I’ll never forget how I was 17 living on my own and I explained to my friends how extended warranties work. I mentioned that my entire means of survival rested on selling as many as possible at Montgomery Wards ”Electric Avenue”. I then gave them basic napkin math of how it works. Clearly my cumulative highschool GPA of 0.34 was too advanced for my circle of friends because they couldn’t understand why they were bad.
A few years later, my circle of friends are then selling a variety of insurance products and they cannot understand why I won’t buy most of those, even though I was an executive at an insurance company.
People do not understand fear, uncertainty, and doubt are powerful tools of mind control.
Just last year a relative was telling me I was a moron being underinsured by his standards and that I should spend an additional $10,000 per year for “peace of mind” with his agency. His eyes glazed over when we wanted to discuss actuarial tables and likelihood and impact of loss. The notion you don’t have to transfer risk if you avoid/accept/mitigate it instead. He just kept pushing whole and universal life, LTC, annuities, and other scams that had the same sophistication of my hustle at Montgomery Wards decades earlier.
Bottom line, people’s cognitive reasoning goes out the window if you can play on emotion which disrupts the brain’s ability to do simple math.
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