This just out: an article I wrote for Black Enterprise Magazine featuring my ever-so-savvy clients, Earl Davis + Tarita Whittingham, offering a step-by-step guide to lowering your property taxes. Earl + Tarita saved over $3,500 with about 30 minutes’ work. That’s what I call a major return on investment!

Click here for the article and the simple steps to lower your property taxes.

AOL real estate has a great article with 10 very detailed credit card moves buyers and sellers should consider making in 2010. This is especially timely because lending guidelines are tightening (again) and the new Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) takes effect on February 22, 2010.

There are a number of provisions in the CARD Act with significant implications and action points for homebuyers and sellers (most of the latter of which will also be homebuyers soon). One, in particular, is to request credit limit increases – if you qualify for them and need a boost to your FICO score – before the act takes place. Afterwards, the CARD Act will make it harder to obtain an increase.

If you’re applying for a mortgage soon, you might also want to use any accounts you have that have been inactive. Credit card companies are highly likely to close those accounts, in this marketplace, which reduces your debt-to-available credit ratio – a major component of your FICO score. I know this seems like a penalty for being responsible, and it is to some extent, but fair or not, it makes sense to avoid inactive accounts being closed by simply using them and paying the balance off ASAP.

Homebuyers wanting to jump into the dawning Era of Conspicuous Frugality might want to look at the free spending and credit management tools referenced in the article.

Check it out! Get the article, here.

lending guidelines are tightening (again) and the new Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD) takes effect on February 22, 2010.

Over the past month or so, the most frequently asked questions I’ve received from readers have had to do with when it makes sense to abandon their home and “walk away” from their mortgages.

I have watched and worked closely with a number of smart women homeowners as they grapple with their priorities and the financial, credit, ethical and emotional implications of leaving – or staying. I’ve also been up hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’ve been underwater hundreds of thousands of dollars on my own homes.

So, better than most experts, I know firsthand – there is no black-and-white, wrong or right answer that applies to everyone.

To help you process and consider the whole-life implications of walking away from a home, I’ve put together a 13-page white paper called REThinking the Walk Away.

This white paper drills down into:

• what ‘walking away’ actually means (and doesn’t mean),
• the pros and cons of walking away,
• alternatives to walking away,
• the implications of walking away and, finally,
• the decision points that every smart homeowner must take into account when deciding whether or not to walk away from their mortgage.

Click here to download.

The Big REThink

In my world, the biggest news story of 2009 had zero to do with Michael Jackson, Jon and/or Kate, or even the literally and figuratively overexposed Tiger Woods.

Instead, the biggest story of the year — maybe even the decade — in my real-estate-fixated consciousness was The Big Rethink: Americans’ wholesale reconsideration of whether homeownership still belongs in “The American Dream.”

You see, in my business I rethink, therefore I am. My company, my Web site, this column, my book series, my “brand” — all are called REThink Real Estate. Since 2006, I have literally traveled coast to coast and back again (and again) hollering “REThink real estate!” from the rooftops and satellite media tours.

This, all because I became convinced through personal experience that real estate presented the purest opportunities ever to consciously design and upgrade our lifestyles.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the beginning of the decade was that if real estate decisions were made unconsciously, there were lifestyle consequences in store that were just as extreme — in the opposite direction. But I learned this, both through personal experience and through those of my clients and readers.

By the end of 2009, we had all become painfully aware of the collective disaster that the unconscious, unsustainable and unwise real estate and mortgage decisions of even a relatively small chunk of the population could wreak on the entire nation — actually, on the entire globe.

And it was this revelation, this apocalypse (in the sense intended by the original Greek definition: “lifting of the veil”) that might have sparked The Big Rethink. It led many Americans to question whether owning a home was even a good thing to do anymore.

I heard stirrings of this, to me, earth-shattering concept that it might be OK, or even desirable, to rent in perpetuity among the same old disgruntled contrarians (sorry, guys — my perception only) who were cranky (”you’d have to be nuts to pay ‘X’ for a house!”), committed renters for years.

But the vast majority of people who opt in to my life experience, both personally and professionally, are and have always been confirmed homeowners and real estate investors.

As such, I first realized that the national tide of opinion on homeownership was choppy in a non-isolated way while reading an article in the New York Times in August, entitled “A Reluctance to Spend Might be This Recession’s Legacy.” I was expecting the article to chronicle the slowdown in consumer spending, rediscovery of simple pleasures and increase in the savings rate — which it did.

What I wasn’t expecting was a quote from a laid-off patent attorney in her early 30s to the effect that she would be happy as a clam if she never owned a home. That, to me, was a real estate rethink of epic proportions.

Maybe it was simply that the swell of The Big Rethink coincided with my reading of that article. Or perhaps such a bold statement from a member of my real-estate-fixated peer group (young, female, professional, attorney, etc.) was my own personal lifting of the veil. But around the end of the summer, the stirrings of homeownership being reconsidered deeply penetrated my consciousness, and I tweeted: “Homeownership needs to step its game up.”

Owning a home had lost the lure of fast appreciation, though it continues to hold its less-sexy wealth-building characteristics (tax advantages and slow-and-steady value increase). And, on top of that, ownership had become newly associated with the traumas of adjustable-rate mortgages, upside-down indebtedness, foreclosure and even eviction.

I wondered — in the aftermath of this crisis, would homeownership be retrained out of the American palate? You know, like when you go on a whole foods eating plan. No matter how much you loved Doritos, Kit Kats and root beer when you started, after your palate has been retrained to Jack LaLanne’s “if man made it, don’t eat it” standard, the thrill of your former faves is gone.

Would homeownership forever after seem like a trans-fat-laden, illusory thrill that, in fact, threatened the wellness of personal economies of all but the wealthiest Americans?

For some homebuyers, the affordability spawned by the deep decline in value was motivation enough, but that would only be temporary. So, what would motivate Americans to want to own homes once they weren’t dirt cheap to buy?

The answer recently came to me: desire. It’s the wish to own the place you live in and, thereby, gain that much more control over the design of your life.

The National Association of Realtors’ recently released 2009 Profile of Buyers and Sellers revealed that overall, homebuyers cited the desire to own their home as the most common, primary reason for buying.

When it came to first-time homebuyers, the number was even more staggering, giving an indication of how non-homeowners are coming out on The Big Rethink: 62 percent of first-timers said that their primary reason for buying was that they plain old wanted to own the place where they live.

But, after The Big Rethink, the desire to own is no longer that voracious-for-square-feet, grasping, by-any-means-necessary, sign-no-matter-what-the-mortgage-papers-say desperation to own before prices go any higher that motivated buyers during the subprime era. The people who go through The Big Rethink and decide to own are motivated by a holistic desire to be the masters (and mistresses) of their own domain.

An article I read at year’s end chronicled the post-layoff lifestyle of creative executive Catherine Goerz, who is now currently, to quote the title, living “happily on 75 percent less” than what she made before she was downsized. Goerz has intentionally eschewed full-time employment to focus on her newly discovered calling as a documentary producer.

Her new 10-minute short, “RE:Invention” tells the tales of several people who were forced by the recession to do their own big rethink, and did so creatively and to life-transforming effect.

As content as she is with her current trajectory, working temp jobs while aiming to parlay the full-length version of “RE:Invention” into a film industry position, according to the article, Goerz’ financial plans have one primary aim: she “craves her own place.”

” ‘I have this niggling fear that I’m screwed,’ she says. ‘Will I ever be able to buy a home or a car? That’s my biggest motivation to succeed financially: to get my own place.’ ”

If 2009 was the year of The Big Rethink, homeownership has been vindicated, at least in the hearts and minds of those who simply desire it. But when “frugalistas” like Goerz finally do buy, they’ll do as 47 percent of buyers this year did, according to the NAR Profile: make sacrifices. Homeownership might still be in style, but overextending oneself to take part is decidedly passé.

Mood of the Market

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

I went home for Thanksgiving this year. My hometown is a mid-sized burb smack-dab in the middle of California, a little spot of bright red politics, traditional family values and industrialized farming bookended by the uber-liberal intellichic of the San Francisco Bay Area a few hours north, and the sleek, anything-goes polish of Hollywood a couple hours south.

What’s cool in my hometown is Friday-night high school football, Sunday morning church services, and big box store shopping galore. I once heard that the city has the largest number of grocery stores per capita of any city in the country, and I believe it. They’ve got more Wal-Marts and Targets in town than any five Bay Area towns combined, and they’ve got grocery stores inside the Wal-Marts and Targets, too! You cannot drive past a corner or bat an eye without a Super-something staring you down.

Unfortunately, neither can you drive down a residential street without seeing several "For Sale" signs of bank-owned foreclosed homes. At various times in the last couple of years, my hometown has ranked at the very top of the state’s and the nation’s lists of cities with the highest foreclosure rates. If that grocery store stat stunned you, consider this: My hometown had the highest rates of West Nile virus anywhere in the country last year, because of all the foreclosed homes with abandoned swimming pools (read: mosquito breeding grounds) sitting stagnant.

Against this backdrop, my decision to visit Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving — in light of my aversions to crowds, to shopping, in general, and to holiday shopping in specific — was either borderline insane or borderline brilliant. (Minus the borderline on both ends of the spectrum.) On the one hand was the lure of $200 off laptops multiplied by the three laptops I needed to purchase for home and business this season, boosted by the thought that if the local economy was as bad as I’d been hearing, perhaps the crowds wouldn’t be as severe as normal.

On the other hand? Reality. And reality was a store literally packed shoulder to shoulder with overheated people and overbreathed air. This store was so packed that I felt like a quarterback trying to find the hole in the defense in my effort to simply find a vacant square foot for my next footfall. And, of course, the computer section was in the corner of the store due kitty-corner to the entrance — the furthest possible distance from the front door.

It was a 20-minute-long, arduous, but scenic route, and I mean scenic in the most tragic manner possible. Along the way, I saw private security guards forming a human chain around the shoppers picking up their iPods with the ticket they’d waited in line for hours to get. I virtually had to step around and over a woman who had literally passed out in Small Electronics — and the crew of staffers hollering for medical help into their radios.

My husband, about 20 minutes behind me, met up with a disabled woman and her small child, looking for someone to avenge her against the shoppers who had plucked the toys she’d selected straight out of her hands. No joke.

Needless to say, my Dad and I got to the laptop line and learned that the tickets for the few sale items that were stocked had been handed out to shoppers who’d arrived two hours earlier, at 3 a.m. I considered picking up the other high-dollar/high-savings items on my list momentarily, then in one of those life moments where you realize with zero regret that you and your parent might be exactly the same, my eyes met my Dad’s, and we made the unspoken pact to get out of that store as quickly as humanly possible.

And that took us another 20 minutes, in a store where I could normally walk from end to end in two, three minutes max. Twenty minutes in which I realized that there is no item possessed by any store on this planet worth inserting my body into that situation ever again in this lifetime or the next.

While I will never repeat this "experience" again in action, I’ve been revisiting the scene of this crime by-and-against human kindness repeatedly in my head for the past few days. As a behavioral economics inquiry, why were so many people — many of whom are undoubtedly broke — in such desperate pursuit of these things that they were willing to show up at midnight or 3 a.m. or 5 a.m., push and shove their fellow citizens, and even toy-jack a disabled mother right in front of her little girl? How many of these people, I wondered, are struggling with or missing their mortgage payments this month? How many are out of work?

The bigger question I keep revisiting is whether this "by-any-means-necessary, must-have" consumerism is simply the retail version of the real estate lust that led so many of us to buy ever bigger homes as long as we could afford the next month’s payment, on the assumption that down the road we could refi or make more money to keep up with the obligation. And as soon as that question pops up, my mind answers that question with another question, Dr. Phil’s twangy catchphrase, "How’s that working for ya?"

It ain’t. Not at all. I’ve been talking and writing for the last year about the need to return to the overarching aim of our real estate decisions: ostensibly, happiness and a better life. After this Black Friday experience, though, I think it makes sense for us to revisit and refresh our memories as to the ultimate aim of all our consumer decisions.

Holiday shopping is supposed to be all about the vision of a Christmas tree, menorah or other cozy family scene celebrating abundance and love through selfless gift-giving. The scene in that store, however, was all about panic, lack and scarcity — the fear that there may not be enough for me, so I have to claw, shove, debt and even steal toys from a disabled person — in front of the child for whom the toy was intended — in order to get mine.

Do the retailers encourage this? Of course they do. But honestly, they’re just doing their job: trying to churn up business in this bleak marketplace. This is one area where we cannot point the finger at Wall Street, Madison Avenue or any other big, corporate or governmental other. Neither Bush nor Obama, Gingrich nor Pelosi is to blame this time, no matter what you normally believe. The behavior speaks for itself — we simply must do better.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of "The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook" and "Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions." Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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REThink Real Estate

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Q: I fell several months behind on my mortgage and my property taxes when my hours were cut back earlier this year. Fortunately, my lender agreed to modify my loan, and now I’m on time with my mortgage again. Unfortunately, this did nothing for my property taxes, and now I’m about $5,000 behind. There’s no way I can come up with that lump sum on what I make. Do you have any suggestions for how I can catch up?

A: Count your lucky stars that your lender worked with you at all. Your efforts to obtain a modification — and your lender’s cooperation — have definitely put you in a position to recover from the financial trauma of lost income. This is a great time to get a handle on your tax situation.

Mindset Management

While people who’ve never had a financial crisis might assume that someone in your situation is a deadbeat or irresponsible, by now almost everyone has had a financial crisis (or is close to someone who has) and understands that it’s just not that simple. When the money isn’t there, bills don’t get paid, and my experience is that most people in your situation stay awake nights with anxiety when they fall behind and desperately wish they could have stayed current on everything.

So, kudos for taking the bull by the horn and working to get your situation resolved. Two things will be critical for your continued recovery. First, you need to ensure that you don’t fall any further behind on your property taxes.

Assuming your loan modification did not require that you pay into an impound or escrow account for your property taxes, I would encourage you to institute an automatic deduction from your regular household bills account into a separate, interest-bearing savings account from every paycheck for that time period’s prorated amount of the property taxes.

Do not get any further behind — as you’ve seen, those monthly amounts can snowball into a big lump-sum arrearage, and those lump sums are emotionally daunting, as well as realistically difficult to tackle.

Second, you need to make sure that you stay "simpatico" with your lender. Being in default on your property taxes might be a violation of the terms of your loan modification. The very last thing you need at this moment in your career as a homeowner is to have your modified payment jeopardized.

Even more likely than revoking your modification agreement, though, is that your lender will notice the default and simply pay off the tax arrearage themselves. While this seems fabulous, the way this works is generally that the lender pays an arrearage then increases your monthly mortgage payment by the amount it would take to pay them back for the property tax payment in a year or two.

This could be a significant increase to your monthly payment, and could very well negate the savings you achieved with your loan modification.

If keeping your mortgage payment at the lower, modified payment is essential to keeping your home, get very aggressive about eliminating your back property tax bill. Getting current on your property taxes might be necessary to save your home, in the final analysis, so use that as your motivation to get current as quickly as possible.

Need-to-Knows

I see many consumers doing what you’re doing, in assuming that catching up on arrearages of any sort — mortgage, credit cards or property taxes — necessarily requires the full lump sum to be paid at any given time. In reality, everyone, everywhere has been hurt by this recession — your county included! Think of all the property taxes that they’ve lost due to the decline in property values and all the mortgage-defaulted and bank-owned properties whose owners are simply not paying the property taxes.

As a result, most county property tax collectors are happy to work with homeowners who are behind and want to catch up. I work in four different counties, and they all have some sort of payment plan available for homeowners who have fallen behind. Usually, some sort of downpayment and monthly payment paid directly to the county to reduce your balance owed is required. These payment plans tend to require extremely reasonable, low monthly payments, and most tend to put you back in good standing with the county as long as you observe the agreed-upon payment schedule.

Also, you didn’t mention whether you have applied to have your property taxes reduced due to any decline in market value, but if you haven’t, you should consider doing so. In most areas, it simply takes a single-page form you can obtain on your county’s Web site and a few recent data points of comparable homes in your area that have sold for significantly below your home’s current assessed value.

This might reduce your property tax payments going forward, freeing up some funds for you to reduce your arrearage.

Depending on how your state’s tax year falls vis-à-vis the calendar year, your reduced tax assessment might even be applied with slight retroactivity, also potentially chipping away at that back tax bill.

Action Plan

1. Reread the terms of your loan modification agreement to get clear on how your tax situation impacts it, if at all.

2. Visit your county’s Web site and, if it makes sense, apply to have your current and recent property taxes reduced due to the decline in your home’s market value.

3. Contact your county tax collector and set up a payment plan for the back taxes you owe.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of "The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook" and "Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions." Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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Home Sale Hindsight

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Q: I went late on my mortgage payments in order to get a loan modification. My lender did reduce my payments, but not my principal balance, so I’m still way upside down. I decided to walk away, but I wanted to buy another place first with my Veterans Affairs (VA) loan certificate. The mortgage broker told me I can’t qualify because of the late mortgage payments.

I thought I was being strategic with my actions, and asked around and got advice from all sorts of friends and accountants, but it seems like I’ve ruined my chances of getting out from under this place, anyway. What did I do wrong?

A: Well, friend, you appear to have fallen victim to several of your own incorrect assumptions and fallacious lines of reasoning along the course of your decision-making process recently.

First off, you incorrectly believed that principal reduction was even a reasonable outcome to expect from your loan modification. The data shows that just over 1 percent of loan modifications actually include principal reduction.

So, if that was the only outcome of your modification process with which you would have been satisfied, the better bet would have been to stay current on your loan and select another course of action before you impaired your ability to qualify for another loan.

Secondly, you did not keep up on the rapid evolution of loan qualification guidelines. Today, it is impossible to qualify for any sort of federally insured loan or loan that will be resold on the wholesale loan market if your credit report reflects any late mortgage payments within the last 12 months.

Third, you’ve repeatedly and wrongly assumed that you can simply have whatever you want, without accepting that your current situation is the result of commitments and decisions that you made, as in the commitment you made to obtain your mortgage. You seem to be operating under a sense of entitlement to a lower mortgage balance, to walk away and still get a deal for another home on today’s market by trying to pull off a "buy and bail."

Fourth, please consider that your process of obtaining advice might have been misguided. I see so many real estate consumers take their real estate advice from other people who are simply groping their own way through mortgage distress, or trying to get free advice from professionals by giving them a tiny piece of the full picture, asking them a quick question at a party or even writing in to advice columnists(!).

When you are trying to chart out as important and potentially life-changing a path as the one you’ve taken, you really need to sit down and consult with a team of professionals in the relevant areas of expertise who will look at your entire situation, holistically, and with their eyes on your endgame and ultimate life financial goals.

Getting scattershot advice in bits and pieces because you’re not willing to pay for or take the necessary time to gather up a full set of custom, expert advice is really unwise in a situation like yours.

For example, in your situation, I would have urged you to talk with a local real estate lawyer, real estate broker, mortgage broker and maybe even a CPA or tax advisor before making the drastic move of stopping your mortgage payments.

Between them, they might have asked questions and provided advice that provoked you to think about whether you were willing to give up the ability to buy again in the near future, in exchange for the unlikelihood of getting your principal mortgage balance reduced.

One of the hardest parts of obtaining advice from a team like this is that they might very well provide conflicting advice, forcing you to do the very grown-up work so many of us avoid of getting clear on your own values and goals and making tough decisions to keep your actions in alignment with those items — even when the "right" thing to do is less than 100 percent clear. Overall, it does seem like you have repeatedly made the mistake of trying to take an easy way out of a hard situation.

I’m concerned you might be continuing on this path of logical missteps by assuming the "right" course of action is to ditch your current house. While real estate is certainly a unique asset class, homes are similar to other material assets and possessions in that their value varies over time. If you were planning to stay in your home at the beginning of this path and you can afford to do so, you should rethink your belief that you should deviate from this path because your home’s value has taken a hit.

By ditching your home now, you lock in your actual losses on the property, and don’t give yourself and this asset the opportunity to recover the lost value, which it is highly likely to do over time. How long it will take depends on where you are geographically and the other puzzle pieces of your holistic financial situation.

To avoid repeating your past mistakes, I’d encourage you to make a serious project of sitting down with your trusted real estate and mortgage brokers, at the very least, to put in place a plan for recovering your credit and your finances from your personal, but temporary, recession.

Ask them who else you should talk with, and consider meeting with a bankruptcy attorney, who can offer some real tools (with real advantages and disadvantages) for reducing your mortgage debt load.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of "The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook" and "Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions." Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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page 356 of SWHH PDF

By now, you probably won’t be surprised to know that I keep a list entitled Tara’s Collection of Helpful Life Proverbs. I want to share two with you.
No. 17 – From my hygienist, on dental health: You only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.
No. 33 – From my Abnormal Psychology professor, on mental health: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.
So how do these relate to homebuying?
Like your teeth, your new home is an asset you must protect. If you want to keep it, that is. The majority of American homeowners think their homeowner’s insurance policy is all the protection they need. That’s because they are blissfully unaware of how paranoid they should be—there are about six different dangers and pitfalls lurking out there in the world that are “out to get” your new asset. The good news is that you can protect your new home from most of these dangers fairly simply and inexpensively relative to what you have to lose if you do nothing. The biggest cost to you is a modicum of effort and energy, so scrounge up a little, and go this final mile to make sure your hard work in getting your home doesn’t go down the drain.

Misused Equity

Divorce

Unexpected Interruptions in Income

Capital Gains Tax

Death

Disability

The finance fear factor involved in buying or owning  a home has grown particularly intense in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis. Seeing constant news reports about the tragic consequences of bad real estate and mortgage decisions makes it tough for buyers not to wonder, “how can I avoid that?!” If you’re about to buy a home, and you’ve had this exact thought, you’re in luck — learn from their mistakes and position yourself to avoid foreclosure in just a few simple steps.

Think long term. Don’t buy a place planning to sell it in a year. Really, you should only buy if you’ll be comfortable owning the home for at least four or five years. As we’ve seen recently, one year you might be able to sell at top dollar in just a few days, and the next year it might take months to move the same house at a deep discount. If you plan from the outset to commit to the home for a few years, your home and loan choices will be less likely to force you into a financial crisis.

Intelligent (mortgage) design. Take charge of your mortgage choices and make sustainability your goal. Let your household spending plan and a reality-based projection of your income over time dictate how much you pay for your home. Tell your Realtor and mortgage broker how much you can spend on housing every month, rather than letting them tell you what you can afford. That may mean you end up buying a lower-priced home than you qualify for, a decision many owners who have now gone through foreclosure wish they had made back when they had the choice.

Sustainability should also be your guiding force when it comes to the type of mortgage you choose — with so many low-interest mortgages with fixed interest rates and payments available, it just doesn’t make sense to take on a loan where your payment will double in a year or two (or three, for that matter)! Actually, don’t make any mortgage move where your ability to hold onto your home relies on your ability to refinance your home in less than five years — that’s like betting your home on a short-term prediction of home values, and that’s not a good move.

Cultivate a cushion. Saving money hasn’t been a priority of American homeowners for some time now. When everyone’s home was wildly appreciating, there was always cash to be had from equity lines and loans. With no real savings, though, even a temporary job loss doomed homeowners to foreclosure. To insulate your home from foreclosure, start the savings habit and shoot to create an emergency cushion of six months’ mortgage payments and other living expenses.

Get a shredder. Homeowners who used their homes like ATM machines have been much more likely to end up in foreclosure. So, decide in advance to avoid frequent or excessive borrowing against the equity in your home. And arm yourself against the barrage of equity credit offers you’ll get as a homeowner. Be prepared to shred the junk mail that comes before you have a chance to start daydreaming about that Bahamas cruise you could take if you just got a small equity line.

Put a Plan B in place. Income glitches due to a death in the family or a job-stopping disability lead to almost as many foreclosures as mortgage problems. Make sure all wage-earners have life and disability insurance policies in place to keep one unfortunate event from turning into a double-whammy.