Expert: Wealthy Keep Wealth

Although there has been an erosion of their wealth in the current economy, “the wealthy are still wealthy,” Shaeffer says.

Shaeffer, who works in a Charlotte, N.C., office, says most small business owners, who make up an important subset of the high-net-worth market, have avoided wealth shrinkage, because their net worth is in their businesses.

“What keeps business owners lying awake is thinking, ‘How am I going to help my business continue?’” Shaeffer says. “Life insurance offers them 2 exquisite solutions: leverage and accumulation. Leverage can be offered through universal life with a focus on high death benefits. An accumulation product set would be an indexed variable universal life policy. Those products are gaining momentum.”