Winning the Life Insurance Game: How You Can Get Good Protection and Still Save Money

John Marston was a federal civil servant in Ottawa.

Dr. J.J. Brown was born in Alberta in 1916 and raised in Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto he went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale. During his varied career he has been a university English professor, a journalist, and a management consultant. Although he came late to the business world, he is now a self-made millionaire — achieved, he says, by following his own advice published in his two previous books:

Life Insurance: Benefit or Fraud? (1964) and Start with $1000: Do It Yourself Investing For Canadians (1982). After living in Monaco for 13 years, Dr. Brown now lives outside Montreal on a working farm.

Dr. Brown became interested in life insurance when he was a young college teacher and starting a family. He was struck by the wide difference in prices quoted for the same level of protection in the various policies he examined. Not wanting to tie up interest-earning money, he decided to buy an inexpensive term policy and put the difference between his premiums and the more expensive “permanent” policies into his own savings plan. Within ten years he was self-insured and could have dropped all his term insurance; his heirs would have been protected by his savings alone!

Dr. Brown, in his engagingly frank book, tells how to choose term insurance, where and how to make the purchase, and how to counter the arguments of an insurance salesman with his eyes on a larger commission. Along the way, he takes a controversial and rather disturbing look at the life insurance industry as a whole.

This book is a “must” for those who are considering a life insurance policy or those who feel they can improve the policy they now have. Your reviewer can only wish that he had read this book when he was younger!