Life insurance agents often sell whole life insurance policies by presenting the prospective buyer with an explanatory document that projects future values. This document often goes by the name “illustration” because it seeks to illustrate the features and functionality of the product. This document helps to explain not only the features of a specific product but …
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 …
Reversing the process for calculating the payable dividend on a whole life insurance policy is nearly impossible given the proprietary nature of life insurers. This said we can use several pieces of information to at least create an approximation on the correctness of the dividend earned on a whole life policy in any given policy …
Being the life insurance guy often puts me in a place where I answer questions about dividends. Turns out a lot of people have a vague understanding that (some) life insurance policies pay dividends so we often answer the questions: “how do you pay for whole life insurance using policy dividends?” If this is a …
Whole life insurance policies often rely heavily on the issuing company’s ability and willingness to pay dividends. While whole life policies do have considerably strong guaranteed features, the payment of dividends dramatically alters the net value a policy owner can extract from the contract. These dividends play a crucial role in augmenting cash values as …
In 2013, we published our first historical whole life dividend analysis. We were the first website to go beyond just a basic table of dividend data because we knew the typical table wasn’t enough to make any meaningful observation about dividend data. This year, we are updating the analysis process to introduce more advanced and …
As its name implies, dividend paying whole life insurance is a form of whole life insurance that earns a dividend from the insurance company that issues the policy. The official insurance term used to identify a dividend paying whole life policy is “participating” because the policy participates in the divisible surplus (i.e. profits) of the insurance …
Limited pay life insurance is a type of whole life insurance that has a shorter guaranteed payment period than a traditional whole life policy. There are several types of limited pay life insurance policies all with differing guaranteed premium payment periods. Despite these differences, all limited pay policies operate under an identical principle. I’ll spend …
A couple of weeks ago, we addressed a suggestion that whole life focused insurers are more conservative investors who seek out specifically guarantees when they make their investment decisions. We tested this theory with a comparison looking at the investment profiles of Northwestern Mutual (the number one issuer of whole life insurance in the United …
The U.S. stock market just wrapped up one of its worst weeks ever. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped around 17% this week alone. The S&P 500 finished the week down 13%. And the NASDAQ fell 12.6%. All of this comes following additional losses in earlier weeks. It’s been over a month since the S&P …
