Retirement Income
You Can Sell Your Life Insurance Policy (Yes, Really)
Many seniors don't realize they can sell their life insurance policy instead of letting it lapse. Here's how life settlements work and when they make sense.
Retirement Income
The Three Plays the Pros Run
Yesterday you learned the three tax buckets. Today, the playbook. Three specific strategies sophisticated planners run with permanent life insurance, including one that can defuse the tax bill your kids would otherwise inherit along with your IRA. Part five of The Evolution of a Promise.
Retirement Income
How Are Your Assets Actually Taxed? The Three-Bucket Diagnostic
Two households, identical incomes, very different tax bills. The difference is not luck and it is not loopholes. It is which of three buckets each dollar comes out of. Part four of The Evolution of a Promise leaves the history books and lands in your kitchen.
Retirement Income
Every Tool in the Life Insurance Box Was Invented for a Problem
Term, whole life, the policy your employer hands you, and a product born because the 1970s broke everything. None of them were invented to be sold. Each one was invented because a specific decade handed ordinary families a specific problem. Part three of The Evolution of a Promise.
Retirement Income
The Math That Made the Promise Fair
In the 1750s, London's only life insurance society turned a man away for being too old. He happened to be one of the finest mathematicians in England, and what he did about it is the reason your premium is priced fairly today. Part two of The Evolution of a Promise.
inheritance planning
The First Life Insurance Policy Ever Sold Ended in a Lawsuit
June 18, 1583. A London salt merchant named William Gybbons becomes the first person in recorded history covered by a life insurance policy. Eleven months later he is dead, the underwriters refuse to pay, and a court has to decide whether the brand-new promise means anything. It did. It still does.