Life Insurance Review and Rescue

Life insurance is a very important and misunderstood tool. It can increase the value of other investments, reduce volatility in a portfolio, secure your business or family, and even help create tax free retirement income.

Most permanent life insurance policies have a number of moving parts, from interest crediting rates and dividend rates to internal expenses and mortality costs. Changes in any of these or other factors can cause your policy to not perform as planned. Life insurance policies should be reviewed and evaluated no less frequently than every few years.

Many people buy life insurance and then rarely or ever review it. This includes title and beneficiary. Doing this wrong can mean what you thought was going to happen, never will. We also look at how the contract is performing relative to expectations. Years of declining interest rates, mortality expectation improvements, and failure to pay scheduled premiums in a timely manner can dramatically change how a policy will perform, possibly leading to lapse or worse.

In order to properly evaluate a policy, we take the following steps:

  • Order and review illustrations for the current policy. We look at different scenarios as to how the policy will perform under different stresses.
  • Look at the financial strength of the issuing company to make sure their claims paying ability has not changed.
  • Evaluate current beneficiary and ownership arrangements to make sure they are not set up in a way that will generate unnecessary taxes or worse, benefit someone other than the persons or businesses that they were intended to benefit.
  • Review and explain contract language in your policy. There are a wide variety of options available. We want to make sure that you are getting maximum value from your policy.
  • Look for options or opportunities to get more benefits from existing policies. You are paying for the benefits; you might as well enjoy all that you are paying for.
  • Discuss the purpose of the policy to make sure that policy structure and provisions are consistent with your objectives.
  • Explain various benefits and options that might exist in the policy that would add value to your overall financial security and performance.