Personal Insurance
Life Insurance
Life insurance is one of the most versatile financial tools that can help achieve a variety of your goals to protect your loved ones, safeguard your wealth, and enhance other planning strategies. Below are some common ways life insurance is used today.
Provide for Your Loved Ones and Those Who Depend Upon You
Insurance provides a lump sum of cash to retire debts or provide future cash flow for living expenses. Whether it’s a spouse, a child, or a parent who depends on your direct or indirect support, life insurance can ensure they have the resources needed if you pass away.
Ensure Your Legacy Without Losing Control or Access to Assets
Rather than giving away your assets or using complex strategies that relinquish control of your assets, you can use life insurance to assure a targeted amount of wealth is transferred as you wish. You’ll be able to use and enjoy the assets you’ve earned over the years. No fuss. No headaches.
Fair Wealth Distribution with Family Businesses
Life insurance can be used to equalize inheritances where it may not be fair or practical to divide up assets that comprise a large portion of wealth such as a family business, land, or real estate holdings. This is especially true for businesses where not all family member actively participate.
Addressing Challenges of Blended Families
Death time division of assets in marriages involving children from multiple marriages can be challenging. Life insurance is often used to ensure the various children are taken care of when there may be practical reasons assets simply can’t be divided up. Employing a trust can enhance the benefits of this strategy even more.
A Hedge for Taxes or Valuations
It’s impossible to predict tax laws decades into the future. Life insurance can provide a source of liquidity at death whether the tax takes the form of federal estate tax, state inheritance tax, income tax, capital gains tax, or a forced recognition event. In addition, if asset or business valuations are higher than expected, insurance can provide additional liquidity for any resulting taxes.
Finding the Right Life Insurance Policy
Life insurance is a complex product, but you don’t need to be an expert. We’re here to cut through the marketing pitches to find quality companies and products that are a good fit for you. As we learn about you and your needs, we’ll find out what’s a good fit and explain why. We’ll give you customization options along the way to arrive at a solution that works for you.
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If I Die Insurance
Term insurance only pays a benefit if you die during the period of time, or term, it is in effect.
More Information on Term Insurance
When I Die Insurance
Permanent insurance is designed to pay a benefit regardless of when you die.
Insurance Qualification
Your health profile and the amount of death benefit you need will determine the best path to qualify for a new policy. Some faster paths may be available that use electronic underwriting. For complicated health histories, we have an underwriting advocacy process called PURE™ designed to negotiate the most favorable pricing for you.
Customization
There are many ways to make a policy fit your life, your needs, and your budget. Below are some of the choices available.
- Insurer
Insurer choice is often driven by the underwriting offer, product pricing, features, financial strength, and desires for insurer diversification. - Benefit Amount
Find a benefit amount that provides the needs for your beneficiaries. For large amounts, policies may be split across multiple insurers. - Premium Period
How long do you want to pay premiums? Policies have tremendous flexibility to fit your needs and may offer discounts for shorter premium periods. - Ownership
Certain policy ownership arrangements may confer tax benefits or provide protective covenants for beneficiaries. - Premium Source
Premiums may be paid by the policy owner, the insured, a trust, or even a business entity. Find the source that works best for your circumstances. - Guarantees
Products can have guaranteed premiums or be subject to certain performance and pricing risks. The choice is yours. - Other Benefits
Products may include provisions that provide long-term care benefits or other features for specialized situations.
Term Life Insurance
Make Your Term Insurance Fit Your Life
The largest death benefit claim we ever delivered was from a term policy. The beneficiaries never asked what type of policy it was. They were just glad to get the benefit.
Term insurance is viewed as a simple purchase where the lowest cost provider wins; but this approach would be a mistake. Term insurance has its own set of nuances that you won’t find on internet quote engines. We’ll help guide you through the selection process to find the product and insurer with the provisions that best protect you and your family at a competitive price. Key considerations include:
- Insurer financial strength
- Underwriting offer
- Competitive premiums
- Duration of conversion privileges
- Contractual rights of conversion language
Conversion Rights: Your Best Protection Against the Unknown
A conversion right allows you to swap all or a portion of your term policy for a permanent life insurance policy during a window of time defined in the policy. You’re able to do this WITHOUT having to qualify medically for the new policy.
It protects against a change in your health and allows you to turn a term policy into a permanent policy. Unfortunately, many insurers are removing these rights from term policies or changing the contract language to significantly weaken the provisions to your detriment. We’ll help you avoid these games and ensure you find a term product with quality conversion rights.
Permanent Life Insurance
Permanent life insurance policies can provide lifelong protection. There are many permanent policy types available. We have access to all types of permanent life insurance policies, and we’ll work with you to find the right fit for you.
Primary Types of Permanent Policies
- Whole Life
- Universal Life (UL)
- Guaranteed Universal Life (GUL)
- Indexed Universal Life (IUL)
- Variable Universal Life (VUL)
- Guaranteed Variable Universal Life (GVUL)
Which product type is the best fit for you will be influenced in part by these five key design elements.
Safety
The degree of protection for your policy benefits and the equity of your policy.
Flexibility
The ability to modify your plan as needs & circumstances change.
Equity
The ability to accumulate cash value usable for flexibility or access.
Certainty
The degree of confidence that policy design parameters will perform as expected.
Premium
Ensuring appropriate out of pocket expense for the coverage objectives and risk tolerance.
Insurance Qualification (Underwriting)
And Why It Matters
You must qualify for life insurance in order to purchase a policy. This qualification process is called underwriting.
Life insurance underwriting includes an examination of your health, occupation, along with financial justification for the amount of coverage. The insurance company will assign a “risk class” for your policy. A more favorable risk class will result in a lower required premium. Insurers view and price risk differently and offers often vary widely across insurers. Thus, it’s important to work with someone who understands the profiles insurers price most favorably, so you achieve competitive pricing for your policy
Advocacy is Critical
In the context of life insurance, advocacy means working on your behalf to:
Match
you to the correct underwriting pathway for your needs and risk profile
Insurers have electronic qualification paths available if you’re pretty healthy and fall within their age and death benefit guidelines. These methods are fast and avoid labs. However, not every insured or even ownership situation will qualify.
For many insureds, it may be advantageous to follow a qualification path that has insurers vying for your business to see who offers the best pricing.
We’ll help determine which approach is right for you based on your unique set of facts and circumstances.
Negotiate
with carriers to get you the best offers
Underwriting, the term used for insurance qualification, is part art and part science. Insurers are trying to infer your future mortality risk based on electronic or paper records which often have ambiguities or conflicting information. You need an advocate who can tell your side of the story, can alleviate the concerns of the insurers, and ensure you get the best possible offer. Our expert team of underwriters knows how to best position you to insurers and challenge them when necessary to push for better pricing.
Avoid
unnecessary tests or gathering of medical records
Insurers see risk differently. They also often ask for different things in the qualification process. One insurer may want the records from “Doctor Jones” while two other insurers don’t require those records. Alternatively, one insurer may want an extra test run on your blood work that other insurers don’t require. Introducing new information can put all of your offers at risk. So part of the qualification process is avoiding unnecessary tests or gathering additional records that could jeopardize any good offers you already have. We watch this closely to avoid any surprises.