Life changes — are your clients’ life insurance policies keeping up?
Are your clients taking a “file and forget” approach to their life insurance policy? You can help them by scheduling regular policy reviews, an essential step to ensuring that their coverage is keeping up with their needs and expectations — even when they haven’t experienced one of the major life events that frequently prompt a review, such as getting married, having children, planning to retire, etc.
To guide this process, take advantage of John Hancock’s policy review kit. It’s designed to help you reach out to your clients and cover all factors that are essential to determining that the right coverage and policy are in place. Teaming up with John Hancock means working with a company that has the financial strength and stability to meet promises today — and in the future.
Policy review overview
Step 1:
Use this what to consider when reviewing existing inforce policies document as a refresher on what to look out for with policy review
Step 2:
Identify prospects and clients who you would like to reach out to. Here is a prospecting letter to help you make those connections
Step 3:
Set up policy review appointments. The life insurance policy review checklist is a helpful way to organize and document what you discuss with your clients. If a client has had major lifestyle changes, the needs analysis can help identify any gap in life insurance need. (In addition to this PDF version, we have an online version of this tool)
Step 4:
Review the policy to ensure it continues to meet the client’s needs/goals.
Conclusion
It is a good practice to review life insurance policies often. The above resources are great starting point to enabling that discussion. Keep in mind, however, that in reality policy reviews are an art and not a science, and your discussion may uncover other considerations, including the need to update beneficiaries, and/or a replacement involving a 1035. Finally, for those clients who are business owners, trustees of trust or even those whose focus in on legacy planning, there may be other resources to consider than a typical policy review. Reach out to John Hancock for suggestions and look below for additional resources.
For more information email us or contact us at 888-266-7498, option 3.
Trusts should be drafted by an attorney familiar with such matters in order to take into account income and estate tax laws (including the generation-skipping tax). Failure to do so could result in adverse tax treatment of trust proceeds.
This material does not constitute tax, legal, investment or accounting advice and is not intended for use by a taxpayer for the purposes of avoiding any IRS penalty. Comments on taxation are based on tax law current as of the time we produced the material.
All information and materials provided by John Hancock are to support the marketing and sale of our products and services, and are not intended to be impartial advice or recommendations. John Hancock and its representatives will receive compensation from such sales or services. Anyone interested in these transactions or topics may want to seek advice based on his or her particular circumstances from independent advisors.
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