The Insurance Pro Blog: Recent Episodes
The Insurance Pro Blog
Who Buys Cash Value Life Insurance — and Who Should August 7, 2026 · Brandon Roberts A few months back we did an episode on who should own cash value life insurance. That was our opinion — 15-plus years of watching who it works for and who it doesn't. This time we wanted to answer ...
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Indexed Universal Life Insurance Problems: What the Evidence Actually Shows August 1, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Search for the problems with indexed universal life insurance and you'll land in a shouting match: caps that get slashed, illustrations that lie, policies that implode, and the big one — eight out of ten IUL policies supposedly fail. ...
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The post Indexed Universal Life Insurance Problems: What the Evidence Actually Shows appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Indexed Universal Life Insurance July 24, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Private Placement Life Insurance: Why IUL Beats the PPLI Pitch Private placement life insurance almost never arrives casually. It shows up in a meeting with the private client group at a bank or a wealth advisory firm, and it comes with a certain amount of ...
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The post Private Placement Life Insurance-Why IUL Beats the PPLI Pitch appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Estate Planning July 19, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Estate Tax Exemption 2026: Who Actually Needs Life Insurance Now For most of 2024 and 2025, a large part of the life insurance business ran on a deadline. The federal estate tax exemption was scheduled to sunset at the end of 2025 and roughly cut in half, ...
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Whole Life Insurance July 12, 2026 · Brandon Roberts The Death Benefit Advantage: How Life Insurance Builds Wealth Most people think of life insurance as something that protects a plan they already have. That’s true, as far as it goes. But it undersells what the death benefit actually does, because buying a policy doesn’t just ...
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The post The Death Benefit Advantage-Using Life Insurance to Build Wealth appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Whole Life Insurance July 4, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Inside the General Account: How Life Insurers Build Your Whole Life Dividend Northwestern Mutual just announced a record $9.2 billion dividend payout for 2026 — about a billion more than the year before, and the largest three-year dividend increase in the company’s history. MassMutual is paying ...
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The post How Life Insurers Invest Whole Life Premiums (Inside the General Account) appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Universal Life Insurance Universal Life Insurance Was Built With Rational Exuberance June 27, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Universal life insurance is the product everybody loves to dunk on. The vanishing-premium horror stories, the lawsuits, the agent who swore the premium would disappear and then mailed a letter twenty years later saying it wouldn’t. If your ...
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Financial Planning June 21, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Financial Planning for High-Income Earners (Beyond the List) If you make $400,000 or more a year, you have already received the standard advice — max the 401(k), open a backdoor Roth, consider a mega backdoor on top of that, pay attention to asset location, fund the HSA, ...
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Retirement Income Planning June 12, 2026 · Brandon Roberts Life Insurance vs. Annuities for Retirement Income: Which Strategy Wins? If you have money set aside and you are trying to figure out whether a life insurance policy or an annuity is the better way to generate retirement income, the honest answer is that it depends. ...
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The post Life Insurance vs Annuities for Retirement Income-Which Strategy Wins? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
A volatility controlled index is essentially an algorithmic strategy that seeks to minimize investment losses by automatically reallocating between risky assets (stocks) and low-risk assets (cash or bonds) based on volatility measurements and predetermined benchmarks. As the podcast hosts explain, “a volatility controlled index is an index that seeks to control volatility” by gradually shifting ...
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The post Volatility Controlled Indices: The Evolution of Indexed Universal Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Despite critics calling it “old,” “expensive,” and “outdated,” whole life insurance is actually gaining popularity. Here's what sophisticated investors know that others don't. If you've been following financial discussions lately, you've probably heard the familiar refrain: whole life insurance is an outdated relic that modern investors should avoid. Yet here's a surprising fact that might ...
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The post Why Whole Life Insurance is More Popular Than Ever: The Three Compelling Reasons Driving Demand appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Life insurance has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the most tax-advantaged financial vehicles available. The ability to grow cash value tax-deferred and access it tax-free has made whole life and universal life insurance popular choices for building wealth. However, it's crucial to understand that not every life insurance transaction is tax-free. As someone ...
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The post When Life Insurance Isn’t Tax-Free: 6 Situations That Create Tax Liability appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
When exploring cash value life insurance as part of your retirement strategy, you'll likely encounter the term “Modified Endowment Contract” or MEC. While often viewed as something to avoid, MECs aren't necessarily bad—they're simply different, with unique tax characteristics that may actually benefit certain financial situations. This comprehensive guide will help you understand what MECs ...
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The post Understanding Modified Endowment Contracts: A Comprehensive Guide for Retirement Planning appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Rethinking Retirement: Why “Just Take More Risk” Might Be Bad Advice Let's talk about something that's been bugging me lately. If you've ever sat down with a financial advisor after realizing you're behind on retirement savings, you've probably heard some version of these three pieces of advice: “You need to save more money” “You might ...
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The post Why Annuities Make Sense: A Deep Dive into Retirement Portfolio Protection appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Recent economic events are causing market volatility and uncertainty motivating many investors to seek stable alternatives for their financial portfolios. With the implementation of tariffs and the resulting market fluctuations, many are asking whether whole life insurance and other cash value insurance products can serve as effective hedges against economic instability. The short answer is ...
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The post Is Whole Life Insurance an Effective Hedge Against Economic Tariffs? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The post Please Don’t Compare Whole Life Dividends to Universal Life Interest appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
There are so many questions about what taxes one must pay on life insurance proceeds. But one that we get a lot is, do you pay taxes on life insurance payout? The subject can be a bit intimidating for a lot of people so we decided to put together a quick reference guide on how ...
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The post Do You Pay Taxes on Life Insurance Payout? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Life insurance loans, particularly from whole or universal life policies, offer a flexible solution for cash flow fluctuations. The process involves checking available cash value, determining the loan amount, requesting the loan, and repaying it without a fixed schedule or penalties. Interest rates vary by policy and insurer, and loan terms are generally straightforward. Key ...
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The post The Life Insurance Loan Process: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
In a recent episode of The Insurance Pro Blog Podcast, we explored an often-overlooked investment vehicle that could potentially revolutionize retirement income strategies: closed-end funds. My special guest, Steve Selengut, shared his expertise on how these funds can be used to create additional retirement income streams. Let's dive into the key takeaways from this informative ...
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The post Unlocking Retirement Income: The Power of Closed-End Funds with Steve Selengut appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
A number of years ago, we stopped regularly updating various analyses we performed on the insurance industry. This, of course, brought on questions. What motivated our decision to end this practice? Was there some objective we sought to accomplish by ignoring it? Perhaps the data was no longer supporting our narrative about a strong industry ...
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The post 2023 Whole Life Company Asset Yield Trend appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
With the economic landscape changing dramatically and a “new normal” taking shape in the fixed-interest marketplace, bonds are testing a long-held–but poorly vetted–theory about safety. Ask anyone with a minor interest/proficiency in personal finance about safe assets, and you'll likely hear something about bonds. They are the asset the investment industry offers up as a ...
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The post Bond Inflows Highlight Annuity Strengths and Speak to Inept Investors appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
When it comes to life insurance, there are several options available for those seeking coverage. Two popular choices are whole life insurance and indexed universal life insurance. However, there is another option that you may have come across: variable universal life insurance. While it may appear appealing due to its flexibility and potential for cash ...
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The post Variable Universal Life Insurance: A Costly Gamble That Could Leave You Empty Handed appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The world of life insurance is an ever-evolving landscape, and as a result, new products and strategies continue to emerge. Among them, indexed universal life insurance (IUL) has been garnering attention for its unique approach to cash value accumulation and premium flexibility. In this article, we'll delve into the reasons why IUL is outpacing whole ...
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The post The Innovation Advantage: Why Indexed Universal Life Insurance is Outpacing Whole Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
In today's fast-paced and unpredictable financial landscape, managing risk and achieving consistent returns is more important than ever. Life insurance companies have emerged as experts in this field, utilizing their vast resources and expertise to create well-diversified investment portfolios that deliver long-term value to policyholders. In this article, we will explore the factors that contribute ...
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The post How Life Insurance Companies Master Diversification in Asset Management appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Main Takeaways Yield to maturity (YTM) is a way to determine how much money you can make from a bond if you hold it until it matures. YTM considers the bond's price, coupon rate, and time to maturity. YTM is important for investors because it allows them to compare the true yields of different bonds, ...
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The post Bond Prices and YTM: How Interest Rates Affect Your Investments appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
While most financial advice is heavily focused on maximizing return while minimizing fees (and this perhaps is one of the reasons so many people fail long term in their financial plan) I'm going to take time today to introduce a concept that is by no means new, but one of those golden little nuggets that ...
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The post Wealth Building Opportunity appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We've long argued that many of the scare tactics used to dissuade people from universal life insurance products are very heavy-handed. The “evidence” exists mostly as anecdotes concerning “I know someone who knows someone who” once owned one of those products and bad things happened. For the most part, bad things involve a requirement to contribute additional ...
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The post How the Fees Destroy Indexed Universal Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
With the Fed's ongoing battle with inflation, we're now seeing interest rates that haven't existed in a few decades. Many of us can't remember a time in our adult lives when the cost of money was so high. Not surprisingly this is forcing some changed behavior when it comes to borrowing money. We started the ...
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The post Save Money: Borrow from your Whole Life Insurance Policy appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Whole life insurance can play an important role in your retirement income planning. This statement might go against the grain of advice you see offered by investment salespeople, but I think we've displayed ample examples over the past decade that whole life insurance not only works as a retirement income tool, but it accomplishes the ...
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The post Get Inflation Beating Retirement Income with Whole Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Back in July of this year, Forbes published an article that sought to “Sound the Alarm on Indexed Universal Life Insurance.” Here's the article if you wish to reference it. The article, like all the others that came before it, makes multiple misstatements and peddles a lot of half-truths about universal life insurance. We're going ...
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The post Sounding the Alarm on Sounding the Alarm on Indexed Universal Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We had a really good run with the stock market over the past 10+ years. It seemed like the market was on a non-stop race to higher and higher levels. In fact, many hobbyist investors made unimaginable fortunes by launching blogs and doling out investment advice that largely parroted the long-standing ethos of the now ...
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The post De-Risk Your Portfolio with Whole Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
When looking at universal life insurance–especially in the context of its ability to accumulate cash value–and comparing it to other life insurance products like whole life insurance, people often note that it appears to have much lower guarantees. In fact, here's an excerpt from an indexed universal life insurance proposal that highlights said low guarantee:Now, ...
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The post Why Does Universal Life Insurance Have Such Low Guarantees appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Life Insurance used to generate retirement income is a slightly more advanced subject within the world of life insurance and financial planning. The stock jockeys hate it, and the life insurance agents love it. No surprise there. But is there something that life insurance brings to the table that is truly special? Or are you ...
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The post Why Life Insurance Works so well for Retirement Income appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
I’ll be honest with you—writing this post makes me feel a bit like Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie “A Few Good Men”. Remember when Nicholson is being questioned by Tom Cruise in the most memorable scene from the movie and Cruise is demanding the truth? Nicholson replies, “You can’t handle the truth!” So, what ...
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The post Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Rate of Return appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
When you read or hear the words tax shelter it probably doesn’t conjure images of using whole life insurance. But whether or not whole life is actually a tax shelter depends on how you define it more than anything. It’s not a tax shelter in any sort of the more shady ways that people discuss ...
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The post Is Whole Life Insurance a Tax Shelter? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Universal life insurance is characterized by its flexibility and transparency of expenses. Unlike whole life insurance, where expenses operate under the cloak of proprietary information, we can easily call up the expense breakdown of universal life insurance policies and see exactly where the money goes. For universal life insurance policies, expenses fall into four main ...
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The post Universal Life Insurance Expense Breakdown appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
With news sources reporting every higher inflation measure–and ample signs of prices increasing across the country–it's understandable that many people are seeking ways to personally combat the effects of inflation on their lives. The Infinite Banking crowd appears ready to pounce on this topic and celebrate their ethos as the solution to the problem. Philosophically, ...
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The post How Does Infinite Banking Fare During High Inflation? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Dividend recognition dictates the policy a life insurance company has regarding what it does in the event a policyholder takes a loan out against his/her whole life policy. If the company practices non-direct recognition then it does not adjust the dividend in the event there is a loan against the policy. The company pays the ...
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The post Dividend Recognition is Going to Get Interesting appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Market corrections happen. Given their frequency, the chances are very high that you will live through a few of them once retired. This can be a scary prospect for a number of people. According to Charles Schwab Research, and reported on by Forbes, retirement accounts that cannot keep up with income needs is one of ...
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The post How to Protect Yourself When Retiring in a Down Market appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Interest rates are on the rise. Mortgage rates are up. Treasuries are at levels we haven't seen in a while. Inflation is top of mind, and the Fed will likely continue raising rates until lofty inflation rates cool down–inflation levels we haven't seen in a very long time. So with rising interest rates comes potentially ...
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The post Are Rising Interest Rates going to Cause Expensive Life Insurance Loans? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
There are life insurance agents, motivated by various marketing organizations, telling people that their taxes are going up. Way up. Mostly because Social Security is bankrupt. They even have a super assertive and amazingly authoritative person to reference. David Walker, the former U.S. Comptroller General…he's been complaining about SSA for years. In fact, he predicted ...
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The post Should You Cancel your IRA to Buy Life Insurance? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Life insurance agents often talk about internal rate of return (IRR) when discussing cash value life insurance. The term may appear exotic but put in simpler terms, it's the rate of return you are achieving on the premiums that you pay into the policy. Equipped with this information, we can compare how putting money into ...
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The post Lying About Taxable Equivalent Rate of Return on Cash Value Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
In our 10+ years of talking about life insurance on the internet, we've mentioned a few times that cash value life insurance gets better with age. It's a simple idea, but it comes with significant implications as we age. Our vulnerability increases as we get older, and this is when life insurance is at its ...
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The post Whole Life Still Gets Better with Age appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Last year, Ohio National Life announced that it was looking to demutualize and be acquired by a Canadian Private Equity-created insurance holdings company named Constellation Insurance Holdings. While we didn't predict demutualization was on the table for Ohio National, we weren't surprised by the announcement. The company struggled for a few years, and those struggles ...
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The post The Last Word on Ohio National’s Demutualization appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We sell life insurance to a variety of people for a handful of reasons, and today I want to highlight one of the common themes involved when someone approaches us about a life insurance purchase. To be sure, there are several reasons why someone might want to buy life insurance. And when it comes to ...
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The post Lock In Your Success with Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The internet is rife with hot tips on how to beat inflation. Since a lot of supposed financial media outlets compete with each other for top billing on Google, the majority of these articles are an incestuous party of underwhelming originality–or even actionability if I'm being wholly honest with you. The free-lancers who dabble in ...
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The post How to Beat Inflation with Your Savings appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We've talked a good bit about how inflation might impact whole life insurance, but we've been much less vocal about how it might affect indexed universal life insurance. In theory, the products operate in a similar world and so should face similar consequences. But… IUL may have some short-term advantages. Since the interest earnings are tied ...
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The post The Problem High Inflation Poses for Indexed Universal Life Insurance appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
I own stocks. This shouldn't be a big revelation to anyone. I think I've been pretty transparent about my beliefs that whole life insurance and indexed universal life insurance are complements–not replacements–to equities. Some–a lot actually–of my personal stock picking would likely be deemed a tad exotic–high risk for sure. And it's worked out pretty ...
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The post I Should have Bought Stocks appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Cash-value life insurance–e.g. whole life and indexed universal life insurance–offers the policy owner the option to use policy values while he/she is still alive. There are a few ways to go about this, but today I want to talk about the loan feature. Taking a loan against a life insurance policy is one of the ...
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The post Should Savvy Business Owners Own Whole Life Insurance? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We don't spend enough time talking about annuities. It's true. We know it. We occasionally talk about it–Brantley and I. We even make plans to do something about it. Then it gets lost in the bustle of life–forgotten until the next time we remember that we don't talk enough about annuities. You'd think things would ...
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The post Do We Hate Annuities? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
We're now well over a year since the COVID-19 Pandemic began, and this means we now have some data that gives us some insights into how the Pandemic is affecting life insurers. Not surprisingly, when the Pandemic began, we saw ample hand-wringing among life insurance companies. Many of them quickly put strict restrictions in place ...
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The post Will COVID Destroy Life Insurers’ Balance Sheets? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Persistently low-interest rates leave more conservative investors in a tough position. While these people aren't really keen on assuming a position in higher-risk assets, the returns achieved on fixed-interest options have been on a downward trend for more than a decade. Cash-value life insurance products do tend to compare very favorably as fixed-interest options, but ...
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The post The Life Insurance Product that Produces an Amazing Rate of Return appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The Fed made very clear this week its intentions to begin easing its long-standing practice of pumping money into the U.S. Economy. This means they are looking to push interest rates up on the broader economy–a day many of us have been awaiting. A lot of things will come with higher interest rates, but one ...
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The post Will Rising Rates Make Life Insurance Loans More Expensive? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Retirement income planning is a complicated and–for many–an elusive task. Industries that exist to help everyday Americans prepare for retirement spend millions of dollars every year trying to craft flashier and fancier marketing hooks to convince would-be retirement preppers to entrust them with their hard-saved dollars. And well-meaning reporters churn out thousands of articles every ...
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The post How to Make the 4% Rule Even Better appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The end of 2020 brought a major change to the life insurance industry. A last-minute change to legislation established a new–lower–guaranteed interest rate for cash value life insurance policies. The exact rules vary a bit depending on the insurance product, but the most notable change affected whole life policies because they would need an overhaul ...
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The post New Whole Life Insurance: Keep Your Eye on the Income appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
In 2020, something a bit unusual happened. Life insurers faced a huge expense that far exceeded expectations had you asked any stakeholder for his/her projection from the vantage point of 2019. This huge expense? A dramatic rise in death benefit claims. Yup, it's true. 2020 saw a sharp–15.4% year-over-year increase to be exact–rise in death ...
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The post Life Insurers Just Got Whacked with a Big Expense…and we Didn’t Even Notice appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
The rate of return one achieves on a cash value life insurance policy is sometimes hotly debated. This is especially true when opining on the adequacy of the rate of return. On the one hand, we have a crowd of people who think it's paltry and represents a foolish financial move because–allegedly–you can do so ...
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The post Life Insurance Gets Better with Age appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
A lot of people buy whole life insurance policies with the intention of one day stopping the premium payment. In some cases, these are guaranteed paid-up policies like a 10-Pay whole life product. In other cases, the policyholder uses non-guaranteed features of the policy to cover the premium. In others, a nonforfeiture option comes into ...
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The post Why are You Still Paying Your Whole Life Insurance Premium? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Universal life insurance is in no short supply of anecdotes and claims that rising fees will destroy the product. Much of this discussion is skewed “data” used for self-interest pushing some alternative agenda. And while these stories exist in the 10's of incidences–which should cause any reasonable person to question the validity of any claim ...
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The post Will IUL Loan Interest Tank Your Policy? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
Diversification is a term so deeply intertwined with traditional financial/investment advice that we often think of it as infallible. If you want to sound intelligent, or at least appear reasonably knowledgeable, make the recommendation that one carefully work to diversify his/her portfolio and there's a good chance your advice is impervious to criticism. For the ...
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The post Do You Need to Diversify Your Whole Life Insurance Holdings? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.
There's no secret that continuously low interest rates cause a struggle for life insurers and this can have a negative impact on insurance products that accumulate cash value. However, lower market interest rates negatively impact all financial tools that use fixed interest rates as a savings mechanism–think certificates of deposit, bonds, and money market accounts. ...
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The post Is Old Whole Life Insurance Better than New Whole Life Insurance? appeared first on The Insurance Pro Blog.