Insurance Archive
Do Your Homework on Indexed Universal Life Insurance
The world of life insurance presents what feels like a never-ending array of products and choices. One of these emerging product structures, indexed universal...
Domestic Private Placement Life Insurance
Private placement variable universal life insurance (PPVUL) products are available through some of the largest insurance companies in the United States....
An Adviser's Guide for Reviewing Life Insurance
Once issued, a life insurance policy can remain in effect for decades. During this time, the original owner's goal and objectives may have changed, or...
Advance Health Care Directives
I've counseled thousands of clients about the need for advance directives as an integral, critical component of an estate plan. Advance directives can...
Private Split-dollar Arrangements
For estate planning using life insurance, and especially for large premium cases, split dollar offers an attractive method for funding the premiums with...
Turning Pennies Into Dollars For Charities
I am a bit of a spiritual seeker. Last summer, in search of the meaning of life, I trekked up one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas to seek the answer...
The Medicaid Trust
The cost of long-term health care continues to spiral and insurance companies continue to cover fewer and fewer long-term needs. As a result, it's important...
Asset Protection for the Middle Class
There's a new type of asset protection technique that's evolved from a well-established and highly effective elder law planning tool: the irrevocable...
The Estate Planner's Guide To Product Suitability
Out in the field, life insurance policies are generally not selected, designed or funded to most effectively support today's complex estate plans and...
A Buy-Sell Innovation
Traditional buy-sell agreements can't always solve all problems dealing with death, retirement, withdrawal and disability without creating difficulties...
The Beauty of SCINsurance
Historically low interest rates have made self-canceling installment notes (SCIN) an attractive estate-planning tool and a viable alternative to life...
Long-term Care Lawsuits Will Just Keep Coming
Many long-term care (LTC) insurance carriers are facing an avalanche of lawsuits from disgruntled policyholders,1 some involving policies more than two...
Climate Change
Today's investment and political climate is causing a perceptible change in the way many clients approach the role of life insurance in their financial...
Discount Private Split-Dollar Does It Work?
Do you think that split-dollar arrangements (other than premium loans under the split-dollar loan regime) faded away when the Internal Revenue Service...
Insurance LLC Helps Business Owners
Owners of closely held businesses have long sought ways to buy the interest of an owner who dies. They also have sought ways to enjoy the business' success...
Today's Split Dollar
The final split-dollar regulations that were effective as of Sept. 17, 2003 (T.D. 9092) became the operative guidance for arrangements that either were...
Still Nervous About That Insurable Interest
For years, advisors have gone blissfully along in their planning for families and business owners, devising wonderfully helpful trusts and solving liquidity...
Handle With Care
Do you know how many of your clients own non-qualified deferred annuities?1 Does their estate planning consider how those annuities are subject to different...
Life Insurance In Qualified Plans
Most people would like some life insurance. Problem is, no one really wants to pay for it. So, since the beginning of time, life insurance professionals...
What To Do With Those Existing Split-Dollar Plans
It's been five years since the Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2002-8, the pronouncement that was supposed to clarify treatment of those split-dollar...
The Twilight of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance?
There's a lot of talk lately about revamping our health care system to address its outrageous costs and the millions of uninsured. ...
Keep Up With Your Clients
Baby boomers are hunkering down for retirement. They are putting computer to spreadsheet, as it were, and running asset and cash flow projections, with...
Sell Your Policy?
Who should consider life settlement as one alternative to managing life insurance capital? When is a settlement a wise decision? What factors should be...
SPLIT-DOLLAR OPPORTUNITIES
Although the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have significantly diminished its income tax advantages, split-dollar insurance can...
Get the Best Offer
Most people would say the hardest part about the life insurance business is getting people to pay for the insurance. I disagree. Once a person selects...
PPLI Primer
Cash value life insurance through its tax-deferred growth of the cash value, tax-free access to that cash value and a tax-free death benefit can provide...
Using FTDs In Buy-Sell Plans
Smart business owners plan for the orderly disposition and transfer of their interests in their companies in the event of their death, disability or retirement....
Cash Out or Cash In?
Many of our clients who bought cash value life insurance policies are taking a hard look at their policies in light of changed circumstances or a changed...
Premium Financing Solutions
Many wealthy clients and owners of closely held businesses need to acquire a substantial amount of life insurance to provide liquidity to pay for their...
THE FMV OF LIFE INSURANCE CONTRACTS
The Internal Revenue Service issued Revenue Procedure 2005-25 on April 8, providing additional guidance on determining the fair market value (FMV) of...
A New Way Of Doing Business
The past year was difficult for life insurance in estate planning. This year will be worse. But the astute insurance professional and other members of...
