Thursday, September 29, 2011

Whereas I would heretofore have a headache...

There has, of course, been some legal rigmarole and financial configuring to do with regards to Jeff having retired from the hardware business several years ago. Among the interesting discoveries we stumbled upon following the tricky moves of the so-called “Great” Recession has been the one that nearly tanked the insurance policy that was contrived to enable my brother-in-law to retire his obligations to us.

The problem with insurance policies (and thank goodness I’m not in THAT business,) is that they might have been designed to float on the buoyancy of a good economy, as ours was. Sometimes, if your raft springs a leak, it doesn’t quite totally sink, but you know if you jump on it all bets are off. That’s where we were. We (as in said b-i-l and myself) refigured, cooked up a way to make higher payments (Jeff, after all, is not someone any right-minded life-insurer is going to take into consideration again,) and now have a somewhat smaller raft that floats.

Part of what this means is more stuff to sign, at the bottom of papers with words like “whereas” and “heretofore.” Usually if I squint and cock my head so that my left ear is higher I can come away from reading these documents with something akin to comprehension. If I were a lawyer though, I would get permanently stuck that way which would seem, eventually, to be an unfortunate condition.

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