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#439 | The VA-ization of Prudential VUL Protector
One of the mysterious things about the persistent rise of the Guaranteed VUL market has been the simultaneous decline in the market for Variable Annuities with Living Benefits (VALB). The peak of the VALB market was in 2007 and it…
#438 | News Digest – 9/8/25
Guardian SafeGuard 360 Goes Mainstream When Guardian released SafeGuard 360 back in 2022, the storyline was – understandably – a little bit muddled. Was it simply a marketing wrapper for separate and independent life insurance and disability products, similar to…
#437 | Making the Case for Juvenile Policies
When I graduated from college, I was given a participating Principal Whole Life policy. Entirely unbeknownst to me, my grandfather took it out when I was in the single-digits and had been paying the premiums on it ever since. It…
#436 | News Digest – 8/6/2025
This is a new format for TLPR, as discussed in the very last section. Here's what we're covering this week: Guardian Enhances 10 Pay Whole LifeLincoln Restricts Term Conversions - AgainMassMutual Makes a Play in Guaranteed ULUpdate to the IUL…
#435 | The Securitization Frontier
A Primer on Securitization Securitization is one of those words that means nothing to the vast majority of humans and yet, unbeknownst to them, their financial lives intersect with securitization on a regular basis. If you have a mortgage, chances…
#434 | The Other Kind of Disability Insurance
The very first article in The Life Product Review was, ironically, not about life insurance at all. It was entitled “Insurance as Savings” and I published it in early 2012, not long after I’d bought my first disability insurance policy.…
#433 | The Best Indexed UL
Introduction Ever since I started speaking consistently about Indexed UL back in 2008, I’ve been asked the same question at least once every couple of months – if you were buying an Indexed UL product right now, which one would…
#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,…
