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In the mid to late 1970’s DMSO was greatly sought out by athletes and arthritis sufferers as a remedy for joint pain. The major problem was, it was illegal to purchase DMSO for human usage, and so you had go to a vacuum or sewing machine repair shop to purchase it. DMSO was frequently used in that industry as universal cleaning solvent.
My fellow athletes and I would purchase our DMSO, dissolve an aspirin or two in it and paint it on our injured joints, muscles or shin splints so that we could continue competing. Those who had arthritis did something similar with their painful joints so that they could function with less pain throughout the day.
The side effects were that DMSO caused extremely bad breath, much like if you had eaten an entire clove of garlic. The other difficulty was not knowing if the DMSO purchased was pure enough. As an extremely efficient solvent, whatever was on the skin of the preparer or had been picked up in the storage, transfer or manufacturing of the DMSO, quickly was absorbed directly into the blood stream of the user.
Today DMSO can be purchased for human use legally, and many companies have made specialty products that are supposed to do all the things that DMSO did. Interestingly, DMSO isn’t the end all-cure all remedy that it used to be. Legalization seems to have taken some of the potency out of it. And so today athletes and arthritis sufferers seek more exotic or glamorous things to help them deal with their pain, inflammation and injuries. But here’s an important fact to chew on. DMSO today is cleaner and more potent than ever before. So why isn’t it as sought after as it was 40 years ago?
People do what people do, because people do what other people do. That is a known fact. People tend to behave in herds rather than as individuals. And as puzzling as it may seem, there are very few people who are willing to do anything substantially different than what everybody else is doing, even though the results they are getting aren’t providing the results that they really desire out of life.
That is why trends, fads and styles can, and are, altered and manipulated by a few elitists who determine what those trends, fads, and styles are going to be. Everybody else simply jumps on the bandwagon so that they don’t feel isolated, left out or weird.
But herd mentality can destroy you financially if you don’t wake up and smell the roses before it’s too late.
The Pine Processionary Caterpillar (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) is a case in point. These little guys will follow their leader to their death by starvation, even though their food supply is centimeters away, rather than break ranks, veer off the path and reach out to eat something that would sustain them. Peer pressure is tough! Just ask the naturalist John Fabre who proved this to be true in 1898.
Today, those elite few who determine where, how and what kind of life insurance you should purchase are stuck on Universal Life products like Indexed Universal Life, Guaranteed Universal Life or even Variable or Flexible Universal Life. The problem with this is that all Universal Life products are based on Renewable Term Insurance. Renewable Term Insurance will become the most expensive life insurance you can possibly purchase, if you keep it long enough. And that means that ALL Universal Life Insurance Products are pre-determined to lapse as some point in the future…if you don’t start paying more premiums than originally planned. And pay you will, either out of your pocket or out of the interest you earn from the investment side of the Universal Life Policy, there is simply no other option with Universal Life Insurance.
Obviously, this is a win-win for life insurance companies and their agents but a lose-lose for the owners and the beneficiaries of Universal Life Insurance products. Time and time again the news media blasts the stories of those who have purchased these Universal Life Insurance products only to find out the cost of insurance has eaten away any value that the policy has developed. And by the time they reach retirement age their policy has lapsed. Of course, at that point they are too old to start anew and they find themselves without the death benefit they were counting on for their loved ones or the death benefits that would make their estate planning more beneficial for themselves.
The truth is that NOTHING works like Participating Whole Life Insurance to protect, guard and keep the money you paid in premium and the growth experienced in this traditional product. Much like DMSO, it continues to work just like it always has, maybe even better as life expectancies have risen over time. The problem is that new trends, fads, and styles of life insurance have been introduced and unleashed upon the uninformed and therefore unaware public. And these new products simply cannot measure up to the value that Participating Whole Life Insurance provides with all of its contractual guarantees.
So, don’t be like a Processionary Caterpillar and starve to death financially simple because somebody tries to sell you a typical insurance product like Universal Life, Indexed Universal Life, Guaranteed Universal Life, Variable Universal Life or even Flexible Universal Life. Each of these products could leave you and your beneficiaries holding the bag and the insurance companies and their agents walking away with the gold. Stick to the only consumer demanded product in the life insurance world, Participating Whole Life Insurance. And even then, make sure you have a knowledgeable agent or representative engineer the policy so that you don’t pay too much for your life insurance and end up holding the losing end of the stick.
You only live life once, so get it right the first time and purchase the best life insurance. And never forget that life insurance, according to Andrew Carnegie is one of the pillars of Americanism. Without owning Whole Life insurance on yourself or someone else, you are at a grave disadvantage in building and preserving the wealth that you will need to live out your retirement without running out of money.
Dr. Tomas P. McFie
Most Americans depend on Social Security for retirement income. Even when people think they’re saving money, taxes, fees, investment losses and market volatility take most of their money away. Tom McFie is the founder of McFie Insurance which helps people keep more of the money they make, so they can have financial peace of mind. His latest book, A Biblical Guide to Personal Finance, can be purchased here.
