Northwestern Mutual is a large mutual life insurer well known for it’s financial stability and smug career agency sales force. Another thing the “Quiet Company” is somewhat well known for within the industry is its not so quiet approach to brandishing about its latest investment moves. A few weeks ago we learned that Northwestern now …
Bill Gross of PIMCO, the authority on bonds (or so they say) announced earlier this month that the days of investing in equities for the long run (you know the sales slogan of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Edward Jones, and company) is over. Now, does it surprise us that the head of the the largest …
Whole life dividends are a commonly misunderstood topic. This is due in large part to the sometimes intentional convoluted nature of whole life insurance. That’s not an attempt to knock it down. Whole life insurance is certain a powerful and worthy insurance contract for your financial needs, and as an asset it certainly complements portfolios as …
We’ve been hammering the alternative investments point pretty hard lately, and this is because the financial services industry is abuzz about what to do with its tarnished image for cuddling up with the main stream stock market for so long and and now being accountable for it’s general lack of reliability to the average investor. So, …
Let’s start with a brief discussion of modern portfolio theory (MPT) just to make sure we’re all on the same page. To avoid a less than exciting academic foray into MPT, I’ll provide a basic definition. Basically, the theory is that individual investment (a particular asset i.e. stock or bond) selection should not be …
Life insurance agents love to fight over meaningless figures in an attempt to inflate the importance or attractiveness of their products. Truth is, current facts and figures aren’t going to matter all that much. I’ve mentioned before that design is super crucial, and I’ve also hinted at the notion that there are core attributes that …
Spring is here, time to enjoy warmer days (if you’re with me in the Northeast), blooming flours, and a fight between a so called financial educator who hustles a selling system to insurance agents known as Bank on Yourself and a fee based financial planner who is pretending to be a consumer/journalist. Here’s the story. …
Now that we know the basics of indexing, we can dive into a much more interesting topic: Does it work? We’re going to use a hypothetical contract (it’s actually a real contract from which I have borrowed heavily, but we won’t name names) where there is a minimum interest rate of 2% per year and …
For several decades insurance companies have been using an approach to determining credited interest rate that is known as indexing. It’s a practice that has had it’s detractors (yours truly for a little while) and has been a method that has been used for good an evil by well educated and unscrupulous agents respectively. Today …
