A few days ago another agent took offense to my obviously uneducated view that indexed universal life is a poor excuse for a life insurance product, especially in the context of infinite banking.

He commented on a post by starting with “I’m sure your completely well-intentioned, but you ought to be more careful of publically declaring opinions & comparisons before you actually know what you are comparing against.” He then jumped on his soap box and rattled off a litany of assumptions about IUL’s that made me sound embarrassingly uninformed. So I called him out on it. I was even nice and didn’t call him out on his rather limited grasp of spelling and the English language. Illustration against illustration. Hit me with your best shot and I’ll post it on this forum for all of my readers to see.

I understand that’s a two edged sword. Remember that six months ago I thought any agent that sold cash value dependent products was insane. Here was his chance to show everyone that I was insane for jumping on board with the wrong cash value product. If I’m wrong I have to eat a little crow, but I get smarter and get to share that with my readers and clients. If I’m right I get to blog him into a pathetic little IUL puddle.

At first he was excited by the idea of an online contest between dividend paying whole life insurance and indexed universal life insurance. So I gave him the parameters of the Illustration which happened to be me. I think I representative of a lot of people over 50 who could use a life insurance product that can help them achieve some goals. I’m a late bloomer and the whole get out of debt, plan for my retirement thing. I’ve done some things right and I know I’ve done some wrong. I just need a little help and I’m real pleased to see what I can do with the right whole life policy.

I gave him the budget and the time frame and what I wanted to pay off along the way and then made the finish line easy. Whoever can guarantee the most cash at the end of 20 years wins. Well, darn. You would have thought I had kicked a Primerica agent in his private parts.

He wanted to know how much I had in savings, how much disposable income I had, how much I had in IRA’s, Roth IRA’s and 401ks. He wanted to know how much I owed on my house and my rental houses, how long I had left to pay and at what interest rates.

I told him that for the purpose of getting the most bang for my cost of insurance buck I was going to use my daughter as the insured and told him her age and that she was preferred, not preferred plus. He wanted to argue that he could get her preferred plus. I understood his logic. Some companies don’t offer a preferred plus rate on cash value plans and by dragging him down to preferred I might be putting him at a disadvantage. The problem is that she might not even qualify for preferred, so I was just trying to lay out a realistic playing field.

He wanted to know my current lifestyle budget and at what age I wanted to start taking income and what my lifestyle budget would be at that time. He wanted to know if I wanted to if I wanted to factor in inflation in my retirement.

Take those questions times about three and that is really how much he asked. I told him for the purposes of comparing insurance to insurance none of that was important. He truly reminded me of an appointment I sat in on one time with a Primerica agent that had made an appointment to sell life insurance to a cousin. I pretended to be her husband. We told the agent what we wanted for life insurance and then went along for the ride. An hour and half later the agent had a plan to rewrite our mortgage, roll over all of our retirement funds and investments, put long term care insurance in place and I’m pretty sure he got around to life insurance at some point.

I am guessing this guy is successful, but on a scale of one to ten, I’m guessing he does all of the talking and very little listening unless it is on track with the answers to the questions he’s asking. That works for some people. They want someone to take over their whole financial life and make it perfect and he’s probably good at that. But he doesn’t listen if your ideas aren’t his first.

Bottom line. Unless I get the illustration I suggested to him tomorrow I will post my own IUL and whole life comparison. I’ll be fair and who knows, maybe I’ll prove myself wrong. If you have any questions or wonder why your indexed UL is under performing, call or email. Let’s talk.