Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Two decades after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration started receiving complaints that Ambien and other sleep aids made women taking them particularly groggy the next morning, and even might have been responsible for driving accidents, the agency accepted and responded to the scientific evidence behind the anecdotes. It turns out that women’s bodies simply metabolized the active ingredient zolpidem in all these sleep aids much more slowly than men did. In 2013, the FDA finally acted, slashing the recommended dosage of these medications in half for women.Medicine isn’t the only field where “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” still prevails. Equality is a wonderful goal, when we consider the kind of outcomes that we want, whether it’s a good night’s sleep or retirement security. How women reach those equal outcomes, however, may require taking a different pathway, whether it’s a question of medical or financial advice. Even the definition of what “financial success” and a good relationship with an investment advisor looks like can be very different for women than for men. I’ve seen many of my clients come to understand what this means. For example, a widowed woman in her 60s, began working with...

The growth of the voluntary benefits market has brought plenty of new players along with new products. More products mean more options for brokers to wade through, but it also means there’s a greater expectation to find the right fit for employers. Particularly when it comes to hospital indemnity insurance, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. To find the plan that works for your employer clients, there are four key things you must consider when selling hospital indemnity insurance, which covers the gap between health coverage and out-of-pocket expenses. 1. Don’t look at the hospital indemnity plan; start with the employer’s medical coverage. The first thing you should consider when evaluating a hospital indemnity plan isn’t related to that plan at all. The employer’s medical plan should be the first thing considered. More than many other voluntary products, hospital indemnity insurance is a companion to an employee’s major medical coverage.The costs of spending just one night in the hospital can quickly chew through an employee’s entire deductible. We’ve all seen the statistics on what that can mean for an employee; Bankrate reports more than 60% of Americans don’t have enough in savings to cover a $1,000 expense. Taking note of the...

Retirement anxiety has been persistent since the Great Recession. Fewer than 40% of nonretired adults said they think their retirement savings are on track, according to an annual Federal Reserve System poll. And 25% of workers have no retirement savings or pension. While the findings are alarming, the surveys represent a significant opportunity for advisors to help people navigate the road to financial security in retirement. Despite all the free online advice and self-directed platforms, financial professionals still have a big role to play in making financial health in retirement attainable for more Americans. The Fed surveys have consistently found that even among those who are saving, individuals said they lack confidence in their ability to manage their retirement investments. The transition to retirement used to be relatively simple, at least for individuals with traditional pensions offering predictable payments. But defined benefit plans have been shrinking. In 2017, only 16% of Fortune 500 companies offered a defined benefit plan (traditional or hybrid) to new hires, down from 59% among the same employers in 1998, according to Willis Towers Watson. That has left people on their own, with self-directed, employer-sponsored plans and individual retirement accounts to supplement Social Security.Yet people still...

There are many sales ideas that revolve around the idea that the cash value of a whole life policy is akin to the policyholder having their own private bank from which loans can be taken. And there is absolutely no reason a policy owner would not do exactly that. Makes sense. What does not make sense is that many agents who sell these plans forget to monitor those loans to make sure clients do, in fact, either repay them or plan for the potentially negative tax implications, if they don’t. Our non-scientific data, obtained from decades of trying to untangle the knots clients tie themselves into after years of borrowing and non-repayment, indicate that the mutual carriers’ whole life products are the most borrowed against and also the most difficult to remediate. To be fair, this is not a criticism about the product itself, but rather the reality of the complexity of how loans affect the structure of a product that clients, and some agents, clearly do not pay close enough attention to. By the time we see them, most loaned policies are so deeply underwater that they are almost impossible to rescue. To understand the problem and turn it...

Since the beginning of commercial insurance technology – roughly in the 1950s from my perspective – there have been long-view opportunists who seek intelligent technologies. These would imitate humans’ cognitive functions and, perhaps, would eventually allow people to focus more on high-level thinking, paired with cold beverages and palm fronds. While we are much closer to theoretical nirvana now, the leisure activity has not kicked in yet (at least for myself and my cohort). So what is the current status, and what’s still in flux? What’s new It is clear that we have high-end technologies (e.g., AI, ML) which are at work as we speak. Oliver Pickup discussed “Artificial intelligence [and] its progression into the mainstream” back in February 2018. It seems that there are a lot of tools, including machine learning, high-speed internet, secure cloud storage, mobility solutions, low-cost devices, etc. Meanwhile, functionality has broken through the cell wall and is moving AI into the mainstream in a twist on a previous joke: “Experts agree that 2018 is likely to be the year AI breaks into the mainstream. The joke that Machine Learning is like teenage sex – everyone talks about it, but very few actually have it –...

“No, no, don’t touch that!” her vigilant grandfather would yell. From an early age, Cait Howerton became a master of semantics and rebellion — not touching that same precious breakable again, but moving on to the next curious, yet-to-be-held object. Again, her grandfather would yell, “No, no, don’t touch that!” to which a toddling Howerton would retort, “Paw Paw, I’m just wookin.” This “tenacious curiosity,” as Howerton described it, is a trait that she still possesses. Howerton, 29, is using that tenacious curiosity in a much different way than her younger self. She is a certified financial planning candidate, taking her exam for the CFP designation next month, and is also the recipient of the Financial Planning Association’s 2019 Diversity Scholarship. Along the way, Howerton has put her curious nature to good use, always trying to understand the “why” or “how come” and even the “why not.” Read the original article at InsuranceNewsNetMagazine.com

David Contorno wants employers to imagine they are buying a car instead of buying health insurance for their workers. He describes it this way: “Imagine you go to buy a new car and your budget is $300 per month,” Contorno said. “But the salesman is so good that they wind up getting you into a $1,000-a-month car payment. And on top of that, you discover the car is really low quality. Do you think that switching your car insurance carrier would be a good strategy at that point? But what happens if you get yourself into a better car that costs less money to maintain? Don’t you then lower the cost of your car insurance, too?” Contorno’s point is to look at the health part of health insurance. “You can’t fix health care through insurance,” he said. “But you can fix insurance by fixing health care.” Contorno is the founder of E Powered Benefits in Mooresville, N.C., and wants to help health insurance brokers save their employer clients money on health insurance by cutting the cost of their workers’ health care. Read the original article at InsuranceNewsNetMagazine.com

What can an Olympic-medalist swimmer teach us about working with clients? Then you went on to your work life and were convinced that the older generations really needed to get out of the way. It’s the same story for every generation, right? How to win, obviously. That is universal — it just takes a plan, a team and intense focus. And, let’s face it, most insurance agents and financial planners are lousy at doing that for themselves. We tend to go it alone and go after the next thing and not look at the long haul. Sure, some do it well, but don’t we all wish we could plan, team-build and focus a whole lot better? Paul Kingsman knows about it because he took his medal-winning ways to the world of financial planning to build a successful practice. Then he broadened into writing, coaching and speaking at events such as the MDRT annual meeting to help others learn how to do it. Among his many awards, Kingsman won a bronze medal in the 1988 Olympics for New Zealand. When he retired from swimming, he went into financial advising. He is now based in South Carolina, using the lessons he learned...

The fallout from the tough best interest regulation passed by New York officials has begun. Just weeks after Regulation 187 took effect, two major insurers pulled their annuity business from the state: Jackson National suspended the sale of fee-based annuities. A Jackson spokesman called the suspension “temporary” until the company sorts out compliance issues. Penn Mutual suspended all annuity applications, effective Aug. 30. The Pennsylvania-based insurer will cease accepting life insurance applications in New York on Dec. 31. The Penn Mutual timeline reflects part two of Regulation 187. The rules will be extended to life insurance on Feb. 1, 2020. That is just one area where rule borrows heavily from the late Department of Labor fiduciary rule. But while the DOL rule was tossed out by a federal appeals court, Regulation 187 opponents were not as successful. Acting Albany County Supreme Court Justice Henry Zwack ruled July 31 that the New York Department of Financial Services was within its authority when it issued Regulation 187. As this issue went to press, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors–New York and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of New York, plaintiffs in the lawsuit, had not appealed Zwack’s decision. “It...

You could practically hear every eye in the room roll back when Dorothy, our human resources director, explained why our health insurance rates were increasing so dramatically and what we could do about it: “You can just stay healthy!” To be fair, that was the last, impromptu “option” on the list, but it struck us as pretty obnoxious coming from an executive of a newspaper corporation. This was 1988 and health insurance was just starting to get more complicated and far more costly, with increases pushing 50% year over year. My employer did not have control over the rates, but Dorothy got the brunt of our frustration. I was just starting out in newspaper journalism, not a lucrative profession. So every dollar counted. It took me many years to realize that Dorothy was right that the aspect of my health insurance that I had the most control over was my health itself. Whither Wellness? The brokers see it as focusing on the health care costs rather than on the insurance rates. It certainly makes sense. But what you won’t find in the article are wellness programs. That’s because even though 50 million employees are covered by them, the programs don’t...