Bill Boersma: On Life Insurance

Why it makes sense to understand what’s going on when refinancing.

After writing a few pieces on loan refinancing, I’ll now share some examples. Over the years, I’ve seen many situations in which policies have significant loans. These include whole life (WL) policies, universal life (UL) policies and others. Some are modest, and the policies can handle the loan, while others are overwhelming and will drive the policies into the ground. Some have reasonable rescue strategies, and others are all but loss causes.

These situations often involve a lack of understanding about how the policies fundamentally work, how loans affect the contracts and how to manage the policies over time. In some situations, the initially chosen policy management features, which have caused the problems to escalate over time, have never been changed. Sometimes I’ve been able to simply make a dividend option change, and a failing policy can be self rescued with the trajectory of the cash value, loan and death benefit reversing itself over time. For example, when a policy has an 8% loan interest rate in today’s market, why would a dividend option be set to buy additional paid up insurance while ongoing premiums are added to the loan and loan interest accrues? Again, it’s a lack of understanding and too often an abandonment of the policy owner by the agent. What may have been true a number of years ago may not be true today given the meaningful changes in the financial marketplace and policy crediting. Policy management is an ongoing responsibility. For full post, click here…