Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Address the Needs of Unmarried Partners

According to the 2010 US Census Bureau, traditional married couples were 78% of households in 1950. As of 2010 traditional married couples represented less than half of households. Couples that aren't married can't take advantage of the many tax and retirement benefits established for traditional married couples, but they still have a number of effective planning tools at their disposal to reach their retirement and wealth transfer goals.

For example, use life insurance to create a virtual marital deduction. A policy insuring one partner may be designed to pay death benefits directly to the surviving partner. Considering life insurance in this way may add new opportunities to your prospecting.

Since people form many different types of committed relationships and many of them today don't involve a marriage contract, the ING Life Companies has created three new consumer brochures to help you work in the unmarried couples market. You can choose from different versions that address a specific market for unmarried heterosexual, female and male partners. View Modern Solutions for Today's Modern Family from ING.


Thursday, February 7, 2013

Let's Stop Complaining?


It's already February, the election is over and we have run into a wall, not over a cliff. Let’s take some control of our own lives and stop blaming everyone else. If we started to save more of our own money, we would have more freedom. Freedom from bad jobs, no jobs, bad decisions, more taxes and even our children moving back home. We could prepare for retirement, maybe even retire sooner, and not burden our families with the possibility that we might live too long and get sick.

Let's take a person age 50 that needs $500,000 of life insurance in the event he dies in the next 20 years. Could he die within that time frame? Of course. Will he? Probably not. Since he doesn't want to die, the insurance company doesn't want him to die and hopefully his family doesn't want him to die, let’s bet with the insurance company that he won’t, and guarantee to give him all his premiums back at age 70 if he lives?

The premium is $4,100 per year. We don’t think the insurance company would take the risk of $500,000 in death benefit for that premium if they thought our customer was going to die. We also don’t think the insurance company believes our customer is going to keep the policy for 20 years to get his money back.  WE HAVE A PLAN to keep some of our freedom. When our customer lives to age 70, he can 1) transfer the $82,000 in returned premium to a single premium product with a $4,000 monthly LTC benefit and a guarantee return of premium if he changes his mind, or 2) transfer it to an immediate annuity, receive $466 per month and use it to pay for a $6,000 monthly LTC benefit policy, or 3) use the annuity money to pay for his Medicare, or 4) party like crazy, celebrating the fact he lived and is not sick!

There are only two objections to the above that we can accept. One, the coverage isn't enough, and the customer needs to save more money or two, the person just doesn't care. If the objection is the second, shut up and stop complaining because he is going to be the problem for the rest of us.