IPB 041: You Naughty, Naughty Life Insurer

Today we are revisiting something that has popped up a few times over the years of writing and podcasting. But our take is a bit different and the focus of this episode follows suit.

Our discussion revolves around universal life insurance. And no, we're not hopping on board the media frenzy that wants to adopt a scorched Earth policy for every universal life insurance policy ever sold.

Nor are we lampooning every company that's ever issued universal life insurance.

In fact, as those of you who've been hanging around for a while already know, we sell a fair amount of indexed universal life insurance ourselves.

But…

Recently (in the past year) there have a been a handful of companies that have announced an increase in expenses to certain blocks of their universal life insurance.

Now, these companies have always had the contractual right to do so if necessary. It's just that it's never happened on widespread basis among several companies at the same time.

The most common reason that's being given for expense charge increase is the prolonged period of low interest rates that we're experiencing here in the United States.

That seems plausible…right?

And we can go along with that to some extent.

However, recently the New York Times published an article that exposed some other things that we consider to be bad behavior. And because of that, we felt the need to open this discussion once more.

Here's a link to the article from the NYT to provide you with some context.

 

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