When choosing the best financial product for your clients, you must take the tax advantages or disadvantages into account. The way contributions, earnings, distributions, and death benefits are taxed could dramatically impact how much your clients or their beneficiaries receive when their accounts are cashed out. Here's a high level comparison of how taxes impact your clients' different financial accounts.

A question some clients raise is that they’ve been told that indexed universal life policies won’t perform over the long term, in other words the policy performance isn’t as rosy as illustrated. Before AG 49, many producers over-illustrated the power of IUL, and today those new guidelines help temper some of the more outrageous claims. However, many carriers are finding unique ways to enhance policy performance by reducing the costs to buy the indexing options.

Selling indexed universal life over the phone is relatively easy if you have access to products that overcome the big objections to buying life insurance. The first objection to IUL that you’ll typically hear is that it is expensive. Here's why IUL isn't as expensive as your prospects think...

Universal Life insurance offers two death benefit options. Most financial professionals know the difference between the death benefit options. However, few understand how structuring the policy correctly can make a significant difference to long-term cash values.

Life insurance provides valuable protection for loved ones. While the primary purpose of pure life insurance protection is to provide a death benefit, many cash-value products offer "living benefits" that you can take advantage of during your lifetime. One major living benefit of cash-value life insurance is access to the cash values in times of need, such as to help pay for a child's education or to help fund retirement.

To amplify the power of Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 7702 many producers wonder what is the best way to structure a life insurance policy if given the choice of using either the Cash Value Accumulation Test (CVAT) or the Guideline Premium Test (GPT). For this reason, making the proper choice -- or selecting a product with the specific test more favorable to the plan design -- is an important issue when structuring the policy. The test selected can have a significant impact on premiums, cash values and death benefits.

With the proliferation of social media accounts, and their overall acceptance in the financial services marketplace, many producers wonder how to start the process of prospecting for IUL clients with Facebook or Twitter.  It really comes down to a few key elements:

Before we get started, let's get real.  Most people aren't saving enough money for retirement. According to a 2015, Employee Benefit Research Institute study, here's the average retirement savings balance for various age groups: