Brandon Roberts 
When buying whole life insurance, it’s tempting to want to figure out all the ways to optimize the policy. I don’t just mean the foundational stuff like blending the policy and making heavy use of paid-up additions–but also the bigger picture stuff like “when should I take a loan,” “what’s the best amount to put …
I have sold a lot of life insurance over the years–whole life especially. I now have policies on the books that span well over a decade and this gave me a chance to observe how things unfold with these policies over time. Using that experience, I thought it might be useful to discuss the things …
Life insurance agents often sell whole life insurance policies by presenting the prospective buyer with an explanatory document that projects future values. This document often goes by the name “illustration” because it seeks to illustrate the features and functionality of the product. This document helps to explain not only the features of a specific product but …
A fight rumbles within the life insurance industry about product selection and this often results in some agents pledging their allegiance to a specific type of life insurance. While both parties find value in the use of cash value life insurance, they disagree quite aggressively about which type of cash value life insurance is appropriate. …
With the recent news that Ohio National Life will demutualize and become a stock-owned subsidiary of a Canadian insurance holdings company, we unsurprisingly received questions about the probability of other mutual life insurers taking the same action. This is an understandable question, as current and future policyholders try to gauge the risks they face in …
With inflation discussions ramping up and the Fed appearing open to a new policy on inflation metrics, we wanted to address the topic of its impact on insurance. While there is no evidence today that exceptionally high inflation is headed our way, we might see moderately higher price level increases versus the past several decades …
Living Balance Sheet® is a financial planning platform created by the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Guardian makes the software exclusively available to its career salesforce. Living Balance Sheet purports to help both individuals and business owners organize their financial lives, uncover uncommon knowledge, and provide correct advice that traditional financial planning often gets wrong. …
Sometimes you see or hear about rules and you might think “man I’d like to know the story that led to this.” Within the financial services industry, we have lots of rules. Rules that are intended to protect people from unscrupulous salespeople and also rules to help protect people from themselves. We have rules about …
A life insurance dividend is a non-guaranteed payment from the insurance company to the policy owner representing profits the company earned during the policy year. Insurance companies often view dividends as a sharing of the surplus created by their insurance activities among policyholders whose insurance contracts generate profits beyond the insurer’s expectations. A dividend also …
Back in 2015 we published this blog post detailing a scenario looking at whole life insurance as an alternative option to buying bonds. The details for the individual who approached us included a desire to invest a sum of $500,000 into bonds, so we looked at how we could best deploy that cash into a …
