There’s no more appropriate time than Life Insurance Awareness Month to ensure your clients’ life insurance policies are living up to expectations.
Reviewing your clients’ life insurance and annuities may be even more important this year than in past years. Life or health changes, economic or financial shifts, poor performing products—any or all of these may be leaving unintended and unnoticed gaps in coverage. What’s different for your clients this year?
Life insurance is an important and often forgotten part of financial planning. Now is the perfect time to discuss with your clients how important life insurance is not just for them, but for their families. Share it now! Encourage those you know to speak with an advisor today.
Who needs life insurance? Well, almost everyone. Purchasing life insurance can seem mistakenly complicated and expensive – but it doesn’t have to be.
Life Insurance Awareness Month (LIAM) is the perfect opportunity to reach out to your clients about life insurance. Whether it’s a life event like a new baby or a wedding or divorce, circumstances change and so does the need for life insurance.
In order to educate clients on the inherent risks of a premium financing program, it is important to “stress test” any plan proposals. Stress-testing may involve any of the following:
- Illustrating the plan using reasonable increasing future cost of borrowing
- Illustrating the policy with a lower than current crediting rate, we suggest using 85% of the current rate
- Illustrating the combined effect of 1 and 2
There are many ways to fund an insurance program. In most cases, the funding source is the checking account of the client or trust. However, what do you do when your client's funding needs outpace their available liquid assets or gifting capacity?
Did you know that many products available today, which you may be presenting to clients and taking applications, must be placed inforce by the carrier on or before December 31st? You can thank Principal-Based Reserving or PBR and the 2017 CSO Mortality Table changes for accelerating year-end business.
After a lifetime of hard work, George Jackson recently sold his business for $100 million. George wanted to celebrate by giving each of his 19-year-old twin grandsons (Jack and John) a special $5 million birthday gift. George has asked his son, Mark, to reach out to their financial advisor for help in structuring the arrangement. Their goal: to minimize the tax implications and ensure Jack and John use the money wisely over their respective lifetimes.
In her work as a policy review specialist for Highland Capital Brokerage and Premier Trust, a dedicated Nevada-based trust administrator, Peg Michails resolves orphan individual life (no agent of record) and trust-based policies. Her goal: to ensure clients and their beneficiaries get what they were promised.
Recent passage of The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) increased the federal unified estate and gift tax basic exclusion amount from $5.49 million in 2017 to $11.4 million per individual and $22.8 million per married couple for 2019.
Our two prior blogposts explored the need for regular and ongoing trust-owned policy reviews and examined methods of valuing underperforming, at-risk policies. This third post explores a potential option when a policy review uncovers a poorly drafted or obsolete irrevocable trust.
Life is change. That’s why as life goals change, life insurance needs change as well. Over time, the original need for coverage — like having young children or providing for income replacement — may no longer matter to clients after retirement. They may own policies they no longer need or can afford, especially if one of the policyholders is in poor health. What’s more, sustained low interest rates and the volatility of equity markets may have drastically affected older policies so that original premium funding levels cannot sustain coverage.