Good Financial Reads: Managing Your Finances During A Global Pandemic

What has changed within the insurance industry since the COVID-19 crisis hit?

• • Most companies are giving 30 day grace period on making payments
  • Illinois put a moratorium on cancelling policies for non-pay.  At this point there is no end date for this moratorium
  • Auto carriers are giving discounts on premiums for the months of April and May because are not driving and claim activity is way down.  The amount of discounts and how it is distributed varies among carriers but it is generally between 15% and 20% of the premium for those months.

It's May (didn't know I was a musical nerd, did you?), and while the market has recovered from its initial free-fall in March, there's still a ton of uncertainty in the air. Will we start to recover in the second half of the year, as the CBO is anticipating, or will the economy continue to stumble? We can't know for certain, as always in the motion is the future, and this uncertainty has led to many questions. Here are a few I've heard, and some of the answers I've given. (Of course, this is not my advice to you in particular, dear reader; take it into consideration, but make sure to apply your own particular circumstances!) 

Buying a house is an intensive (and stressful) process in the best of times. Throw in a crashing economy and global pandemic — and the fact we don’t do anything the “normal” way — and our recent experience got pretty interesting.

Okay, to be fair, the pandemic didn’t dramatically change much about the process of buying our first home, mainly because we were already in the middle of trying to close on it (so we had already looked for and found the property that we put an offer on and the sellers accepted).

NO ESTATE PLAN IN PLACE

• • If you become incapacitated or die with no estate plan documents in place, COURT intervention is required.
  • Guardianship court appoints someone to make your medical and financial decisions.
  • Probate court distributes your assets to your heirs according to IL law.