#40 | Unintended Consequences in GUL Administration

My education in Guaranteed UL began long after I had helped place millions of dollars of GUL premium, run hundreds (thousands?) of GUL ledgers and given many presentations on creative designs using pricing holes in GUL products. The product, to me, was just the illustration. But I’ve learned over the past year that Guaranteed UL is anything but simple and that the illustration is only part of the story. Carriers were more than willing to bake excessive complexity into the products for a variety of reasons ranging from noble (pricing precision) to downright scandalous (cheating on AG38 reserves) and I began to see how that complexity could make GUL explosively unpredictable when the client did anything that wasn’t on the illustration. However, I was mostly stuck with conjecture. I’d heard a few horror stories but didn’t have any real evidence.