance. But the rule with good financial planning is you always solve for the insurance need first using term life insurance.

An ethical insurance agent will never sell you $100,000 whole life policy when in reality you need a million-dollar term life insurance policy. If someone ever does that, then you are not getting good advice. If you need a million dollars of life insurance, you need a million dollars of life insurance and that's going to be covered with term life insurance that you can get in place as quickly as possible.

If you don't have life insurance, go get some. Put it in place. It solves beautifully the financial problems that are created as a result of death, especially unexpected death. Now, there are lots of needs and uses for insurance down the road. One of the things that I have come to appreciate over years as I become more mature as a financial planner is I've come to appreciate how insurance still is valuable for people who are older.

When I got into the insurance business at 23 years old, I was very much convinced of buy term and invest the difference and make sure that you self-insure as quickly as possible. What I learned, though, is I would find myself working with guys in their 50s, guys in their 60s who still appreciated having their life insurance.

Now, there's clearly a point in time at which you certainly don't need life insurance. But what's interesting is even as you get older, having life insurance can still feel really good. And as I thought about it more, I realized some of the reasons why it feels good. One of the things that people miss when they go very intensively on the get self-insured as quickly as possible and then dump your life insurance program is they miss that most of the time we don't wind up with as much money as we would like.

And there's a big difference between somebody who has just enough money and somebody who's genuinely wealthy. For somebody who has just enough money, life insurance can provide valuable peace of mind. Because when we die, most of us don't die in a sudden motorcycle accident or a sudden cardiac event.

Most of us die over the course of – let me be careful with most. I can't say most, just many of us. Many of us die over the course of several years. And if you think of it, imagine yourself that you've just gotten a cancer diagnosis and it's for sure going to kill you, but it's going to kill you three or four years from now.

All of a sudden now, wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have so many financial worries? Wouldn't it be nice if you had a little bit extra and you didn't feel like you just couldn't spend money? Now, not everybody wants to go and check off everything on a family's bucket list or a man's bucket list before he kicks the bucket.

That's not what everyone wants to do. A lot of times people find that when they get a terminal diagnosis, then they're actually more interested in spending time with family and loved ones and playing with their grandkids than they are in going and seeing the Taj Mahal. But it'd be nice to be able to go see the Taj Mahal if you wanted to.

And that's where insurance really works out well for people who could technically be self-insured because it can allow for additional medical care and additional expenses to be made. And so I've come to really appreciate this in a way that I couldn't have imagined appreciating when I was younger and a bit more bulletproof.

If I'm 50 years old and I've got enough money to be on track for retirement, my wife is certainly not going to be destitute. But imagine if I get a cancer diagnosis, I'd like to be able to spend a few hundred thousand dollars taking the family to Europe and taking the family all around the world and buying toys for everyone and just doing all kinds of stuff.

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Go to lipsandads.com now. That's L I B S Y N ads.com. For my loved ones, while I'm healthy enough to see them and enjoy them, I'd like to get to that point of financial abundance. In addition to, of course, finding a quack who's going to give me an alternate diagnosis and go into some alternate treatment program that might prove the first guy to be a liar.

And a lot of that stuff, I'm just going to need to go and pay money for it in case it wasn't clear because sometimes it's not. I say quack in the most affectionate way possible that if somebody gives you a terminal diagnosis, go find another doctor who will lie to you and tell you there might be some hope and try something new and different.

Making a joke. Life insurance has its place and life insurance can help us to live really high, live really expensive and do those things that otherwise we might not be able to do even if we were technically financially independent. So I've counseled a lot of people who've come to me and just said, Joshua, hey, I think I'm self-insured now because I'm on track for financial independence.

And I would say, well, I think you're probably right. Your family's not going to be destitute. You got a million and a half dollars. Great. Good job. But why don't you keep your insurance for at least five more years and reassess that? There's a big difference between somebody who's got a million and a half bucks versus somebody who's got $30 million.

And so life insurance has enduring benefit for those guys who are, yes, I'm self-insured technically. I don't need it anymore, but you might still like to have it because it make you feel good if you got a terminal diagnosis. Life insurance is not the only thing, but it's a huge thing.

If you have life insurance and you have no other end of life planning, no other death planning done, then it can all be figured out. There is a plan in place that's already there. For example, let's say that you don't have a will. Should you have a will? Probably.

But the reality is all of us do have a will. It's just called the intestacy provisions for our state. These intestacy provisions generally for most people line up pretty much with what you would want to happen. If you die, your assets are going to go to your family and your wife, your children, your husband, and perhaps other family members as well.

The most important reason to have a will for parents is to be able to designate who your preferred guardian is that you want to have in place for your children instead of leaving it for your family on the court to work out without your input. That's a big deal is you want to make sure that your children are being raised if they're orphaned, that your children are being raised by the person that you designate.

But I don't jump up and down on my soapbox because I'm a realist about this. As a realist, the truth is that it's normally pretty uncommon for husbands and wives to both die at the same time. The need for a will is probably less important than life insurance. At the end of the day, the court and your family, they're probably going to settle in most cases on the guardians that you yourself would designate for your children, but not always.

Having a will is a good idea. There are a bunch of other end-of-life things that need to be done. So having in place a power of attorney that will spring into being once you're dead makes it a lot easier for your family members to settle your affairs. But it's not strictly necessary.

They can go through the difficult process of petitioning the court and getting it done. The having end-of-life directives and having a living will and things like that, those are all helpful and important. I'm not saying they're unimportant, but there are ways around because people die all the time and people go into end-of-life care all the time without having that stuff.

The big one is the life insurance. You got to get the life insurance before there's ever any hint of your needing it because when you get it before you ever need it, it's cheap and easy and everything is smooth and simple. And then all of a sudden, boom, you get a diagnosis and you can't get it anymore and you're really glad you got it.

So get a lot of life insurance. Get term life insurance. I've done other podcast episodes of get insurance in place, get good term insurance with good term companies in case you ever want to convert some. You probably don't need it with all of it. If you're going to have $4 million of insurance, you might want a million or two with a company that you would convert to and then get a couple or three million of cheap term.

There's good insurance planning. That's what an insurance agent does. So talk to an insurance agent. They can help you with that. I think some of the other things though is where my heart is today which is not so much the technical financial planning but just more the life planning.

The first thing you should do is you should talk with your spouse about what you want your spouse to do if you're dead. And it would be great if some of this is written down but let's be realistic. Most of us are not going to put it number one on our list like we should.

I've got people who have a beautiful letter written if I'm dead open this and all the stuff is written out. I think that's an absolutely brilliant perfect plan. But let's at least initiate a conversation. Talking about death should be a normal and common thing for you and for your wife or for your husband.

You should talk about it. You should talk about what do you want to do. What are some of the things that you need to talk about? First, make it clear what you think should happen. For example, if I die, my wife is going to want to know what I think would be best for her.

I've given a lot of counsel. I've given an enormous amount of leadership and direction. If all of a sudden she's got to do it all, she's got to be responsible for all the decisions. She has no duty or obligation to do what I think she should do. I'm dead.

I'm gone. I'm out of the picture. She'll appreciate hearing what I think she should do. And so we talk about, you know, where do I think that she should live? Should they keep living where we live now? Should they move? I give her my suggestions. Here's where I think you should move and here's why.

Here's why I think that would be the best thing. Talk about relationships. I think that, for example, be very clear. I tell my wife, listen, if I'm dead and you meet a guy who you think is right for you, marry. You have my full blessings. I don't think this is common, perhaps.

I don't know. I don't know how common it is. But sometimes people get all messed up. I've had family members whose spouses have died and, well, I can't go and find love again because of my fealty to this person. Marriage is for life and it ends with death. And most normal husbands and wives want what's best for their spouse if they die.

And so talk about it and give some suggestions. Lay out some ideas of what you think your wife should look for in a man. What you think are some of the most important qualities. You know her. You know her better than anyone else. Tell her what you think that works really well about you guys and vice versa.

If my wife had terminal cancer and I had the opportunity to interact with her, at the very least, I would want to know what she thinks about me, what she thinks I should do. She knows me better. Years ago I read the story of – it was probably the most extreme story that I don't think I recommend, but it's interesting – of James Wesley Rawls.

And he writes on his blog how his wife, the Memzahib, had terminal cancer. And one of the things that she actually did was she found him his second wife. She put a note out on the blog. She interviewed a variety of ladies. And then – I don't remember the specific details – but something like she left him with some suggestions.

And she said, "Here's who I think you would be really compatible with, and here are some names. So when I'm dead, open – I don't know how she did it – but open this envelope, and here are some people that you should consider. And here's who I think you would really click with based upon my conversations with these ladies." And that's very unusual.

But there's something enormously loving about that. It's always – that story has stuck with me forever. It's just inspiring to me. And sometime after she died – I don't know if it was eight months, a year, who knows – sometime after she died, then he went ahead and initiated a relationship and ultimately married the woman that she had picked, or at least one of the women that she had picked.

I don't remember – I don't know the details. That inspires me so much. What a cool way to be an adult. And if you have a happy and satisfying marriage, who would you want to pick your wife except the wife that you're happy with now? Because after all, she's a woman.

She could see through the games. Now, if you have an unhappy and dissatisfying marriage and there's a sense of relief in the death of your spouse, then obviously you would want to pursue a different tack. You might yourself want to make some different choices the second time around. The point is to talk about it.

Talk about what would be best for the children. Talk about what would be best for your spouse if you died. Now, going beyond talk about it, talk about the details. For example, if I can't give financial advice, my wife knows who she is to call and ask for financial advice.

Then you need to put in place a plan for a specific plan for accounts, account access, phone access, things like that. Everything is difficult if you don't have all the passwords. Everything is difficult if you don't have all the stuff. For many of us today, we don't have paper.

It used to be, okay, we go to the filing cabinet and we wait for the mail to come in and we look for the statements. But now, we go to the encrypted email inbox. Uh-oh, I can't get into that. And all the financial statements come in and they're all purely by email.

Well, I can't get into the email. And so in most cases, these things can be sorted out in the fullness of time with a power of attorney, with a death certificate, where you reach out to the companies. But there at least needs to be awareness of what the family has.

And then you go into seeing how things can be managed. There's a lot more technical planning that I could do. I have a whole discussion about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency assets. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be talked about in this context. But I'm focusing on just what I can do extemporaneously and in the spirit of the moment.

The final thing I would say is just simply be spiritually ready to die. I don't just mean accept Jesus into your heart, although, of course, I mean be ready to meet your maker. And as a Christian, I want you to be born again, repent of your sins, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, be baptized in water for the forgiveness of your sins, and receive the Holy Spirit.

That's what I believe. But more important in this context, I'm not preaching at you. What I am saying is be ready to go knowing that you've kept short accounts. If there's anybody in your life that you hold a grudge against, go and fix the relationship. If there are broken relationships in your life, go and fix them now.

Go and apologize. If there's somebody that you have wronged and you haven't apologized, go and apologize. If there's a sin that you're guilty of and you haven't confessed it and made restitution for that sin, go, confess your sin, and make restitution for that. If there's something that you admire about somebody else, if there's something that you really appreciate, don't wait for the funeral to say that.

Go and say it to the person now. Go and send them a message on their birthday. Go and speak to the person and say to him, "Here's what I really appreciate about you." This is a skill that is hard. It seems especially hard for men. When I do this, I still have to preface it with a little bit of a disclaimer to make it not awkward, but I try to do this.

I try to say, "Listen, friend, this is going to be a little bit awkward, but I really believe in saying things to people while they're alive instead of at their funeral. Here's something I really appreciate about you. Here's how you've touched me in my life. Here's how you've encouraged me.

Here's what you've done for me, and I'm really grateful for that. I want you to know that I thank you for it." And make that normal. Make that a normal part of your life, that you appreciate those that you want to appreciate. Imagine that you're dead, and your dad doesn't know how you feel about him.

Imagine that he still thinks that when you died, you were still dealing with the fights that you had when you were 20 and rebelling against everything he ever said to you. Imagine when you're dead that your best friend doesn't know how much you really appreciate him. Don't let that happen.

You could be the one who dies. Now, similarly, imagine that that person dies, and you didn't have a chance to say to her how much she meant to you. That's really bad. So keep short accounts. Fix it. If there's something that you are going to be ashamed of in your life, get it all out there now.

One of the things that's interesting is--I think about this a lot-- people go through their life with their past unfixed, and yet you can fix it. For most people, and if you are turning to God, this is what I always counsel as first thing. Step one of turning to God is repent.

Make a list of all of your sins, all the people that you've wronged, all the sins that you've committed, the crimes that you've committed, the people that you've wronged, the things you've done. Make a list of those things, and go and set them right. Confess them to other people so they're not hidden in a closet, and go and make them right.

If you don't, even if you're not dead, they're going to bite you. 20 years from now, you're going to run for office, and all of a sudden somebody's going to dig up all these heinous skeletons that are in your closet of all these heinous things that you did, and now you're going to have a problem.

You know how you deal with that? Get the skeletons out of the closet, put them out on the front porch, find all the people who were involved, and fix them. Confess your sins. Repent of them. Make them right. Make restitution. If you've stolen from somebody, go pay it back.

If you've wronged somebody, go and fix it. If the person is dead, pay it forward. Find a way to fix the things that you are ashamed of so that you're ready to die, and keep short accounts. Be spiritually prepared for death. Be ready to meet your maker every single day.

Finally, just a couple of quick suggestions for walking through death with people who are facing it. Well, not necessarily the people who are facing it, but when it happens. If you're young, especially, and you don't know what to do, there's just a couple of things. First, when somebody dies unexpectedly, express your condolences genuinely and sincerely.

The most important thing you can possibly do is go. Go fast. Go and be with the person, in person, if at all possible. I learned this lesson when I was a boy. When my sister passed away, when she was 14 years old, she had an epileptic seizure, and she died early in the morning.

When I woke up, I immediately sensed something was wrong. The events of that morning, because of their emotional intensity, are etched into my mind. I'm not going to share them here in a public context. One of the things, though, that's enormously meaningful to me is I know who was there within a few minutes.

It was my dad's closest friend, and he was there. In probably 20 to 30 minutes after I woke up, my dad must have let him know. I will always remember the fact that he was there. He was there immediately. The most important thing you can do is be there immediately.

If you're dealing with a friend and somebody who has passed away, then immediately go. Don't even ask. Just go. If you get there and the person's not there, you can fix that. You can always find a way to be useful. Don't ask. Just go. If you hear that somebody, so-and-so, has died, and you get a call from his wife, or you see an announcement somewhere, or you get it from a friend, if it's just happened, go.

Get in the car, go. Drive to the airport, and while you're at the stoplight on your way to the airport, book a flight. Whatever you need to do, go. Because there's a lot of things that you can do to help somebody who is grieving and is in a difficult place for making decisions.

That's one of the most rewarding things that you can do to help someone. It's one of those things that they will treasure forever. I'm sure that many people came and expressed their condolences when my sister died. I'm sure of it. But I don't remember any of them. I was a boy.

I don't remember any of them. I do remember the man who showed up. And since then, this has always been something that I've learned. By the way, a similar thing that I've learned even with childbirth. I learned this another experience. One time, my wife and I had a baby.

And ordinarily, when people have a baby, someone will go ahead and set up--today, it's called a meal train, right, with a website. But often, if you have friends or your church friends, someone will organize some meals so you don't have to cook. But one time, we had a baby, and our friend heard that the baby was there, and she didn't call.

She didn't say, "I'm coming over." She knocked on the door about 2 1/2, 3 hours after the baby was born, and she said, "Hi, I brought you this." And she has a big box full of stuff, full of food. And it was all just quick-buy food, but it was great.

It was some nice fancy sodas and lovely chips and some sandwiches, and just everything was, boom, right there. And she just said, "I brought you this. It's for you, and I'm so glad. Congratulations on the baby." She handed it to us, turned around, and left. I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget it because she was there immediately, which is when the help was needed the most. We've been so blessed by many, many friends who have brought us many meals when we've had a baby. They all blur except for that one, for me. I appreciate our friends, and I don't count her as better.

I'm just saying that being fast makes a difference because you can be there when the need is most needed. So I've learned that in my life, and I want to be the kind of friend who's there the first. I've been able to do it a couple times, and I'm going to keep on doing it whenever those events happen.

And I'm just sharing it with you. That is something I never heard anyone else say, but it's something that's really, really useful. I had a few years ago, somebody died. I got the notice, and I immediately went there. Somebody died in the house of a family member. I immediately went, and I was so grateful because the housemates were in emotional grief, and I knew the situation.

I knew who was there, and I was able to be the one who was there to talk to the police, talk to the coroner, to coordinate everything because I was emotionally disattached. And it's just something that I want to share because I want you to do that for your friends when someone passes away.

I want you to experience it. I want you to hear of it directly. And then the final comment I have to say is simply related to words. Don't worry about not having words. In many situations, there are no words. In life, all of us will experience tragedy, sometimes more intensely, sometimes less intensely, but we will all experience tragedy.

And when someone is facing intense tragedy and intense grief, it's very likely that there simply are no words that will do anything, that will help, that will improve the situation. Words don't fix everything. They probably don't even fix anything. I remember a number of years ago, I heard for the first time a message by Pastor Rick Warren.

And he was talking about the events surrounding the time when his son committed suicide. And he talked about his friends who, as soon as they got the call that his son had died, that they immediately came over and were there with him. And he gave this bit of pastoral counseling, which I've taken and I believe is really wise.

Basically, the more profound the grief, the less you say. The more profound the grief, the less you say. If somebody has a minor car accident and their car has some damage and they're frustrated about how expensive it's going to be, I'm probably going to say some words about how it's going to be okay.

A few years from now, it'll all work out. The grief is going to pass away. But if I hear that a friend of mine has a child who's just committed suicide, I'm going to go as fast as I can and I'm going to say nothing. And I'm going to be with them and just say, "I love you and I'm here for you and I'm going to be with you.

I'm going to cry with you and I love you and I'll be with you." That's it. There's nothing else that can be said and there's nothing else that needs to be said. All of us face evil and tragedy in our life. It's the natural consequence of living in a fallen sinful world, so expect it.

Expect that it's going to happen to you and to those that you love routinely and systematically in your life. Trying to make sense of evil is something that we all try to do and that we all generally fail at. So don't look for having the right words to take action.

Just go. I've reached the end of my allotted recording time here that was supposed to be engaged in consulting and I'm going to wrap it up. I just want you to know that you can plan ahead. You can plan ahead so that your death results purely in grieving for your family and not in panic.

You can plan ahead for the deaths of your family members so that when one of your family members dies, you can focus on grieving and mourning and remembering instead of focusing on financial panic or life panic. Be prepared for death. Be prepared for your death and be prepared for the death of your friends and your loved ones.

Be spiritually ready. Be ready to meet your maker. Be ready to give an account of your life every day at all times. Keep short accounts. Seek out to your friends and tell them the things that you want to say at their funeral. Tell it to them now. Encourage them today when no one else is doing it.

And if you need to fix something, go fix it today. Today is the day to go and fix it. Get life insurance if you don't have it and if you find out that someone is hurting, just go. Be the person who goes quickly and shows up and gives them a shoulder to cry on and just say, "I love you and I'm here for you." Thank you so much for listening.

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