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Last night the dog woke me by throwing up on the bedroom floor at 2AM.  I think he has a stomach bug, but I was up and I had a hard time getting back to sleep.  It was storming pretty loudly and my mind drifted, as it sometimes does, to imagining Very Bad Things.  I started to think about how bad the roads are in the bad weather and what I would do if something ever happened to my husband.

Being a financial planner, this is not a new line of thought for me.  I’ve been trained to always think about worst case scenarios, to plan for them, so it’s a road I’ve gone down many a time before.  Unfortunately, in our case, my husband doesn’t have any life insurance.  It’s not that we haven’t tried!  He’s just not insurable, at least not affordably so.  For now we just have to hope for the best and plan for the worst.

So in the middle of the night, I started thinking about how I would have to find a full time job immediately.  Maybe I could find a job that would pay the mortgage, but it would require some major juggling.  I would end up having almost nothing left over for the rest of my expenses.  But I would never want to sell the house that we had worked so hard to get.  These are the crazy things I think up in the middle of the night!

The sad fact is that such an event would be financially devastating for me.  I would also have to give up many of my other financial goals.  Forget about saving for retirement or for the kids’ college funds, I’d barely be able to pay the bills.

On the bright side, I have life insurance.  I was easily insured and we took out a perfectly fitting policy for a woman as irreplaceable as I am.  If anything happens to me, Dave can pay off the mortgage and still send the kids to college while he forever mourns the loss of his perfect wife.