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June 20, 2012 at 07:04 AM
The mutual insurers that sell traditional products such as participating whole life insurance tend to be leery of trying to predict the future.
The only things certain under the sun are death and taxes.
“Past performance is no guarantee of future results” has become something like a secular hymn for the more respectable members of the financial services community.
But participating whole life has been around for generations, and there is something about pairing it with long-term care (LTC) benefits that seems as natural to some marketers as pairing warm cocoa and a warm chocolate chip cookie, or fluffy slippers and a big armchair.
Tara Reynolds, a corporate vice president and marketing specialist at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Springfield, Mass., said in an interview that she thinks financial services consumers are showing more appreciation for history than they were a few years ago, before the economy cooled.
MassMutual started selling individual long-term care insurance (LTCI) in 2000 and now has a 7% share of the individual LTCI market, Reynolds said.
The company has been selling dividend-paying whole life insurance since the 1860s.
“Whole life has been around for an awfully long time,” Reynolds said. “That tells us something.”
MassMutual sells stand-alone LTCI policies, and it also sells an LTC rider along with whole life policies. A purchaser who qualifies for LTC services can use the rider to accelerate payment of a portion of the death benefit payment.
