Jan 17, 2012
By Alan Lavine
Age expectancies are rising. Are your clients prepared?...
Jan 1, 2012
By Alan Lavine
Insurance firms face some major market risks, and financial advisors should look carefully at the financial strength of a firm before selling its products to clients....
Dec 19, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Financial advisors are increasingly concerned about the financial strength of the insurance companies whose products they sell. They cite low interest rates and exposure to the stock market via product principal guarantees as grounds for their concern, according to a fall study by LIMRA....
Nov 15, 2011
By Alan Lavine
What do you get when you splice together a life insurance policy and an immediate annuity?
A reversionary annuity. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but it carries some of the advantages of each and is ideal for certain kinds of clients.
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Nov 1, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Clients seeking investment guarantees are increasingly turning to insurance products....
Oct 17, 2011
By Alan Lavine
You might be surprised what you find if you review your clients’ insurance needs.
Many universal and variable universal life insurance policies underperformed over the past 10 to 15 years due to falling interest rates and huge stock market losses in 2002 and 2008.
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Aug 15, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Retiring baby boomers are pouring their money into variable annuities with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The problem is, these products have a number of hidden drawbacks. Financial advisors need to keep clients informed....
Jul 18, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Might some of your single clients unknowingly need life insurance? “One typical reason young people (in their 20s and 30s) buy life insurance is to protect their insurability,” says Ronald Klein, assistant vice president at Sun Life, Wellesley, Mass. “It is also a good tax-free way to save for the long term.”...
Jun 21, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Combining a managed payout mutual fund with a deferred immediate annuity may be a simple way to help clients plan for retirement...
May 17, 2011
By Alan Lavine
How well-diversified are your big-ticket clients’ life insurance issuers? Standard & Poor’s threw Uncle Sam, the insurance industry and financial advisors for a real loop in April when it downgraded long-term U.S. government debt to AAA negative from AAA stable and revised its outlooks for five U.S. insurance groups to negative from stable...
Apr 19, 2011
By Alan Lavine
When you design a portfolio by market capitalization and investment style, do you consider the cash value and death benefits of your client’s life insurance policy in the mix? Some experts say you should. Why? The death benefits and steady growth of cash value over the years can improve an overall portfolio’s risk-adjusted rate of return when combined with bond values.
“Investment managers should realize there may be a place for life insurance as part of the fixed income part of a portfolio,” says Richard Weber, principal with The Ethical Edge Inc., a Pleasant Hill, Cal., consulting firm. “Fixed income investments have low correlations to stocks. Life insurance cash values don’t move in the same direction (as stocks or bonds) during a crisis.”...
Mar 15, 2011
By Alan Lavine
Reps are turning to index universal life insurance to bridge the risk gap between low-rate permanent life insurance and riskier variable universal life. With variable universal life policies, the cash value is invested, typically in mutual funds....
