Brandon Roberts

Impaired risk life insurance is a trickier realm of the life insurance industry. It involves securing life insurance for people who have health impairments or whom have had health events in their life, which place them at a greater likelihood of a shorter life expectancy, and make insuring their lives riskier for life insurers.

The difference between an approved life insurance application and a declined life insurance application can be incredibly and surprisingly minor. However, a decline from one company, can greatly increase the odds of a decline with another, so it pays to do a lot of work upfront and meticulously pick out the appropriate insurer for an individual.

Keep Reading

Life insurance brings a lot of mind comforting notions with it. It helps many people sleep soundly at night knowing that they need not worry about what happens to their family or loved ones if they should meet an untimely demise. But what happens if you recently put your coverage in place and you don’t live beyond the life insurance contestability period?

Do you need to worry about the insurance company’s not paying the claim to your beneficiary? What if you fibbed a little bit about how great your health was? Or what if you find out not long afterwards that you weren’t quite as healthy as you thought you were?

Can the insurance company use any of that against you to deny the claim?

Keep Reading

Maybe you’ve heard this one before, the claim that mutual life insurance companies are better than public life insurers. Of course, the mutual life insurers all think so. But we’re willing to bet that the so-called public life insurers would tell you differently.

So is it true that the non-mutual life insurers are just out to swindle everyone out of their money and represent all that is wrong with American capitalism? Or are the mutual just stodgy companies that have a problem embracing modernity…and the capital markets. 😉

Keep Reading

Participating whole life insurance is a form of cash value life insurance that is often used with a focus on its cash accumulation capabilities and retirement income generating prospects.

In fact, we’d argue quite forcefully that if one wishes to use whole life insurance as an asset, participating is a key attribute to any chosen policy. And every time we reference whole life insurance for this purpose, we assume by default that the policy is a participating policy.

What does participating mean?

Keep Reading

When it comes to evaluating whole life insurance dividends and whole life insurance yields it’s important to keep an eye on the investment results of a company’s general account. The general account is the collection of assets the company holds under management to support most of its fixed insurance products.

Since investment return is one of the three main components of whole life insurance (or any permanent life insurance) design, ignoring a company’s investment performance would be a critical error.

Keep Reading

Indexed Universal Life Insurance is well-known for its ability to generate a retirement income stream, but how can you tell a good product from a bad one?

Most attempts to compare company products fail to find a solid basis for comparison or are foiled by marketing gimmicks.

Keep Reading

A couple of times a month we get a question about term life insurance that I've always found amusing: will you guys write term insurance?

I admittedly chuckle a little bit every time we get this question. I do have to admit, however, that I've not spent an incredible amount of time highlighting this product. Perhaps it's because there's less to say–but then again, there are those who spend a lot of time on this topic. Or, maybe I just have to admit that I'm more fascinated by, and more interested in spending my time discussing the whole cash value life insurance as a low risk asset class thing, but I think I've also allowed myself to appear put off by term insurance by virtue of the lack of discussion.

Keep Reading