A colleague of mine passed away recently.

I know that he had bought term life insurance on his life.

Term life insurances are really cheap. Every wife should make sure that her husband is insured for at least EUR 500,000. And that she is the legal owner of the term life insurance policy, and not her husband.

I hope that my colleague`s widow was not naive. And that she had deposited the insurance proceeds not in one but in several local banks, with each bank no more than EUR 100,000.

There is another trick of insurance companies: they offer the widows to keep the insurance proceeds as a deposit, with relatively high interest.

I hope that my colleague’s widow requested that the insurance proceeds were paid out to her immediately.

Here is a rule: always demand immediate payment from the insurance company. No exceptions.

The widow should probably just put the insurance proceeds in a public bank that is under the government’s deposit guarantee, and let it sit for a year or two.

Widows are vulnerable to salesmen. They need a “cooling-off period” as we have in trademark oppositions.