alternative investments - The Insurance Pro Blog

Indexed Universal Life: Market Neutral?

Indexed Universal Life Insurance Market Neutral

The other day I was part of a conversation with another agent about Indexed Universal Life. The conversation was more of a challenge to my position that, like whole life insurance and current assumption universal life insurance, indexed universal life deserves just as much credit for being market neutral and falling into the alternative investment category …

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055 Strippers and Insurance Agents Aren’t All That Different

by Brantley Whitley

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

(Complete Show Notes Below)

In the 55th episode of the Financial Procast:

ESOPs Gone Wild

The DOL has filed a lawsuit against the California Pacific Bank. It seems that after the bank unwound their ESOP, they violated ERISA law by shortchanging the employees who were the plan participants.

First, we thought it appropriate to offer a high level overview of ESOPs just to make sure that we're all on the same page. ESOP is the acronym for employee stock ownership plan which is just another type defined contribution qualified retirement plan (think 401k, 403b, 457). The major difference being that they employee doesn’t actually contribute anything. All contributions are made on behalf of the employee and in the form of company stock.

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Exotic Investment Schemes are NOT Always Better

by Brantley Whitley

Have you ever met someone who has had the next great investment idea? It may be a really good friend, perhaps someone that you see on the cocktail party circuit or in many cases it’s your friendly investment advisor, insurance agent, stock broker, financial planner et. al.

I’m not talking about the guy who always has the inside scoop on the latest stock pick necessarily. No…I’m talking about the guy who in 1991 had the inside track on how to make a fortune in the Russian telecommunications business. Guess what?? You can be a part of it for only $100,000.

As we’re sort of famous for saying, “That’ll work out good for someone….probably not you, but someone’s gonna make a lot of money”

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Invest in Real Estate? Why not Modified Endowment Contracts?

by Brandon Roberts

Sometimes I just feel like being edgy, and throwing the words invest and Modified Endowment Contract about seems like a good way to be edgy. Of course this so called “edginess” is more a testament of my dork-dom–analogous to my saying, “I know my AGI is >$33,750 but screw form 6251.”

If you got that joke, I think I love you.

But in all seriousness a few recent events played out that gave way to this post. You see, It's been a long time since I thought real estate was a good place to invest. When I was in college I had a professor point out that the 30 year CAGR on real-estate in the United States was under 4%. Yikes! That was before the bubble popped, and let's not forget that real-estate can be super volatile.

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The Coming 401k Bond Blood Bath

by Brantley Whitley

For a while, Brandon and I have been discussing the coming 401k bond blood bath for people who are retiring and have been planning for years to shift their asset allocation to a much more conservative posture. Remember when the conventional wisdom was that during your retirement years you would shift the weighting of your investment portfolio to income producing assets…think bonds.

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The Financial Planners are Turning to Alternative Investments and Life Insurance is on their List

by Brandon Roberts

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, what are money managers and general financial planners (the certified kind) doing to restore faith and peace of mind among their clientèle? The answer is quite interesting.

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