Bobby Samuelson
#282 | Penn Mutual Enters the Guaranteed VUL Space
A year ago, I wrote a series on Lincoln and Prudential’s Guaranteed VUL offerings that argued, essentially, that the pricing was unsustainable and a reckoning was coming. Nine months after that, I wrote a follow up piece about the fact…
#281 | Portfolio Rates & Life Insurance
In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace told a story that has since been cemented as an iconic parable in American culture. It goes like this: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they…
#279 | MassMutual Whole Life 10 Pay
After watching a wave of updates to Universal Life products to illustrate the new Section 7702-2% rates, it was only a matter of time before one of the major Whole Life writers released an updated version. It also wasn’t hard…
#278 | Principal Completes its Strategic Review
Yesterday morning, Principal announced the conclusions of the strategic review that had been brought on by activist investor Elliott Investment Management’s increased stake in the company earlier this year and their demands that Principal take a hard look at its…
#277 | Symetra Accumulator IUL 4.0 and the AI Strategies
For the life insurance industry, 2021 started off with a bang. Overnight, companies selling Universal Life suddenly found themselves incorrectly illustrating and administering tax limitations for every policy being sold as a result of changes to Section 7702 being passed…
#276 | North American Goes to (IUL) War with Builder Plus 3
By now, the strategy for optimizing Indexed UL illustrations under AG 49-A is quite clear and I wrote about it in great detail less than a month ago in #273 | The New IUL Illustration War. That article includes a…
#275 | Permanent Insurance Goes Direct(ish)
If you were to just read the industry headlines, you’d think that the only revolution happening right now in the life insurance space is the explosion in growth and investment in online insurance marketing firms. That’s why I wrote last…
#274 | The Online Life Insurance Gamble
Last week, the insurance world was rocked by news that Ethos Life had secured an additional $200 million in funding at a whopping $2 billion valuation, placing the firm at roughly half the size of Brighthouse Financial, two-thirds the size…
#273 | The New IUL Illustration War
Indexed UL is besieged by falling caps that imperil the core story of the product and the ways that it has traditionally been sold. What's the solution? In the same way that life insurers previously changed the identity of the…
#272 | Lincoln MMA & Brighthouse SmartCare
Click here for the first part of the Lincoln MMA review. For a refresher – because it’s been a while – here’s how I closed it: "The biggest surprise of all, though, is that Lincoln didn’t come up with the…
