What Other Mutual Whole Life Company Faces De-Mutualization?

What Other Mutual Whole Life Company Faces De-Mutualization?

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 …

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How Inflation Affects Whole Life Insurance

How Inflation Affects Whole Life Insurance

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 …

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Living Balance Sheet: A Review

Living Balance Sheet: A Review

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. …

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Financial Advisors Giving Advice on Life Insurance

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 …

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What is a Life Insurance Dividend?

What is a Life Insurance Dividend?

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 …

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Whole Life Insurance vs. Bonds (Updated for 2021)

Whole Life Insurance vs. Bonds (Updated for 2021)

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 …

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What is Imputed Income on Life Insurance?

What is Imputed Income on Life Insurance?

Imputed income is the recognization of a benefit received for which the recipient did not pay. When it comes to life insurance, imputed income occurs when someone receives coverage through his/her employer where the individual does not pay for the coverage. Internal Revenue Code 61 stipulates most of the rules for imputed income. Imputed income …

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Is IUL Good for Retirement?

Is IUL Good for Retirement?

Indexed universal life insurance (or IUL) can be good for retirement because it protects your savings from stock market crashes. It also has the potential to earn more than a whole life insurance policy. IUL is able to accomplish this slightly higher return potential because it uses index accounts that are linked to the movement …

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Should you Hire a Fee-Only Insurance Advisor?

Should you Hire a Fee-Only Insurance Advisor?

Fee-only insurance advisors provide advice on insurance-buying decisions free of the potential conflicts posed by commissions.  Fee-only advisors receive compensation through a fee you agree to pay them for their work.  In exchange for their fee, these advisors will review the facts of your specific buying situation, insurance proposals you received from agents, and make …

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Premium Finance Life Insurance Problems

Premium Finance Life Insurance Problems

Premium finance life insurance requires the policy owner to get a loan from a bank to pay the premiums on his/her policy.  The strategy works to reduce the net cost of buying an extremely large life insurance policy, and wealthy Americans use premium financing for this very purpose.  There are, however, times when unscrupulous insurance …

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