If you live near where we live, then for the past month or so you would have seen local homes being ‘decorated’ with fake cobwebs, skulls and crossbones and carved out pumpkins. People have not become macabre. It is just that Halloween is becoming more and more popular in Australia.
Personally, we think the best use for a pumpkin is a nice thick soup. But maybe Halloween can serve another useful purpose for you this year. Let us explain.
We have conducted research into this (well, we looked up Wikipedia) and discovered that the name ‘Halloween’ is a modern version of All Hallowe’en, which means All Saints Evening in some old Scottish language. Hallow means saint, which makes sense when you consider that we describe places like our favourite cricket ground or racetrack as ‘hallowed turf.’ Hallowed, in that sense, means ‘made saintly’, or sacred. So, of course, here in Australia we use it to describe sporting fields.
In the way the old Scots meant it, ‘saints’ does not just mean those particularly impressive people who have churches named after them. It means any person who has passed away. So, Halloween is the night to remember those people who have come and gone in our lives. We are not quite sure when that degenerated into scary spiders and carving pumpkins, but c’est la vie.
But remembering people who have died brings us to our point for this week. Halloween is an annual reminder that every great life must come to an end. Hopefully, for all of us, that end time is well into the future. Unfortunately, though, that is not always how life plays out. While we all know that our life will end one day, few of us know when. This leads, of course, to the old joke: It is better to know where you are going to die, rather than when. At least then you can make sure you never go to a place.
The rate of death remains unchanged at one each. And sometimes an untimely death can have a serious impact on our loved ones. Which is, of course, why life insurance was invented. And why it remains such a good idea today.
If there are people who would suffer financially if you were no longer with them, then you should insure your life. If you would suffer yourself if you could not work (think here of a permanent disability), then you should take out insurance for that as well.
One of the reasons that Halloween is celebrated every year is that those old Scots knew that people need to build reminders into their everyday lives. Without rituals like Halloween, the busyness of everyday life may mean that we forget to remember our lost loved ones.
That’s why we think that Halloween is also the perfect time to think about your life insurances. Many people have insurances which were established many years ago. But our needs change over time: new kids arrive, older kids ‘graduate’ out of our care, marriages begin or end, incomes rise and fall. It makes great sense, at least once a year, to stop and consider our insurance arrangements to make sure that, when the time comes for us to be made a ‘saint,’ our loved ones have one more thing to remember us fondly for.
So, this year, why not expand the slogan and make Halloween a time for ‘trick, treat and talking to your financial planner.’
