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#432 | North American Secure Horizon IUL
Over the past few years, there has been a pronounced convergence of the Fixed Indexed Annuity (FIA) and Indexed UL markets both in terms of distribution and product development. One of the clearest examples is the fact that Annexus, the…
#431 | The New Risk Free Rate
This is not a political post or commentary on the political environment. This is simply a perspective on the credit quality of life insurers to that of the US Government, independent of any particular party or person in power. On…
#430 | Leverage and Life Insurance
In the context of life insurance, leverage is usually understood to mean one thing – premium financing. Borrowing money to buy life insurance certainly introduces leverage. The economics of the program hinge not on the absolute level of policy performance,…
Guest Post – Cash Value Loan Optimization
This article was authored by subscriber Paul Hanley. Paul first reached out to me in 2023 about the concept for this article and I was impressed by some of the insights. We went through a few revisions, it sat untouched…
#429 | Lincoln WealthBuilder IUL
Aside from some modest recent revisions to AssetEdge VUL/SVUL and lowering prices on Term, the recent introduction of WealthBuilder IUL marks Lincoln’s first real move towards recapturing marketshare in the life insurance market after exiting VULone. Despite the new name,…
#428 | John Hancock LifeCare
To say that John Hancock has scar tissue from Long Term Care insurance would be an understatement. Like many insurers, John Hancock sold stand-alone LTC back when the market was frothy from roughly 1995 to 2005, eventually amassing around $10…
#427 | Domestic Bias in Indexed UL
Performance in any index-linked insurance contract is driven by two things – index performance and index participation. The vast majority of crediting strategies in Indexed UL are linked to the S&P 500 and for good reason. It’s a simple, straightforward,…
#426 | Indexed UL on the Efficient Frontier
Back in early 2019, I wrote a 3-part series entitled Indexed UL on the Risk Spectrum (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) that argued that by every metric, Indexed UL is a relatively low risk, low return proposition more akin…
#425 | Waking the Japanese Giants
Earlier this month, Legal and General announced that it was selling its US entity, Banner Life, to Japanese mutual company Meiji Yasuda. The sale marks the next chapter of the continuing retreat of European insurers from the United States life…
#424 | The 4% Rule and Life Insurance
A Refresher on the 4% Rule Fewer things in finance have been more unjustifiably maligned than the “4% Rule.” As interest rates fell in the mid-2010s, much was written about how the 4% Rule was too aggressive for the current…
