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April 18, 2011 at 03:36 PM
Last Monday, I received from a colleague a clipping of personal finance columnist Lynn Brenner’s latest “Ask the Expert” column. The column runs in Newsday, a daily newspaper serving the metro New York and Long Island communities, as well as online. Basically, it’s like Dear Abby but on financial matters. You can read the entire article here, but the short version is a reader asks the following question:
My husband bought a $150,000 flexible premium life insurance policy more than 20 years ago. He’s now 70, and our children are adults. I don’t think we’d buy the policy today if we didn’t own it. The insurer says our $1,000 annual premium will maintain it until 2014. The cash surrender value is about $6,000 and declining a little every year. The agent wants to talk about switching to a different policy. What should we do?
To which Brenner’s ultimate answer is:
The bottom line. As you grow older, you may no longer need life insurance.
Yeesh. No wonder why individual life numbers took such a hit in recent years. with experts like this, who needs charlatans?
Now, Brenner didn’t start with that. She went through some other options, such as surrendering the policy, reducing the face amount of the policy to a point where the insured no longer needs to pay premiums, or exchanging the policy for an annuity. Interestingly, she never mentioned a fourth option – selling the policy to a life settlement company – even as an abstract concept. I find myself wondering why. My friends in the life insurance world might not like that option being raised, but it is an option nevertheless, especially since it looks like the secondary life market is here to stay.
This is not the first time Brenner displayed what appears to be a fairly narrow view of life insurance. In another article, she points out that there are three basic reasons for having life insurance: to replace the salary of a breadwinner, to provide cash to pay for estate taxes and to invest on a tax-deferred basis. Now, I have only been in the life insurance business (to the extent that a journalist can say he is “in the business”) for about a year, and even I know there is more reason than that to buy life insurance.
First off, Brenner’s off when it comes to replacing salary. How about replacing income? Surely there are other ways of bringing in money aside from punching a clock, all of which are insurable interests. Perhaps Brenner’s word choice was an accidental one, but I doubt it. She’s a financial reporter with many years of experience. She ought to know better before telling people about the inherent worthiness of a pretty important product such as life insurance.
