The top 10 IUL myths and how to debunk them

Myth #6: Taking loans from an IUL in a flat market is risky.

Critics have long proclaimed the perils of taking distributions from an IUL in a flat market. The thinking goes that even if an IUL can never do worse than 0 percent, it still has to sustain the cost of insurance in those flat years. When you couple the cost of insurance with zero growth and then take a distribution, your policy could go into a tail-spin from which it may be difficult to recover.

Even if the above statement were true, I’ve long advocated that the IUL should be one of multiple streams of tax-free income upon which clients rely in retirement. When coupled with Roth IRAs, Roth 401(k)s, Roth Conversions and tax-free distributions from IRAs (up to the standard deduction and personal exemptions), tax-free distributions from an IUL can be a welcome supplement to a tax-free retirement. Should an IUL not perform well in any given year, this might be the ideal time for our clients to avail themselves of their other tax-free streams of income. The peril arises when clients put all their eggs into the IUL basket and don’t diversify their sources of tax-free income.

Myth #7: The IUL shifts the risk of growing cash value to the policyholder.

This is an argument commonly put forth by advocates of whole life insurance. While whole life insurance companies assume the onus of growing their policyholders’ cash value by depositing premiums into the insurance company’s general account, IUL policyholders assume the “risk” themselves. They do so by linking the growth of their accumulation account to any of six to eight different indices. So the success of an IUL, the story goes, ultimately depends on the policyholder’s ability to choose the “right” indices.

Well, many financial advisors advocate a balance of at least two or three different indices (for diversification purposes), each of which has back-tested rates of return that range from 7 to 9 percent over the last 40 years. For our purposes, let’s assume these mixes of indices continue to provide a 7.5 percent average annual rate of return into the future. Let’s also assume these contracts are properly structured (by minimizing the death benefit and maximizing contributions up to IRS MEC guidelines) and have average internal expenses over the life of the program of 1.5 percent. Well, that’s a net rate of return after fees of 6 percent. Getting a consistent 6 percent net rate of return without taking any more risk than you’re accustomed to taking in your savings account is not an inherently risky proposition. Once again, we make decisions every day with regard to our financial lives that involve risk. Having to choose the right complement of indices in your IUL with the help of your financial advisor should not be considered one of them.

Myth #8: IUL minimum interest rate guarantees are smoke and mirrors.

This criticism arises because of how IUL minimum guarantees are sometimes explained to the client. Some companies have a minimum guaranteed growth rate of between 2 and 3 percent. That doesn’t mean, however, that they guarantee you’ll receive a 2 to 3 percent credit in all down years. One such guarantee might work in the following way: Every five years (can be between five and eight, depending on the company), the company looks back at the growth in your accumulation account and asks: Did your money grow at a minimum cumulative rate of at least 2 percent over those five years? If not, they will go back and retroactively credit (or in industry parlance “true up”) your account at a 2 percent cumulative rate for each of those five years. In other words, the worst your policy will grow over any five-year period is 2 percent.

Why do insurance companies make these guarantees? Because they realize that the likelihood they’ll have to honor them is infinitesimally small. After all, given the track record of these policies over any historical five-year period, what’s the likelihood that the index would be down in so many of those years as to average only 2 percent? Not very likely. The market would have to experience very little movement (or go straight down) over that five-year period, which the market rarely does. Even during the “lost decade” of the 2000s (where the market finished the decade pretty close to where it started) there were incredibly wide swings, which resulted in huge gains for IUL policies. In short, the IUL’s critics are wasting a lot of hot air on a perceived deficiency (the minimum guarantee) that has a very low statistical likelihood of ever coming into play.

Myth #9: Clients risk a huge 1099 should the IUL run out of money.

As is often the case with IUL myths, this one has a kernel of truth but is shrouded in fallacy. First, let’s parse out the truth. The IRS does require that any life insurance policy have at least $1 of cash value at the time of death, or the policy violates the definition of life insurance. If the client violates this rule, they risk receiving a 1099 on all the gain in the cash value above and beyond their basis. For policies whose accumulation funds exceed their basis (the vast majority of policies when structured properly), this poses a substantial risk. However insidious this risk, it can be mitigated in several ways.

First, as I mentioned in Myth #6, IULs should never be the only tax-free stream of income a client relies upon in retirement. It should always be perceived as a complement to multiple other tax-free sources (i.e., Roth IRAs, Roth 401(k)s, etc.). If the IUL doesn’t perform as expected over a period of time, simply rely upon those other streams of tax-free income. If the IUL is only one of multiple sources of tax-free income, the likelihood it would run out of money falls dramatically.

Second, some well-regarded IUL companies offer an over-loan protection rider that insulates the client against the prospect of loaning too much money and bankrupting the policy. These types of features typically work in the following way: let’s say that through a combination of too frequent (or too robust) loans in an underperforming market, your cash value descends to a dangerously low level. Companies will alert you of this danger and avail you of the opportunity to “pay-up” the policy. In this scenario, they reduce the death benefit to the point where the remaining cash value effectively “pays-up” the policy. This procedure disallows further loans, but also ensures that there will be at least $1 in the cash value at death, helping the client avoid a taxable event.

Third, this criticism is much more relevant to VULs where combinations of market downturns and ill-managed distributions can send policies into a death spiral from which they may never recover, resulting in a taxable event. The IUL is different than a VUL in a very fundamental way: while a VUL’s cash value may be rapidly depleted in a down market, the IUL never gets credited worse than 0 percent. Certainly the cash value could reduce somewhat during a 0 percent crediting year due to ongoing insurance expenses, but never to the extent that it would during the down markets we’ve seen over the last 15 years. In other words, while this risk is worth discussing, it isn’t a compelling reason to forego the financial benefits of an IUL.

Myth #10: Variable loans could sink your IUL ship.

Variable Loans are a unique feature of IULs that can enhance distributions by allowing the loaned portion of the accumulation value to continue to receive index credits (say 7 percent). The thinking goes that if the credit is consistently greater than the loan charge (say 5 percent), then the company is effectively paying you to take a policy loan. This additional credit (2 percent in this example) can further build cash value and increase the cumulative loans over the life of the policy.  

Critics target these types of arrangements because the client bears the full brunt of loan costs (5 percent in this example) should the index suffer a down year and the client receive a 0 percent credit. Two years in a row of full loan costs while taking distributions can be a dangerous drag on the accumulation value of the policy.

What critics fail to consider, however, is that some companies offer at least two different types of loans, the most common of which are variable loans and preferred loans. In the preferred loan, the amount being credited to the loan collateral account is the same as what’s being charged. Some well-regarded companies even guarantee that these two numbers will never change, ensuring that distributions will always be “tax-free” and “cost-free.” Further, some companies allow you to “toggle” between these two types of loans every year, giving the client an added measure of flexibility. So, if you take a variable loan in a down year, pay the full cost of the loan (5 percent in the above example) and don’t want to risk paying those loan expenses two years in a row, you can always revert back to the preferred “no-cost” loan.

Finally, we have to weigh the upside of the positive arbitrage of the variable loan in years where the index is up versus the downside risk of paying the loan costs when the index is down. To further explore this trade-off, let’s take a look at the S&P 500 index over the last 70 years. Since the decade of the 40s, the S&P 500 has been up roughly eight out of every 10 years. In two-thirds of those up years, the index has performed above and beyond many companies’ caps (assuming an average cap of 13 percent). That means that over the last 70 years, you would have experienced a positive 8 percent arbitrage (assuming an average loan charge of 5 percent per year) over half the time! Conversely, you would have experienced the full brunt of the 5 percent loan charge in only two out of every 10 years. For many clients who utilize the variable loan, this is a trade-off that’s well worth making.

In conclusion