Exclusive Article on Building a Life Insurance Portfolio

[Brian Anderson]

Prudential VP of Advanced Markets Brett Berg, LLM, CLU, ChFC, has contributed an exclusive article to Insurance Forums about working with clients who would benefit from diversifying their life insurance coverage.

The article (link below) covers some of the major considerations in a portfolio approach to managing life insurance coverage, including layering coverage and second-to-die policies among others, and takes a look at what combinations of policies might be appropriate in some common scenarios.

Please give the article a look, and share your experiences or challenges you’ve faced in layering coverage for clients on this thread.

Insurance Forums | Building a Life Insurance Portfolio

 

[tooker0704]

Good article. The multiple policy approach is often the right thing to do for the client and good for your practice as well. Every additional policy increases retention substantially.

 

[MSchreur]

This is excellent advice! Thank you for sharing! I anticipate using the needs based, combined policy approach with all my clients that will listen to me. Although that is my passion, I am still very new to life insurance. I've been in P&C for 10+ years and got my life license in 2011. I've decided to branch out on my own and focus on life insurance sales. May I ask, how did you learn all of this? Any designation courses or work experience that were helpful along the way? Even though I understand the basic concept of these strategies, the details are way over my head. I get the term layering but the permanent options are very foreign to me. It's pretty sad because I own a UL policy and do not completely understand it! I want to be able to help clients maximize these options but I've got studying to do! Any point in the right direction is appreciated.

 

[WMG]

I understand the concept, and I read the article. I think maybe there is a collapsing of certain issues and thoughts.

While I feel there is certainly some credibility and validity to a "multiple policy" approach -- there has to be definitive reasons why. Are we talking about term or some type of permanent coverage? First, I only feel it's feasible and necessary with large amounts of life insurance. At $1mm, no, completely unnecessary; especially if you deal with quality companies. Second, there could be underwriting, reinsurance, retention, etc., and other related issues. Third, diversification might be over-saturation and the inexperienced agent might not know it. Even the experienced agent might not know it as he/she might be inexperienced with large cases (very large).