life insurance Money
put into these products grows on a tax-deferred basis just as it does in
retirement accounts. In the case of annuities, the money is eventually
taxed as ordinary income when it is taken out. With permanent life
insurance, the death benefit goes to the beneficiaries free life insurance of
income tax, but if it is a permanent life insurance policy, as opposed to a term
policy, the owner of the policy could also borrow against its cash value
and never pay income tax on it. (The insurance company charges interest
on the borrowed money, though, and that loan reduces the value of the
death benefit if it is not paid back life insurance
life insurance
And while insurance companies are using the tax issue as a selling
point, that is by no means the full picture. I have written recent
columns on how this year’s tax increases have influenced behavior
around estate planning and life insurancelife insurance investments.
As in those two cases, life insurance the decision to buy various life insurance
policies or annuities can be unduly influenced by the tax advantages
inherent in insurance. Many policies carry high upfront and management
fees, have limited investment options and penalize people for
withdrawing their money life insurance within a few years of buying the policy or
annuity life insurance.
With these downsides, insurance companies are regularly looking for
reasons to sell their products beyond the death benefits of insurance
and the steady income stream of annuities.
“Oftentimes life insurance these products are sold based on the moment in time,”
said Richard Coppa, managing director of Wealth Health, a financial
advisory firm. “A couple of years ago, they were sold on guaranteed
returns of 6 or 7 percent because people were so fearful. Today, it’s
uncertainty about taxes because many of the favorable tax treatments out
there are subject to negotiation.”
life insurance He said
there were certainly people who were afraid of running out of money in
retirement who could benefit from an annuity. He pointed to people with
$250,000 to $500,000 in assets who could calculate how much money on top
of Social Security they would need and buy an annuity that would cover that life insurance.
“ life insurance I
think you really need to run the numbers and understand life insurance the charges and
compare those to an investment portfolio where you’ll get an expected
rate of return,” he said.
life insurance Given
the lure of tax-deferred savings, how should people weigh that against
the risks and downsides of insurance life insurance and annuities?
Thomas Pauloski, national managing director at Bernstein Global
Wealth Management and a former insurance company executive, said people
could go wrong when they did not fully consider how long they wanted to
keep their money in an insurance policy and how much the company was
charging them in fees.
life insurance If they
are going to pull out the money out in a few years, insurance makes
little sense since fees will cancel out any gains. What’s trickier is
knowing what those fees are going to be, even over the long haul life insurance.
Mr. Pauloski said among permanent insurance options — as opposed to
term insurance, which has no cash value — only so-called private
placement life insurance policies were clear about their fees, but that
was because these policies were custom-made life insurance for
someone paying a premium often in excess of $1 million. With more
common forms of permanent insurance, like universal life insurance and whole life,
finding the fees becomes more difficult, he said, because of how they
get embedded in the policies.
life insurance More
confusing still is how the returns on the cash value of the policy are
presented, since they can mask the high fees. “Any insurance
illustration is going to have a lot of assumptions built into it,” he
said. “It assumes, for one, that today’s pretax dividend is going to
continue forever. That is simply not going to happen.”
When presented with a proposal for a client, he said he often went
back to the insurance company and asked it to redo the calculations with
lower, more realistic assumptions. Even that, he said, is not life insurance perfect because it assumes a consistency that is unlikely.
life insurance With annuities life insurance the fees start to pile up when people elect
additional features, like a guaranteed, minimum payout. Those fees
reduce the return and the value of the tax deferral life insurance.


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