We plan to post the January 2004 Internet monthly update to our five monthly update websites on Monday, December 29th.
The January 2004 disk update will be processed Monday, December 29th and Tuesday, December 30th.
Disks will be shipped Tuesday, December 30th. You should have the January Update in your office by Friday, January 2nd. Unless you have made arrangements to purchase your diskettes, please return your November disks ONLY AFTER you have successfully installed this December 2003 Update. November disks are your backup in case you should have problems installing the December edition.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Subscribers who are receiving disks can save up to $100 per year by switching to updates by Internet. Please read the last part of this bulletin for complete details. Don't wait for your next subscription invoice to make the change. Compulife will bonus your subscription renewal deadline for switching from disks to internet.
It is hard to escape the fact that more and more of the greeting cards that we receive in the office at this time of year do not say "Merry Christmas". I remember a time when the majority simply said "Merry Christmas" but now it's "Seasons Greetings" or "Happy Holidays".
It's a sign of the times that more and more people are succumbing to the pressure brought by the vocal minority who argue that "freedom of religion" really means "freedom from religion". As time moves on it seems to take less and less to offend those members of our society and more and more the silent majority retreat hoping to end the complaints. Unfortunately that retreat is a slow but certain loss of our right to free speech.
One may wonder what is offensive about "Merry Christmas". What does the expression convey that could cause many to draw away from it? First, it is a Christian expression referring to the mass which celebrates the birth of Jesus. What can be so offensive about the birth of a baby? But He wasn't just a baby, He was the founder of a religion. We must, as the vocal minority chime, appreciate that everyone is not a Christian and therefore we must realize that saying Merry Christmas to someone who isn't a Christian is an act of trying to force Christianity down someone's throat. And how, as the reasoning goes, do we dare do that?
But if free speech means it's free only if the speech doesn't offend someone then our ability to speak freely is going to evaporate quickly. In case you hadn't noticed, there are more and more folks who find things that are more and more offensive about our society and culture. They have also equated "disagreement" with "offense" and expect us to stop saying things that they don't agree with, claiming that these thing are offensive to those who simply don't agree with what is said.
If you think I'm wrong you need to watch network nightly news. It's hard to get through a week without hearing another story of the ACLU suing someone for this or that. And in the spirit of "going along to get along" many try to accommodate these folks without realizing that no matter what is done there will always be the "next thing" which they are offended by. Slowly but surely our freedoms are being steadily eroded simply because those who disagree with someone have learned they can muzzle those people by saying they are offended.
I noticed a year or two ago that instead of Christmas greeting cards I started to receive "Happy Thanksgiving" cards from businesses who no longer send out greeting cards at Christmas. This appears to me to be the ultimate "politically correct" solution to the "Merry Christmas" problem. I believe the rationale is to celebrate Thanksgiving instead of Christmas hoping that Thanksgiving is less offensive. But if the celebration of Christmas is eliminated, as the vocal minority wants, let me assure you that Thanksgiving is not far down on the list of offensive activities. After all, what is Thanksgiving? It is a time to celebrate the harvest and a time to give thanks. But give thanks to whom? To God of course, for the harvest. But what about those who don't believe in God? Isn't Thanksgiving forcing a religious celebration upon those who may not believe in God? And wasn't all this cooked up by a bunch of religious Pilgrims who were Christians?
The point of all this is to explain to you that while wishing you a "Merry Christmas" will offend some, I am going to wish you Merry Christmas anyway.
To my Christian brothers and sisters, who celebrate the advent of the baby Jesus as the gift of God's Salvation, who paid our debt for sin by dieing on a cross, I join with you in giving thanks to God for providing a Salvation so rich and free. I also give thanks that God cared enough about His human creation that He took the form of a man and walked among us so that we could better understand how much He loves us and how He wants us to live.
To those who do not share my views, I wish you a Merry Christmas in the best sense of the season. No matter what your faith, I hope that your holidays are happy and that your celebrations are full of family, friends and good times. I hope you will take some time to rest and relax. I would also encourage you to do something nice for someone who can't do something nice for you. It is the spirit of the season and will make your holidays that much better.
And finally, if during all that you have some time to consider the Christ of Christmas, I can tell you that He made all the difference in my life once I realized why He came and what He did for me.
This is just a reminder that those Compulife subscribers who have paid listings on our term4sale.com website will likely received renewal invoices for those listings during the month of November. The only exception will be those who added zip codes during the last half of 2003 and who have already paid for their 2004 listing.
If your payment is not received by December 31, 2003, your account will be credited and your zip codes will become available to anyone else who wants them. If you decide you do want those zip codes after January 1, 2004, you will need to reapply and they will be available on a first come, first serve basis.
With that in mind, there are those subscribers who have wanted to break into zip codes which are full. These are codes with three listings which are the maximum number listed in anyone zip code. Most subscribers are reluctant to initiate an auction to break into those codes, evidenced by the fact that we have had NO auctions during 2003.
Therefore, if there is a code you were interested in, but was full, it would be to your advantage to contact Compulife on January 5th and check which codes have now become available. Call Bob Barney at 800- 798-3488.
I have recently received calls from a number of subscribers who have expressed thanks for a number of the new program features and capabilities which we have been adding to our software. During our 21 years of service we have always employed programming staff with the intent that we need to improve, expand and move our software program forward. Sometimes there is a lot of evidence of our work, and sometimes there is less evidence of it. Sometimes the work is to the infrastructure of the software to make certain that it is reliable and easy to update. While the result of that important work may not be readily apparent, it explains why Compulife can respond so quickly to rate changes in the market and why our system is as accurate and reliable as it is.
During the next couple of months we will be spending time on projects that we cannot announce at this time. During this time you may see the pace of change slow down somewhat. Rest assured that when the time is right, we will have some important announcements about those changes.
This feature is completed and in the testing stage. We will release it during the midmonth updates in December.
One problem that we have encountered with people doing Internet updates is that we lose track of those folks. People move and do not advise us of their new addresses which means that when we send out their renewal invoice, it doesn't get to them.
The new feature will kick into an automatic application/renewal form as you get close to the end of your Internet subscription. It will let you generate your own application/invoice and make sure you do not stop receiving updates.
While Compulife has not yet received all the "Health Criteria" information for all the companies in our system, we feel that we now have a sufficient sample of the most popular companies, and we can now proceed to expand the health criteria categories not yet available when you click on the "Health Analyzer" option.
The first function that we are adding is "Driving Record". This is the simplest of the three.
The second function that we will add is family history. This is considerably more complex to design and was the most complicated of the health criteria to date. This is because different companies have a wide variety of different rules and criteria regarding this matter. For example, some companies are concerned if there is a family history of "death" due to certain disease/illnesses (before certain ages which vary), while other companies are concerned about a history of the mere existence of those disease/illnesses before certain ages (which vary). Some companies pay attention to parents only while others look at parents and siblings.
The list of diseases also varies by company. Some are concerned about CAD (Coronary Artery Disease), while others are concerned about that and Cardiovasular Disease (CVD). Some are worried about cancer of any type while others dismiss certain types of cancer such as basal cell carcinoma while others are focussed on just certain types of cancer.
Needless to say, we have had to design and create a questionnaire that encompasses all the criteria which apply. This design work is now complete. We think that we have come up with an approach and method that is all encompassing yet simple enough so as to not drive you nuts while answering the questions.
The last function that we will tackle is avocation and hazardous sports where we will deal with pilots, scuba divers, etc. The design for this part of the analyzer is not yet complete.
It should be noted that there will be a further enhancement to the refile option that is not yet functional. Once it is completed, and if you use the Health Analyzer, the program will refile the least expensive premium rate class for the product which is available based upon the health criteria that you have entered.
To go with that coming option will be a "Health Criteria Report" which will explain what premium classes were rejected by the program and the reasons why they were rejected. If the health criteria for that product was not provided by the company, the system will still pick the lowest premium available for the class selected. The Health Criteria Report will indicate that health analysis was not performed for that company/product.
We are slowly moving forward with expansion of our multi-life quotes from 2 to up to 5 people. Progress on those improvements has been slowed by other work which has been more important. As we complete that, work will again focus on expanding to a maximum of 5 lives for comparisons.
Some companies permit a discount for husband and wife when they buy policies at the same time, while others also allow it for business partners. Many companies that allow the discount for business partners will allow the discount for more than 2 partners and so the multi-life comparison button for non-spouse will eventually ask how many clients to include in the comparison. It will give the total premiums for that group. You will also be able to file that group of 2, 3, 4 or 5 individuals into the Pick 12.
Once this function is completed our multi-life comparison option will be completed.
For those who update by Internet, Compulife has gone to great lengths to provide you with redundancy in our websites. Our main website is:
However, we keep another completely separate website, on a completely different server, in a completely different country, at:
Whatever we update to compulife.com, we also update to compulife.us or compulife.cc. If one website goes down, for whatever reason, the other is ready to serve you. That includes both monthly and mid-month updates.
For those doing monthly updates by Internet, we rely on three other websites to supply monthly updates. These are automatically checked and used by our automatic Internet update software.
For those not wanting to return disks there are two ways to eliminate the problem.
1. Switch to obtaining monthly updates by Internet.
Not only will you eliminate the expense and hassle of returning disks, you will save $100 per year in subscription fees.
To switch to Internet monthly updates, go to our webpage www.compulife.com and select the last menu choice "Forms, applications, instruction tutorials, etc." Under the section "License Agreements", the third license is the "Internet Update Endorsement". Print the endorsement. Once you have it, please read it carefully, especially the part where you agree that you have successfully downloaded and processed our "mid-month updates". If you haven't done that before, call us and we'll be happy to take you through the procedure. It's easy.
2. Disk Purchase Program
The other way to avoid returning the disks and the disk box each month is to pre-purchase them for $21 per year ($1.75 per month). Once you do that you can keep them for future reference, throw them away or return them for a credit (once each year) when you are invoiced for the following year. $21 costs you less than mailing back disks each month.