I’m 28 and I don’t have any life insurance. For many people, they don’t begin thinking about life insurance until they start a family and I’ll be no different. While we don’t plan on starting a family in another year or so, it’s important to learn things before you need it (before emotion and time pressure begin affecting judgment) and today I spent some time looking at life insurance.

I’m not an insurance professional and everything I wrote in this article is simply my opinion. I understand that I may have made some mistakes or misunderstood some things, so take what I write with a grain of salt. Insurance can sometimes be a confusing topic and I, like many of you, am learning it as I go along. If you do see anything inaccurate, please let me know so I can fix it!

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Oooooh yeah, you didn’t think I could let a Your Take go by after the uproar over AIG paying out their bonuses to the very division that caused their financial malaise, did you? Well, I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I’m curious what you all think of the situation and whether the public outcry was unfair or justified.

To recap, AIG paid out $165 million in contractually obligated bonuses to executives in the Financial Products division. The public, and subsequently the congressmen and women, were upset because AIG received billions of dollars in bailout funds to prevent a bankruptcy. People protested outside AIG headquarters in New York, Congress grilled CEO Edward Liddy, and Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert made light of it nightly on their shows.

If you are eager to carry a pitchfork, I invite you to read this letter from from former executive vice president, Jake DeSantis.

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It’s absolutely insulting that AIG spent $443,343 on a retreat just days after the Feds bailed out the company with a $85 billion infusion that sucked 80% of the firm away into the Federal abyss.

It’s my personal opinion that C-level executives are overpaid by the conventions of mere mortals but the reality is that their salaries and benefits are the result of what the market will and can bear. Goldman Sachs CEO earned $74M last year, Lehman Brothers chief Richard Fuld defended his $71.9M payday (it wasn’t as much as before the bankruptcy though!), and ex-CEO of Bear Stearns James Cayne earned $49.31M over the last two years. It’s an ungodly sum of money, especially for companies that are either dead or on life support, but that’s how the game is played. You take the heat with one hand and the cash with the other.

What AIG did? Spending nearly half a million on a retreat at the St. Regis Report in Monarch Beach? That’s like someone spitting in your face. If I had any business with AIG, I’d seriously reconsider it.

Rock Out With Your Bailout [The Smoking Gun]

Everyone’s been focused on brokerage failures and bank failures lately, wondering what happens and who backs them in the event of a failure… that is until we learned that AIG (American International Group) was in serious trouble. This begs the question very few have asked before, what happens if my insurance company fails? The quick answer is that most states have a guaranty that will back the fund up to a certain dollar amount.

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