For most corporate and professional trustees, the life insurance trust and policy administration landscape has changed drastically in recent months. As a trustee, are you confident that your life insurance trusts are being managed properly in light of business continuity plans and work from home models? This webinar will highlight the things you should be focused on right now to manage trust owned life [...]
Updated 2/5/2020, Originally posted 11/29/18 In the 1980s when current assumption universal life (CAUL) hit the market, sales illustrations were created showing cash value returns of 10% and more every year – for a product that was invested in fixed instruments. When equity markets soared and variable universal life (VUL) became the rage, many sales illustrations projected 12% returns – again, every year. Life insurance [...]
Updated 11/20/19 Originally posted 8/15/19 We recently wrote about remediation and the challenges that TOLI trustees have when managing a policy. Remediation is not just developing the best options for an under performing policy, increasingly it means maximizing the value of a policy that a grantor believes is no longer needed, or one whose expected funding has stopped. These decisions must be well-thought-out and every [...]
In 2013, we wrote about the sale of Lincoln Benefit Life, an Allstate company, to Resolution Life Holdings, Inc. It was the first purchase in the States for the UK company, run by British entrepreneur, Clive Chowdry, whose ambition, according to the Financial Times, was to “buy up and roll together a number of life assurance businesses and to run them for cash instead of [...]
On October 30th 2018, Voya Financial, a company we wrote about because of a lawsuit filed against it for cost of insurance increases that occurred on universal life policies sold in the past under the Security Life of Denver banner, announced in its third-quarter earnings call it would be ceasing all life insurance sales as of the end of the year. The company, which was [...]
Back in the spring, we reported on the Lincoln National “Enhanced Cash Surrender Value” offer the carrier began making to a select group of policyholders. These unsolicited offers would allow policyholders to receive an amount higher than the current cash surrender value to return their policies to the carrier. As we noted, the offers were similar to some made on mispriced variable annuities after the [...]
On October 29th the government of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan amended regulations dealing with premium deposits into a specially designed universal life policy. The new rule limits deposits into “side accounts in life insurance policies to an amount equal to premiums required under contract.” (1) The new regulation comes as a court battle rages between Canadian life insurance carriers and investors who purchased the [...]
In 2015 we reported on a Transamerica cost of insurance (COI) increase on a block of universal life policies and illustrated the 40% increase in COI on one policy affected raised the annual carrying costs to maturity for that policy from $36,400 to $81,595. That cost increase led to three separate class action lawsuits that were consolidated into one claim in November of 2016. Preliminary [...]
Recently, we posted a blog that laid out the 5-step process we undertake to move a block of policies to the Life Insurance Trust Company (LITC) as successor trustee. There are several reasons this may occur. Some trustees simply grow tired of the risk that ILITs represent, especially if they can remove the risk while still retaining the client in other, more profitable business lines. [...]
Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a new regulation implemented by the New York State Department of Financial Services to “govern life insurance company practices related to increases in the premiums” of life insurance and annuity policies. That regulation required carriers raising rates on policies to notify the department “at least 120 days prior to an adverse change in non-guaranteed elements of an [...]
