Insurance Pro Blog Podcast - The Insurance Pro Blog

Bond Prices and YTM: How Interest Rates Affect Your Investments

Understanding how interest rates affect bond prices and yield to maturity

Main Takeaways Yield to maturity (YTM) is a way to determine how much money you can make from a bond if you hold it until it matures. YTM considers the bond’s price, coupon rate, and time to maturity. YTM is important for investors because it allows them to compare the true yields of different bonds, …

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Wealth Building Opportunity

by Brandon Roberts

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While most financial advice is heavily focused on maximizing return while minimizing fees (and this perhaps is one of the reasons so many people fail long term in their financial plan) I'm going to take time today to introduce a concept that is by no means new, but one of those golden little nuggets that could dramatically change the way you look at financial matters through the lens of your personal self worth.

Because SOPA and PIPA went down a ball of flames I'll post the following picture to illustrate what today's post will be all about. Not, of course, before acknowledging that it's not my original work and noting that you can purchase it directly from despair.com (I haven't started selling ad space; I'm not getting paid for this, FYI)

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How the Fees Destroy Indexed Universal Life Insurance

by Brandon Roberts

We’ve long argued that many of the scare tactics used to dissuade people from universal life insurance products are very heavy-handed. The “evidence” exists mostly as anecdotes concerning “I know someone who knows someone who” once owned one of those products and bad things happened. For the most part, bad things involve a requirement to contribute additional …

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Save Money: Borrow from your Whole Life Insurance Policy

by Brandon Roberts

With the Fed’s ongoing battle with inflation, we’re now seeing interest rates that haven’t existed in a few decades. Many of us can’t remember a time in our adult lives when the cost of money was so high. Not surprisingly this is forcing some changed behavior when it comes to borrowing money. We started the …

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Get Inflation Beating Retirement Income with Whole Life Insurance

by Brandon Roberts

Whole life insurance can play an important role in your retirement income planning. This statement might go against the grain of advice you see offered by investment salespeople, but I think we’ve displayed ample examples over the past decade that whole life insurance not only works as a retirement income tool, but it accomplishes the …

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Sounding the Alarm on Sounding the Alarm on Indexed Universal Life Insurance

by Brandon Roberts

Back in July of this year, Forbes published an article that sought to “Sound the Alarm on Indexed Universal Life Insurance.” Here’s the article if you wish to reference it. The article, like all the others that came before it, makes multiple misstatements and peddles a lot of half-truths about universal life insurance. We’re going …

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De-Risk Your Portfolio with Whole Life Insurance

by Brandon Roberts

We had a really good run with the stock market over the past 10+ years. It seemed like the market was on a non-stop race to higher and higher levels. In fact, many hobbyist investors made unimaginable fortunes by launching blogs and doling out investment advice that largely parroted the long-standing ethos of the now …

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Why Does Universal Life Insurance Have Such Low Guarantees

by Brandon Roberts

When looking at universal life insurance–especially in the context of its ability to accumulate cash value–and comparing it to other life insurance products like whole life insurance, people often note that it appears to have much lower guarantees. In fact, here’s an excerpt from an indexed universal life insurance proposal that highlights said low guarantee:Now, …

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Rate of Return

by Brantley Whitley

I’ll be honest with you—writing this post makes me feel a bit like Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie “A Few Good Men”. Remember when Nicholson is being questioned by Tom Cruise in the most memorable scene from the movie and Cruise is demanding the truth? Nicholson replies, “You can’t handle the truth!” So, what …

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Universal Life Insurance Expense Breakdown

by Brandon Roberts

Universal life insurance is characterized by its flexibility and transparency of expenses. Unlike whole life insurance, where expenses operate under the cloak of proprietary information, we can easily call up the expense breakdown of universal life insurance policies and see exactly where the money goes. For universal life insurance policies, expenses fall into four main …

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