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April 12, 2017 at 11:34 AM
If you help clients with life insurance, or with longevity planning, information about how long people live shapes your world about as much as the Force shapes Luke Skywalker’s.
A life insurance policy or annuity contract is really a statistical lightsaber made up of assumptions about mortality and interest rates.
— (Related on ThinkAdvisor: Under the Hood: Life Expectancy and Financial Planning)
A team at the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has just published the latest U.S. life tables. That’s a 64-page PDF full of information that’s in the public domain. It can be reproduced or copied without permission, without getting you in copyright trouble.
The NCHS life tables report even includes a statement at the end that the document is “hereby certified as an official federal document and is fully admissible as evidence in federal court.”
You might have no need for statistical information that’s admissible as evidence in federal court, but you might have a need to make rain. You might have an interest in reaching new prospects, in persuading established clients to give you more business, and in attracting referral business from other professional advisors.
If you have a fee-based business, your need to establish yourself as a thoughtful, independent-minded source of wisdom might be even more acute than if you rely mainly on commission revenue. If you have, or are building, a fee-based practice, based on the idea that you will act as a fiduciary, you can’t just get leads from a service and sell people what seems nice to sell today. You have to have your own idea about what the world is like, or at least show clients that you are knowledgeable enough to make a sensible choice about where to go for ideas about how the world is, and how the world of the future will be.
One quick, cheap and easy way to establish yourself as a thinker is to use free government statistical data.
Here are five ideas about how to do that.
Keep in mind that, before you make any effort to market yourself, even through use of a government document that’s admissible as evidence in federal court, you need to check with your own compliance advisor, and the compliance people at the financial services firms you work with, to make sure you’re dotting your compliance I’s and crossing your compliance T’s.
1. Tweet.
Many agents and advisors set up Twitter feeds, then wonder what on earth they should tweet.
One simple way to use the new NCHS life tables report is to post a copy of the report on your website. Put a prominent link to your local copy of the report on your main entry page, or whatever page you’d like prospects to visit first.
