5min chapter

BetterWealth with Caleb Guilliams cover image

The Complete Guide to Overfunded Whole Life Insurance | Garrett Gunderson

BetterWealth with Caleb Guilliams

CHAPTER

The Benefits of Saving Money and Exploring Life Insurance and Bonds for Retirement

This chapter explores the advantages of saving money instead of investing, and examines the potential value of life insurance and bonds for retirement planning. It also emphasizes the importance of entrepreneurs and investors considering life insurance as a secure place to store short and medium-term funds.

00:00
Speaker 2
And what time is it there right now? It's a little after 7 in the morning. And how long have you been there, and where are you heading next? In
Speaker 1
China, I've been walking for a bit over two years right now, and I'm walking north towards the Heilongjiang Black Dragon River, or the Russians call it the Amur, the border between China and Russia. And the town that you're calling in from today, how long have you been there? Just overnight, because I'm walking every day. So we're talking about maybe, what, 12 hours, something like that. Got in last evening.
Speaker 2
Wow. So every night it's somewhere different.
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's most of the time. I do pause the walk on occasion for longer periods,
Speaker 2
both to rest but also to do my work to write. Well, you're 10 years into this remarkable journey, retracing the migration pathway out of Africa that the first humans took tens of thousands of years ago. And you've been retracing this pathway as our ancestors did, walking at three miles an hour at the pace of which you've called a distinctly human tempo, which I love the phrase. And I imagine you've been asked this question a lot, but I guess I need to ask it as well, which is what prompted you to embark on this journey? And perhaps more importantly, why did you choose to walk? I
Speaker 1
had been working for a number of years internationally as a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Tribune based in Africa. And my beat actually was mainly Africa, but global because I got sucked into war reporting in Central Asia and the Middle East as well. And after, I don't know, about nine years of doing that continuously, the combination of the implosion of the print media world in the US and also just kind of having reached a point in my life when I thought that I was looking for new challenges, new ways to tell stories, ways that might get closer to the bone of meaning at an international level. I came up with this idea of combining science with storytelling and following the footsteps of the first anatomically modern humans, people who look like us, who left Africa anywhere between, you know, 70 to 120,000 years ago and began walking across the planet, dispersing across the continents. And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it's been kind of a giant, kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected, not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I've found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That's basically the premise of this. It's a listening project where destination almost always is another person.
Speaker 2
And
Speaker 1
the destination is also, as far as I understand it, the tip of
Speaker 2
South America in Patagonia. And that's ultimately where you want to end up. When you set out, how long did you think it would take you to get there? Yeah,
Speaker 1
based on a just a rough calculation, I think literally on the back of a napkin in a restaurant in Chicago, I thought it might take about seven years. If I walk at the average pace that a human adult walks, which is about three miles or five kilometers an hour, I did kind of thumbnail math and it came out to be about seven years with a route that spans about 24 000 miles from the horn of africa as you mentioned to the tip of south america and why the tip of south america because it just happens to be a convenient conceptual finish line for a walk that's hoping to kind of mimic the first human migrations. And scientists tell us that the tip of South America is one corner of the continents where
Speaker 2
our ancestors ran out of new horizons. But it's taken you 10 years to get to China. And how long do you think it'll take you to get from where you are now down
Speaker 1
to South America? Yeah, it's very, very difficult to predict, you know, so much for the back of the envelope schedule, right? But, you know, who's counting at this stage? The walk has become my life. If geopolitics work out, if, you know, the weather works out, if my knees hold out, maybe another three, four years of walking. It depends on a lot of variables. Yeah, it's a very, it's an art, not a science, I've discovered, this
Speaker 2
walking gig.

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