Latest Content
#288 | Private Placement Goes Mainstream
Over the last couple of weeks, Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) has gotten more attention from mainstream media than it ever has before. Bloomberg ran a click-bait article on September 2nd entitled “How Rich Americans Plan to Escape Biden Tax…
#287 | Peak Premium Financing?
Last weekend, I was up in the mountains of North Carolina and happened to run into a guy from Tampa who I knew from overnight camp when I was a kid. I hadn’t seen him since we were both counselors…
#286 | Guardian Reprices Flagship L99 and L95 Whole Life
I've had several folks recently tell me offhandedly that they always get a kick out of the pictures that I post to my articles. The fact that this new TLPR website requires stock images was a bone of contention between…
#285 | The Lesson of the Cares Act
To quote the great Yogi Berra, “in theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.” That’s certainly the case with the Washington Cares Act, a well-intentioned law designed to provide a backstop for the growing…
#284 | Brookfield Buys American National
This article makes a lot of references to financial data about both Brookfield and American National. All of the data comes from public sources, specifically statutory filings and 10-Ks. You can find all of the information at the SEC website…
#283 | The Scourge of Conversion-Only Products
I’ve argued before that a guaranteed conversion privilege is the most mathematically valuable part of a Term insurance policy – yes, even more so than the death benefit coverage itself. The chance that you’re going to die while being covered…
#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…
#280 | Ready or Not: State Mandated Care in Washington
Ramona Neal independently publishes data and articles about Hybrid products and LTC/Chronic Illness riders on her website, Living Benefit Review, https://livingbenefitreview.com. She has graciously offered to publish one of her articles every quarter exclusively on The Life Product Review. Ramona…
#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…
