Insurance Pro Blog Podcast | Life Insurance and Annuity Insights

Over the years we've seen our fair share of dubious sales practices used by "professionals" to sell the whiz bang awesomeness of cash value life insurance (both whole life and indexed universal life). 

But none as egregious as when we see financial professionals intentionally inflating the rate of return by plugging in an artificially high tax rate in the illustration software. It's done by using a taxable equivalent yield calculation that assumes a very high effective tax rate (north of 50% in many cases).

Obviously, this makes the non-taxable nature of cash values look much better. But it's painting an unrealistic comparison.

Listen to the full episode to find out why we very much dislike this practice.

And reach out to us if you'd like to explore how a cash value life insurance policy might work for you: https://theinsuranceproblog.com/contact

We sell life insurance to a variety of people for a handful of reasons, and today I want to highlight one of the common themes involved when someone approaches us about a life insurance purchase.

To be sure, there are several reasons why someone might want to buy life insurance.  And when it comes to cash value life insurance, the motivations multiply and often overlap a bit.

We have a specific example of one motivation that came up recently, and I think it explains the scenario really well.

If you'd like to talk about how a policy might work for you, please reach out by clicking here.

The internet is rife with hot tips on how to beat inflation.  Since a lot of supposed financial media outlets compete with each other for top billing on Google, the majority of these articles are an incestuous party of underwhelming originality--or even actionability if I'm being wholly honest with you.  

The free-lancers who dabble in finance rounded up the usual suspects and found someone with credentials to parrot something related to using them for the purpose of beating inflation.

You'll find brilliance such as:

-Buy inflation-protected bonds (let's address this one)
-Reduce your spending (kinda already done for you doncha think?)
-Buy stocks ('cause there awesome)
-Buy real estate ('cause 'Merica)
-Buy vegetables (you're going to love this one)
-And budget, budget, budget (because nothing solves a problem faster than simply talking about it)

But none of these hastily written articles mention the inflation bunker that is cash value life insurance.  One of them mentioned annuities but made a vague reference to the eeval-ness of annuities so watch out.

We'll get to why life insurance might just be one of your best bets against inflation, but first, let's take a more serious look at the a-d-v-i-c-e whose omnipresence can only vouge for its legitimacy.

If you'd like to explore what cash value life insurance could do for your please contact us and we'll look at options for you.

We're now well over a year since the COVID-19 Pandemic began, and this means we now have some data that gives us some insights into how the Pandemic is affecting life insurers.  Not surprisingly, when the Pandemic began, we saw ample hand-wringing among life insurance companies.  Many of them quickly put strict restrictions in place regarding COVID exposure as well as a multitude of limitations on new business that sought to reduce general risk exposure.

Thankfully, with a little bit of distance between patient zero and now, many of these limitations have relaxed as insurers gain a better understanding of COVID and the risks it poses to them.  But just because some life insurance companies are sighing in relief to the realization that COVID mortality wasn't as bad as originally speculated, that doesn't mean we're in the all-clear.  Some insurers are definitely seeing a change in claims experience, and this might present a challenge for the foreseeable future.