Life Insurance for the Family

    Once you have decided to purchase life insurance you may wonder if you should also purchase policies for immediate family members.  In answering this question it is important to remember the only purpose for term life insurance and the primary purpose of permanent life insurance is income protection.
     So in that case of a spouse this question is often very easy to answer.  If your spouse also works you need to protect his or her income as well.  If you think about the problem a little further, you will find that even in the case of a full-time homemaker, there is a reason to buy a policy.
    This is because the death of the homemaker will affect the primary breadwinner's disposable income.  Money would need to be used for child care expenses, additional time would need to be taken off of work which could affect future raises or salary, and either more money or time would need to be spent on day-to-day upkeep of the home and meals.  So, in case of a full-time homemaker, you are not directly replacing income with a life insurance policy, but you are protecting yourself against future expenses that would be incurred if the homemaker passed away prematurely.

SelectQuote Review Comment Spam

    Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, I have noticed something quite strange.  I have gained a massive number of inbound links recently, despite doing nothing special to gain them.  It appears the vast majority of them actually came towards the beginning of this month, and are just being counted by Google now.
    The majority seem to be from comments on blogs.  They are very generic comments with incorrect grammar. The comment also never varies, nor does the link text.  So I suspect automated software is being used.
    The question is, by whom and for what purpose?  I didn't pay for any SEO this month, and this isn't the sort of the link building I would wish to employ.  Where are I have posted a comment myself, I always reference something mentioned in the article.  It just seems polite.

Online Term Life Insurance Quotes

    Any quote you receive online for term life insurance is merely an estimate.  It may not even be a particularly good estimate, depending on how many questions you answered.  And no online quote sites vet the potential applicant as well as the actual life insurance application process.
    Remember, when you buy term life insurance the insurance company is essentially placing a bet that you will not die within the length of the term.  So when you complete an actual application, that insurance company goes to great lengths to understand exactly what kind of risk they're taking.  In most cases you will need to get a medical exam.  Issues may pop up during this step that can change your rate.
    Even if nothing pops up during the medical exam, any potential health issues will be delved into in much greater detail than they were with your online quote estimate.  For any chronic health issues you will go into detail on what medications you're taking, how much medication, how bad the issue is, did you miss any work because of that issue, and so on.

Term Life Insurance

    Term life insurance is a cheaper option than permanent life insurance.  Your rates are guaranteed for the term of the policy, which is typically 10, 15, 20, or 30 years.  Normally you would carry the policy only for the length of this term.  The rates are cheaper than with a permanent life insurance policy because there is no cash value for the policy, and the insurance company has limited their liability.
    Essentially, the insurance company is making a bet that you will not die within the length of the term.  If you do not die within the length of the term, the insurance company is out no money at all.  So with a term life insurance policy you are buying pure protection.  You would buy a policy with the term sufficient to cover the years that you expect to have people depending upon your income.

Designing for Software Reuse

    At SelectQuote Insurance, adding a new carrier was a process that took many months.  There were many reasons for this, but they were not good reasons in my piece of the puzzle.  I was designing software that would take a sold policy in XML format and send off to the insurance carrier to fulfill.  Each carrier did things slightly differently, but I wanted to reuse code across all of them.  Here is how I approached this problem:
    Different carriers had some different requirements.  A few wanted near real-time notification of a sold policy, but most did not.  Most preferred a file delivered on the schedule.  Due to real time communications not being a requirement, a message queue was not needed.
    I wanted to do my part such that it would be a purely administration task to add new carrier for my piece.  No more expensive one-off development for the hand-off made at the time of sale.  So, I needed to identify the parts that would vary and break them out from the simple server that processed these sales requests.  I would put anything carrier specific into config files that could easily be modified by non-programmers.