Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a financial professional. If you take any of my advice just assume that you’ll be sued, you’ll lose all your money, end up in prison, your house will burn down  and you’ll probably get a really mean case of athlete’s foot.

Now that we’ve weeded out all but the fearless, and those not afraid of itchy feet, read on…

A common insurance mistake illustrates the principle – many people have comprehensive and/or collision coverage on their cars. This is a good idea for the first five years you own the car, and if you have a car loan it’s required. The mistake many people make is not reviewing this coverage when the value of the car falls below $5,000. If you look up the blue book value of your car and it’s worth $2,100 because it’s 8 years old and has almost 200k miles on it maybe you shouldn’t be paying $200 a year to protect that $2,100. Now yes, it is possible that a tree will crush your car and your insurance company will give you the $2,100, but the odds are you’re going to do that for 3 years, and pay over $500 for peace of mind that your car was protected if it had been crushed. At this point, rather than feel content, you should picture yourself content and short $500, while your other self could risk the car and be enjoying a weekend at the beach with cash to spare.

The easy way out of this is Self-Insurance. You, as an individual, can use the same strategy used by many large corporations to avoid paying insurance premiums. Every time you get offered insurance coverage at check out (say from that store with the gadgets and the guys in the blue shirts), if you actually consider it, refuse it and put that money aside in a savings account. You can do it on a whiteboard if you want to see it in action, but it’s more fun to actually have the cash sitting in an account. What you’ll find is that just like a casino, over time you will win big. A co-worker of mine has been keeping track and by the time he got to his second big screen TV he had a pool of a couple thousand dollars ready for repairs.

You’ll get to a point where you have more in the fund than most stuff costs, with the exception of your car and house – the things you do need to insure. Everything else is giving it up to the casino.

http://knol.google.com/k/john-wall/marketing/fcs251vg9glf/1

Year 2 of “The Ronis!”, a name that is lame! (Click to see Year 1)

There will probably be one more post of my goals for 2009 but otherwise this should be the last of the 2008 wrap-up postings. Here are the things stood out in the last 365:

Comic Book Movies (Iron Man/Hulk/Batman) completely tore things up, but

GTA IV sold more in week 1 than the biggest movie of that week.

In Entertainment

Doctor Who kept me enthralled and Dearly Devoted Dexter was a horrible book and yet impossible to put down

Flight of the Conchords – Business Time made me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe

Red Hulk

Business Stuff

Manticore automation of email campaigns turned things up another level

Erik Schwartzman’s On the Record is quality listening, and thanks to Chris for turning my photos up another notch

Mahalo Answers is fun and addictive

iNetsoft’s Style Intelligence running with Salesforce.com – I’m just scratching the surface but it’s very cool

In General

A Peaceful Transition of Power – a wonderful thing.

Please feel free to nominate others or tell me why my choices stink. Or better yet, make your own awards and give them a cool name.

Originally broadcast as a series in the late sixties, Patrick McGoohan played a Secret Agent Man who was kept as a prisoner on an island village. You could never tell who exactly was keeping him or why exactly was he was being kept. He said he wanted to retire, was it his own agency locking him down? An enemy spy agency trying to break him? Every week he, referred to only as “Number 6″, would try to escape or the leader “Number 2″ (who was played by different actors as the series progressed) would have a scheme to try and break him.

The original series is kind of odd in that the final episode is very strange and it’s not really clear what the hell was going on at all. Long before “Lost” or “The X Files” this series presented a story that really made you think, and forced you to think long after it was over.

As they say in the Village… “Be seeing you”.

Photo uploaded to Flickr by John Rees