I got a text message the other day telling me to schedule my annual flu shot.
Cool.
Except… I already had my flu shot.
But, wait. There’s more!
Ever notice how when you go online, there are these ads that seem to “follow” you around, asking you to buy things you already bought? This is called “retargeting” and it’s extremely common in online marketing. It’s also common in regular offline marketing but it’s extremely common in online marketing because it’s very easy to do and I guess companies think it works.
Anywho, in my weird way of thinking, this is the problem with pretty much all advertising these days… especially when it comes to social media, financial and stock market analysis, and economic analysis.
The majority of what you read, see, and hear is all about what happened in the past.
It is about where you’ve already been, not where you are going.
Because of this, it gets you thinking the wrong kinds of things and makes you more susceptible to biases. For example, I can almost guarantee you that after the next recession, people will flock to insurance and other guaranteed investments. In fact, there’s a term for this phenomenon in economics. It’s called “the flight to safety”.
But people only “fly” to safety AFTER all the bad sh*t has happened.
It don’t make no sense.
In reality, if you’re going to fly to safety, you should do it before the walls come tumbling down around you.
But, this requires planning things out in advance, which rarely happens for one reason or another. In the life insurance business, planning is absolutely required. But, some agents gear up their advertising so that you get “hit” with a hot new product after disaster has already struck. I dunno, I guess that works on a lot of people but really, it shouldn’t work on you.
You’re (really) smarter than that, right?
Anywho, if you want to plan ahead and avoid a for-real catastrophe, the time to buy life insurance is now, not later. I can’t predict the future and neither can you and, most importantly, neither can any of the talking heads on the tell-lie-vision.