With all the technical talk about life insurance, the types of life insurance, which life insurance companies would be best etc…… The bottom line is if you love somebody, if you have people who depend on you please get life insurance. Whether you get it from lifeinsure.com or not, please get it and get as much as you can.

Whole life insurance can be a wonderful financial instrument. The barrier is “sticker shock” because the premium for whole life (or universal life) is so much more expensive in the initial years than term life. To compare whole life/universal life and term life insurance think about a level premium vs. one that is much less initially but becomes much more expensive (term) as you get older. As an analogy, with whole life you’re overpaying now to “underpay” later. In order to do this, part of the “overpayment” is held in reserve by the insurance company and earns interest (tax deferred). This is called cash value. You can access your “reserve” or cash value through loans or if you drop your policy. Another analogy that’s been used that’s not entirely inappropriate is to compare whole life vs. term to leasing vs. buying. One costs more initially, gets but you get to use it for life and develop equity — whole life or owning. One is temporary and with housing inflation gets more expensive — renting or term. You might consider permanent life insurance such as whole life or universal life insurance as part or all of your life insurance portfolio.

Without getting into too much detail, if your estate is of sufficient size - $5 million plus - to be concerned about estate planning there are unique planning ideas that can help you and your family minimize estate taxes, increase retirement cash flow to you and your spouse and to help a worthy charity (or charities) that you care about. Here’s just one very simple idea out of many: One sets up what is called a charitable remainder trust. This trust gives a future donation of property or other assets (usually appreciated assets). The property is given today but the charity does not have access to that until both you and your spouse die. Say it is an apartment building purchased for $500,000 15 years ago and now worth $3,000,000. The charity receives the gift, sells the property and guarantees you and your spouse a lifetime income. You receive the income plus a current substantial tax deduction. What’s the result? You and your spouse receive lifetime income, a current large tax deduction and the property is no longer in your estate or subject to estate taxes. So what about the children or grandchildren? One can take some of the cash flow from the charity and by using an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT) obtain life insurance that replaces the value of the asset to the children and passes estate and income tax free! This is a very simplified description of many varieities of this and other techniques where you, your family and charity can benefit if you plan a gift. Associates of lifeinsure.com can, in concert with legal advice, help crunch the numbers to show if such designs can be of benefit to you. You can contact us for more information on charitable planning. Mark the contact - “Questions about charitable planning” so we get it to the right associate.

Here’s a copy of a recent press release we sent out: Entire Life Insurance Rates Database Open to Public Not too long ago a consumer interested in life insurance would have to call on a bunch of agents to get quotes and compare prices (or have agents come see them). Twenty plus years ago an agent would look up the cost for someone in a rate book or rate manual and give a quote often for their company. You could trust that the person in front of you had a fair price or to compare you’d call on another one or two. The next evolution which changed life insurance quoting was the PC since an agent could check software on their computer and give you a printout, but it was still usually from one or two companies that the agent had software. A consumer could then collect printouts from a few different companies. The Internet changed everything. One can learn about life insurance and get instant life insurance quotes from all the most competitive companies and can do it online, instantly and anonymously.This is a perfect example of Internet shopping. Shopping for life insurance has evolved from having a life insurance advisor to one’s home or office with a rate book, to seeing an agent or several agents with printouts from a pc, to present, where one now has the ability to view an entire life insurance rates database on one’s own pc through specialized life insurance sites, like lifeinsure.com. These sites allow one to see the prices anonymously and instantly.This evolution in life insurance quoting has another unintended, but positive, consequence benefiting of the American consumer. Because of the full disclosure now available in life insurance quoting and the complete transparency, life insurance companies must compete. The best rates are shown instantly for all to see! Thus we’ve seen rates for term life insurance to continue to get lower year after year. With life insurance on the Internet that industry has not only seen an evolution but a revolution of full disclosure with the consumer winning.