Choosing a life insurance policy for many Canadians is not clear or understandable. At the end of the day, what is life insurance for? It is security for our loved ones. Right?

It is supposed that life insurance is for those with big debt loads, young families, and young careers who want to protect their families. They are being wise and protecting their family incase of a tragedy.

So do buyers who have a lower debt load and an empty nest still need life insurance or is it just for young people? Thinking they are making a financially sound choice, many people stop getting life insurance. They have put their families at risk even though they have saved just a few dollars.

It may not be as costly as you think to get life insurance. Life insurance is much more affordable than it was a decade ago. The ten million Canadians who are in their forties and fifties can get life insurance at very affordable rates.

You can choose from many different policies to protect your family and your wallet as you get older. Term life insurance is going to be smarter, safer, and cheaper in the short term. However, to prepare for long term, you have the choice of permanent life insurance where you can choose from traditional whole life, universal, and variable whole life insurance.

If you want to save money and still keep your loved ones secure, these options will help prepare the future.

With traditional whole life, the buyer is offered the most guarantees. The certainties include minimum cash value and death benefits as well as annual premiums. Most traditional whole life policies are participating, meaning the surplus they earn can be used to grow cash value or death benefits.

The premiums with universal life are really flexible, particularly in the early years of the policy. You can get guaranteed minimum cash value and death benefits along with maximum guaranteed premiums with universal life. Instead of dividends, universal life policies earn interest at a set rate every year.

For the more well-informed risk taker, there is variable life. Though it has the least guarantees, it can be rewarding because it has the best potential for cash value increases. Obligatory annual premiums and guaranteed death benefits come with variable life.

Purchasing life insurance can be difficult, but can be beneficial for your loved ones down the road. Visit www.infoprimes.com to receive great deals and expert advice on life insurance.

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Decide how much you can afford for a home before you shop for it, not after. Sadly, most borrowers have no idea how much they can afford to pay for a home and end up wasting their time looking at houses that they discover, once they apply for a mortgage, are way out of their price range.

If you understand how banks determine the mortgage you can afford by examining your income, amount of down payment and total closing costs, you will have a better concept of this. What your expenses are and will be is another important factor in this determination since the lender will want to make sure you can cover the monthly payment after these other expenses.

What you can afford to pay will be determined by ratios that are based on factors such as income and expense, outstanding debt, amount of deposit and closing costs.

You can try to estimate these costs yourself, or you can make it easy on yourself by consulting with a mortgage professional who will do this for you.

For most people, affording the down payment is the biggest barrier to purchasing a home. People don?t routinely save as much as they used to, so often they will not have any decent balances in savings accounts. We can forget about no down payment mortgages now that the credit crunch in the real estate market has forced lenders to be stricter about their terms.

Assume at least a 10% deposit to buy a home. So, if you are looking in the $200,000 price range, you have to have $20,000 on hand, plus enough for closing costs. Lenders will be happy to give you an estimate of your closing costs.

So let us suppose that you need $25,000 to start looking for a house. Now the lender will ask whether you can afford the monthly payments. You can figure how much you can pay based on income and current expenses if you go to one of the many calculators available on the net, or you can take a simpler route and speak to a mortgage consultant.

The traditional rule is that your housing costs should not exceed 25% of your income. But this does not reflect extraneous credit card debt. They have to make sure you have adequate funds to pay the mortgage after you have paid for your food, utilities, education and other such expenses. A high credit card debt means that you will have that much less available for your basic needs.

Without these additional issues, figure that a monthly income of $6,000 means that you can manage $1,500 in mortgage, taxes and insurance. This is the best way to shop for a house, once you really know how much you can afford to pay for it.

When you are trying to time the best entry point to borrow for your home, picking a time when interest rates are down will save you a lot of money. Those who think rates will increase want to buy now and take advantage of currently lower rates, and those who think they will decrease want to wait until a better time.

What determines interest rates depends on a lot of factors, so knowing what they are and how they behave can help you make a decision. Interest rates are actually the price of money, and just as the law of supply and demand dictates price, the law of supply and demand will influence the price of your mortgage: its interest rate.

The first factor to lood at in terms of interest rates is the inflation rate. And the inflation rate is influenced primarily by two factors. These include the producer price index as well as the consumer price index.

PPI is the fluctuation in prices at the stage where goods are produced. If PPI is rising, this will mean that the cost of finished goods is higher, which mean inflation.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures changes in prices of a given ?market basket? of consumer goods. CPI is more well known to most people because it shows whether the prices we are paying are rising or falling, and by how much. Frequently, to remove some of the volatility of the CPI, analysts examine core inflation, which eliminates energy and food prices from the formula. This leaves what is considered the ?core? inflation rate which is a superior indicator of general prices and inflation.

GDP is the next typically used indicator of how inflation and therefore interest rates will act. The Fed (Federal Reserve Bank-the Central Bank of the United States) is responsible for maintaining the economy on an even keel-not a lot of growth, which will cause inflation and not too little, which may cause a recession. Central banks intervene in the money markets to control the supply of money to slow the economy down or speed the economy up.

The next most important interest rate indicator is the unemployment level. If the economy is experiencing low unemployment, inflation will most likely follow since salaries have to go up to bring in candidates. High unemployment will typically lead to lower interest rates since it means lower wages and consequently lower prices. In other words, increased wages lead to a wage price spiral and lower wages bring prices down.

The prospective home purchaser can help himself by keeping an eye on these indicators to attempt to determine rates. In general, a slowing economy, with high unemployment, means that interest rates will be coming down, and you should hold off on your loan for a while. On the other hand, higher GDP and decreasing unemployment will signal an increase in interest rates.

You have a lot of choices to make in buying a home and deciding upon a home loan, and in today’s confusing loan world, you now also have to choose the index that you want for your Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM).

When we speak of the “index”, we are speaking of the base financial instrument that the adjusting rates will be based upon. Various indices are employed, including government treasury instruments, the Fed Fund rate or LIBOR.

The rate on an ARM is adjusted periodically upwards, or downwards, depending upon the movement in the general interest rate environment, but tied to a specific instrument. One such instrument would be Certificates of Deposit-your mortgage rate would go up and down with the CD rate. An additional feature of an ARM is that there is an adjustment cap, which prevents the interest from moving up or down too frequently, even if the index does; sometimes this can be an advantage if you just adjusted and then rates move upwards. By the same token, if your adjustment is scheduled to take place right after the CD rate increased, you will have that rate for a while, even if the CD rate is lowered in the interim.

There are any number of ARM indices, and they include the CDs, LIBOR and government bonds mentioned. The Fed Fund rate is the rate banks pay to the Federal Reserve Bank for funds. LIBOR is the London Interbank Offered rate, which is the rate that commercial borrowers pay each other for the use of funds.

Which is the right choice depends on your situation circumstances and your view of where interest rates are heading. Adjustable rate home loans that use CDs as the reference rate tend to change more quickly. Adjustable rate mortgages that use T Bills will change more slowly. LIBOR is one of the fastest moving indices, so if you want to take advantage of quickly falling interest rates, this is the one to use.

An interesting, and possibly dangerous choice in interest rate choices is the option ARM, which permits the borrower to decide the “option” of choosing his mortgage payment every month. Of course, there is a minimum, usually the amount of interest, so the lender can guarantee its return, and then the balance goes toward the mortgage principle. Those using this option should be aware of negative amortization, because they may never repay any of the loan if they always choose the lowest amount.

With this dizzying choice in interest rate options for your mortgage, the best idea is to meet with a mortgage expert who can explain all of them to you and advise you best on your needs.

Banks have been cutting their home loan portfolios back, that is for sure, but the careful borrower can still locate a mortgage.

Smaller, community focused banks are still extremely active in the home loan business. This is not surprising. Mortgage loans originated with the old building societies, such as we see each year on “It’s a Wonderful Life”- taking Joe’s depositsto build Bob’s house. Even if they may no longer be called building societies, this focus has protected them in the recent mortgage market market turmoil.

They are actively granting loans to their customary clients and even expanding to absorb the slack where other lenders are no longer active.

While major banks project reduced loan volume in all categories, including mortgages, community banks expect stable numbers in loan volume for single family homes, although no increases.

Community lenders such as this, that may include credit unions and development banks, have had extraordinary success in lending to the so-called sub prime borrower, because they remain close to the customer they are lending to. These companies are not only staying in business, they are making a profit on their loans.

Take, for example, Shorebank, a small community lender serving that city’s poorer community; its delinquency rate is 3.1%, in comparison to the national average of 18.7%. These lenders charge market rates which are higher than the ones available to prime borrowers, and manage their risk prudently. And their goal is only to be profitable, not profit maximizing, a interesting point made by Mark Pinsky, the head of Opportunity Finance Network, an umbrella group for these types of banks. Should we read profit maximizing as “greedy”, a term that has been applied to most of the mainstream lending institutions that are now reeling from the sub prime mortgage crisis?

If you look at the salary of a CEO of one of these small community based institutes, such as that of Douglas Bystry of Clearinghouse CDFI, at $190,000 as compared to that of Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide Financial at $22.1million, you can realize the problem. The location of Shorebank is a modest renovated movie theatre, not an expensively built corporate complex.

These kind of lenders usually remain close to their customer base, and by doing so, they can monitor their portfolio and protect their assets better. Take the program managed by Shorebank that educates its borrowers in energy conservation to save costs, money saved that can help pay the mortgage.