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#443 | Busch v Pacific Life
Image: AP It’s been a very long time since anything related to life insurance has broken into mainstream media. Larry King famously claimed to be scammed by a STOLI transaction that had been executed with his approval and paid him…
#442 | A New Era for Blending at Pacific Life
10/29/2025 Update - Last night, two-time NASCAR Cup Champion Kyle Busch and his wife Samantha Busch announced that they were suing Pacific Life over an $8.5 million loss in an Indexed UL policy. The complaint, which is now public, makes…
#441 | F&G and The Insurance Origination Model
What’s a life insurance company? We’ve asked this question a few times in The Life Product Review because the answer isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem. Life insurers exist on a spectrum. At one end sits the classic, true-blue…
#440 | The Curious Case of the 4.5% Whole Life
In the immediate aftermath of the changes to Section 7702 that were enacted in early 2021, the story was – understandably – entirely focused on the fact that Section 7702 rates were allowed to drop below 4% for the first…
#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.…
