Indexed Universal Life Insurance Problems: What the Evidence Actually Shows August 1, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Search for the problems with indexed universal life insurance and you’ll land in a shouting match: caps that get slashed, illustrations that lie, policies that implode, and the big one — eight out of ten IUL policies supposedly fail. …
Indexed Universal Life Insurance July 24, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Private Placement Life Insurance: Why IUL Beats the PPLI Pitch Private placement life insurance almost never arrives casually. It shows up in a meeting with the private client group at a bank or a wealth advisory firm, and it comes with a certain amount of …
Estate Planning July 19, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Estate Tax Exemption 2026: Who Actually Needs Life Insurance Now For most of 2024 and 2025, a large part of the life insurance business ran on a deadline. The federal estate tax exemption was scheduled to sunset at the end of 2025 and roughly cut in half, …
Whole Life Insurance July 12, 2026 · Brandon Roberts The Death Benefit Advantage: How Life Insurance Builds Wealth Short Answer A life insurance death benefit builds wealth by creating a guaranteed, income-tax-free sum on the day the policy is issued — for a fraction of what saving it would take. It is not about beating …
Whole Life Insurance July 4, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Inside the General Account: How Life Insurers Build Your Whole Life Dividend Northwestern Mutual just announced a record $9.2 billion dividend payout for 2026 — about a billion more than the year before, and the largest three-year dividend increase in the company’s history. MassMutual is paying …
Universal Life Insurance Universal Life Insurance Was Built With Rational Exuberance June 27, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Universal life insurance is the product everybody loves to dunk on. The vanishing-premium horror stories, the lawsuits, the agent who swore the premium would disappear and then mailed a letter twenty years later saying it wouldn’t. If your …
Financial Planning June 21, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Financial Planning for High-Income Earners (Beyond the List) Short Answer For a high-income household, the standard checklist — max the 401(k), backdoor Roth, index funds — builds only the growth side of a plan. What it skips is a stability lane: contractual, non-correlated assets like cash value …
Retirement Income Planning June 12, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Life Insurance vs. Annuities for Retirement Income: Which Strategy Wins? If you have money set aside and you are trying to figure out whether a life insurance policy or an annuity is the better way to generate retirement income, the honest answer is that it depends. …
Whole Life Insurance June 6, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Whole Life Insurance Dividends: Easy to Model, Impossible to Predict A whole life illustration shows a year-30 internal rate of return near 5 percent. You ask a fair question: what happens if the dividend scale falls? The software answers in seconds. Lower the assumption by 50 …
Case Study May 17, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Whole Life as Portfolio Insurance: A Windfall Case Study A large, unexpected gain changes the planning problem. The question is no longer how to build wealth. It is how to keep what you just earned without giving up the upside that got you here. Whole life insurance …