Typical Fee Based Consulting Scenarios

It is fairly common that I pick up the phone and on the other end of the line is an attorney, CPA or trust officer who asks some version of “I have a client who is being proposed a life insurance transaction and I’m not so sure about it. What

Sometimes the simplest things can make the biggest difference.  I was once brought a universal life policy with a modest loan; about a $500,000 policy with a $20,000 loan. An in-force projection showed the policy was suffering. The death benefit was degrading significantly over time and the policy was projected

While I have earned a reputation as the “go to guy” for fixing problems, I continue my attempts to convince policy owners and their advisors to understand and properly manage life insurance before problems develop.  Better than 9 out of 10 situations I am called in to are scenarios where

Recently I was brought into a case by an attorney for the benefit of a business owner of significant wealth. The lay of the land was as follows.  There were tens of millions of dollars of life insurance in force, mostly second-to-die and a mix of whole life and variable

More than once we have been brought into situations where things just don’t add up and we have a difficult time figuring out why. Our first inclination is generally not that what we received from the insurance carrier is factually incorrect, but it always has to be in the list

Whether for gifting purposes, business transactions, trust exchanges, charitable donations or filing a 706, there are a number of situations where policy owners and advisors need to put a value on a life insurance contract and we can be integral to that process.  Most recently I was called in because

Split dollar, intra-family loans, premium financing, private placement policies… the list of strategies and ideas can be extensive. Some of these are clearly beneficial in certain situations and some are simply fancy ways to sell life insurance.  Independent consulting can vet proposed strategies and bring new ideas to the table

One drawback of modern life insurance illustration systems is that they cannot model real life scenarios. Most take current assumptions relative to expenses and crediting rates and project them indefinitely into the future without change. Clearly this will not happen. In the real world, these policy variables are dynamic, not

A law firm had about 50 policies on partners for deferred compensation purposes. The policies were being put in force since the seventies but none had ever reexamined the efficacy of the program since then.  With a multi-decade slide in dividend rates supporting the policies, it was important to understand

It is not uncommon for policy owners to have little understanding of the tax ramifications of their actions. Many times my work with advisors has prevented substantial tax surprises when a policy owner didn’t realize their policy was in a significant gain position. This is especially true in policies with

So much effort is put into finding the “best” policy but it is surprising that so many people put much less effort into underwriting.  It is not uncommon to have a very significant spread in underwriting offers from various companies given the exact same information. We have even see situations