Five slides that make room for both, starting with where life insurance fits.

Most advisors start with a needs analysis, and for good reason. It asks what your family would need if you died tomorrow, and it answers that question well.

There is a second question, and it is easy to skip: what do you want? How much of what you have, if anything, do you want to go to the people you care about when you die? Should any of that amount be in the form of cash for them? Needs and wants are different questions. A life insurance conversation should make room for both.

Why life insurance for wealth transfer should be allocated and adjusted like any other long-term holding, and how that compares with the way it is sold today.

Life insurance answers two different questions. The first is protection: if I die tomorrow, will my family be all right? The second is wealth transfer: how much of what I will have do I want to go to other people as cash, and how do I keep that right as my life changes? The way life insurance is sold today was built for the first question. It is now used for both. For the second question, I think there is a simpler and more logical way to do it, and it borrows the logic investment advisors already use for portfolios.

Where the capital dividend account does its work.

If you advise on life insurance, the investment Holdco is arguably where the product fits best. The money is already set aside, the owner usually has an accountant, and the tax rules give a death benefit there an advantage over most of the alternatives. What advisors often lack is a simple way to explain why, one a client can follow before going to the accountant for the details.

Here it is: three kinds of money, one theory of integration, and the capital dividend account. Then the numbers, and the assumptions that move them.

An investment holding company usually holds three kinds of money, and they have not all paid the same tax. In round numbers: money that came up from an operating company’s active business income has paid about 12%. Business income above the small business limit has paid about 25%. Investment income earned and taxed inside the Holdco has paid about 50%.

Canada’s tax system is built on integration. Whatever route income takes, by the time it reaches the shareholder the total tax should come to roughly the same amount - call it 50%. So the 12% money and the 25% money still owe the difference. It is paid when the money comes out as a dividend, during life or at death. Until then it sits in the corporation, which is why it is sometimes called trapped surplus.

The objective is to rank the participating whole life products available to independent advisors in Canada, on published criteria, with the scoring open to inspection. Not because a ranking settles anything, but because an advisor cannot write a real reason-why letter without naming companies and saying why this one. No carrier is going to hand us sufficient product information that lets us do that. If we do not build it, nobody will.

That makes it a professional disclosure obligation rather than a marketing exercise. The industry already requires a reason-why letter. A letter that names a product without saying what it was compared against, on what criteria, is not a reason. It is a record.

This is a work in process, and everything below is open. Here is the methodology.

Enhanced Whole Life, thirty years after it broke, and what changed when an insurer guaranteed the moving part that broke us.

Here is a structure I did not expect to find on a Canadian shelf, and I have only found it once so far.

An insurer offers a guaranteed amount of life insurance for a guaranteed premium over twenty years, at the lowest cost for a guaranteed twenty-pay I can find on the market. Then it funds part of that guarantee with two things it does not control and cannot promise: the dividend its participating pool earns, and the cost of one-year term insurance it buys from a reinsurer. Neither of those is guaranteed. The result is.

So the insurer has taken the floor. Whatever happens to investment markets, to mortality experience, or to reinsurance pricing over the next fifty or sixty years, the amount the family receives does not move.

And then, if the pool does well — and nobody will know how well for a very long time, possibly not until the contract is a claim — the policyholder does well too, out of the same pool, on the same experience. It looks like a product designed by an actuary for a large group of friends all sharing the risk.

I cannot see how they priced it. That is not a complaint. Based on forty years of doing this, I do not know how you do it, and it is the one question I would most like answered. But I have read the contract and run the illustrations, and nothing in either of them is hidden.

A product review of Foresters Advantage Plus with the Enhanced Insurance Option, and why I changed my mind about it.

A male 37 non-smoker pays $1,232.80 a year for twenty years. When he dies — at forty or at a hundred, it makes no difference — his family receives $90,000. That is the entire transaction as he experiences it. Twenty payments, then nothing more to pay, and one number at the end.

So he knows exactly what it costs. Twenty-four thousand six hundred and fifty-six dollars in total, three dollars and thirty-eight cents a day, and after the twentieth deposit he is finished. And he knows exactly what it buys: $90,000, guaranteed, whenever it happens. On the premium survey I run, that is the lowest-cost guaranteed twenty-pay available in the Canadian market today. Everything else in this article is about how a company can do that.

Because underneath those two numbers the contract is doing something he will never see unless he reads the fine print. The $90,000 is not one amount. It is $51,426 of basic insurance, guaranteed outright, plus $38,574 of what the contract calls the enhanced amount — and the enhanced amount is bought every single year with a dividend that is not guaranteed.