Diversification is a term so deeply intertwined with traditional financial/investment advice that we often think of it as infallible. If you want to sound intelligent, or at least appear reasonably knowledgeable, make the recommendation that one carefully work to diversify his/her portfolio and there’s a good chance your advice is impervious to criticism. For the …
There’s no secret that continuously low interest rates cause a struggle for life insurers and this can have a negative impact on insurance products that accumulate cash value. However, lower market interest rates negatively impact all financial tools that use fixed interest rates as a savings mechanism–think certificates of deposit, bonds, and money market accounts. …
When purchasing whole life insurance, the buyer makes a long-term commitment to a strategy and–to a slightly lesser degree–an insurance company. This notion appears very simple on its face. It makes sense and we can follow the logic pretty easily, or at least assume we can. But a lot of people struggle with the inter-temporal …
Last week, we discussed the results one could get from indexed universal life insurance from 2001 to 2010. We also looked at how this type of policy performed if the market returns from this time period were repeated over and over again every 10 years. We wanted to evaluate how IUL behaved during a sustained …
The Street.com reported early last week that the Bank of America price to normalized earnings ratio indicates a negative 10-year return for the S&P500. This is the first time the metric has made such an indication since 1999, and we all know how that played out. Does this mean the S&P 500 is doomed for …
Whole life insurance dividend season is right around the corner. During this time, major life insurers who issue whole life insurance will announce the dividend scale for 2022. For most of these insurers, they will mention the dividend scale, which is a cryptic datapoint often misused by agency marketers as well as insurance agents in …
Following up on the Ernst & Young piece about incorporating whole life insurance and annuities into a retirement plan, we noted that we generally agreed with the observation EY made about whole life insurance and annuities being good substitutes for bonds. We’ve held this belief for a long time. But we should quantify what makes …
A proposed Bill in the House of Representatives seeks to put new rules and limitations on IRA’s as well as traditional qualified retirement accounts. This Bill seeks to raise revenues for various government programs in the name of ending a decade’s old practice of “subsidizing retirement savings once account balances reach very high levels.” The …
Some questions came up following last week’s discussion about Ernst & Young’s analysis on various retirement strategies. The gist of a handful or so of these questions focused on the buy term and invest the difference scenario, basically did the hypothetical couple continue to pay term insurance premiums into retirement? We don’t know the answer …
Ernst & Young published a study this year that speaks very favorably about permanent life insurance and annuities. The TL:DR version of the 18-page reports is that when they incorporated whole life insurance and annuities into a retirement plan, they increased both retirement income and “legacy value” for the hypothetical retirees. So should we rush to …
