Under the Bed

My mother died recently. She was never the sort of person to have things like life insurance, and, because she lived with us for the last 22 years, she had no need of house or car insurance (she gave her car away one day to a young man who had his eye on it!). Furthermore, she believed in the principle of sowing riches in heaven, and we are still getting what she rather ironically called, ‘begging letters’, from the large number of the charities she had donated to, in small amounts, for many years.
She kept telling us she was giving us all her money while she was alive, and that there wouldn’t be any inheritance. We were happy with that: she was one of the most generous people I’ve known.
However, we discovered, after she died, that she had quite a large sum of money under the bed (literally in a drawer under the bed), the sort of amount most people don’t believe in keeping lying around. And on top of that, her bank account had more than enough in it to pay for her funeral, something she always said would be the case. We were very grateful that the money was there. We could have covered the costs, but it would have reduced the money we had considerably. Funerals, even for little old ladies who would sooner not have one at all (!), don’t come cheap.
We were fortunate too, I guess, that she didn’t have a long spell of sickness before she died. Covering those sort of medical costs can quickly reduce the income – especially as I’ve only got back into full-time work after being unemployed for around six months.
Insurance portal online – normally known as the rather more mouth-filling insuranceportalonline.com – is one of those sites where you can get quotes for the three basic types of insurance, life, house and car. It’s a nicely laid-out site, with good, clear guidelines to what insurance is and isn’t, and, apart from one typo (‘frequent asked questions’) on the bottom of every page, is easy to follow. They don’t do medical insurance, but that’s okay. They’ll have enough on their plate doing the other three!
I don’t know whether it was their site, or my browser, but on their frequent asked questions page, the text suddenly changes from the normal small size they use to a different font (the equivalent of moving from Times New Roman to Ariel in a different point) and the lines are sitting partly on top of each other. An eye-catching effect, but probably not an intended one!
Disclosure statement Mike Crowl also writes here