Researched Advice or Opinion?

Clients are seeking advice about what is best for them, not an uninformed opinion of what might be good and certainly not some sales pitch for some particular product.  Advice, by definition, is the act of making a recommendation regarding a decision or course of conduct.  The reliability of any such advice is directly related to depth of knowledge supporting that recommendation.  Knowledge, by definition, is the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through (direct) experience or association (i.e., research).  As such, clients seeking reliable advice about which life insurance product is best for them must select life insurance practitioners that either have the experience or research necessary to know the facts that then lead to the most suitable life insurance product recommendation. 

So how does a client and/or their advisors go about identifying those life insurance practitioners who have either the experience or the necessary research? First and foremost, experience alone is no longer sufficient to provide familiarity with all the products in today’s life insurance market.  Thirty years ago, there were far fewer products with the only choices being term life or whole life which had been around in mostly the same form for decades.  Products were also more highly-regulated with fewer health-risk rate classes and less flexible.  As such, there was less difference between best-available rates and terms versus poorly priced products.  It was, therefore, conceivable, that a life insurance practitioner could become sufficiently familiar through experience alone to render reliable advice about product suitability in that environment. 

Since then, entirely new product types are being introduced about every 5 years or so. Insurers are also pricing products for specific funding strategies and age cells, and closing and reintroducing different versions of the same product type far more often (as often as every 18 months) in today’s life insurance market than in the past.  All these product advancements mean that the number of combinations and permutations of pricing factors has increased exponentially and beyond that which experience alone can equip the life insurance practitioner with sufficient familiarity to render reliable advice about product suitability in that environment. 

As such, to know just from experience which product is most suitable in a particular client situation, an agent/broker would have to have had experience with all prospective products from all appropriate insurers in all estimated 5,000 possible pricing combinations and permutations.  With some 65 insurers comprising 90% of the market (as measured by sales), and with each insurer offering at least 2 different product types, an agent/broker would have to have had experience with and retained the knowledge of that experience with more than 500,000+ possible different answers to the question of which product is most suitable in a given client situation.  In addition, because old products are being withdrawn and new products introduced every 18 to 24 months, this experiential knowledge is not cumulative and thus is likely 98% incomplete without the benefit of research (i.e., the ability to look things up). 

Of course, this is not unlike the circumstances of the CPA or tax attorney who has certainly not memorized the many sections of the tax code and must look things up in the likes of Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), CCH Group, Research Institute of America (RIA) and more.  Or of the investment manager who has certainly not had first-hand experience with each and every possible mutual fund, private equity fund, hedge fund, stock, bond and/or other security and thus looks things up in the likes of Morningstar, Lipper, ValueLine and the like. 

For the same reasons that CPAs subscribe to tax information services like BNA, CCH or RIA that are separate from the advice rendered to clients, BOTH THEInsuranceAdvisor.COM AND the trusted life insurance professional are needed in many cases for the necessity of both A) the independent research offered by THEInsuranceAdvisor.COM versus B) life insurance advisory services offered by these trusted life insurance practitioners.

THEInsuranceAdvisor.COM is simply the fastest, easiest, and most credible, comprehensive and cost-effective way to independently verify to clients and their advisors whether or not the pricing and performance of existing or proposed life insurance is in their best interest.  Only THEInsuranceAdvisor.COM is accepted for independent client representation, endorsed by the New York Bankers Association (NYBA) and compliant with the rules of leading regulatory agency for the financial services business. 

Use the Confidential Policy Evaluator (CPE) Research Reports to determine the appropriateness of pricing, the reasonableness of performance expectations for invested assets underlying policy cash values, and overall suitability for you(r client’s) policies based on the 5 factors of suitability.  Click here and get up to 3 Confidential Policy Evaluator (CPE) research reports under our NO-Risk trial subscription.