Workplace Permanent Life Sales Double

What You Need to Know

Accident insurance benefits sales increased in the fourth quarter.
Critical illness insurance benefits performed well.
The number of workers with new short-term disability benefits fell.

Your clients might be much more likely this month to come to you with employment-related life insurance.

The number of people with new work-related term life benefits increased 14% between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021.

The number with work-related permanent life insurance benefits — products such as universal life insurance and whole life insurance — soared 111%.

LIMRA has told the story in a new batch of workplace benefits sales survey results for the fourth quarter of 2021.

What It Means

For an insurance, retirement or general financial advisor, a client’s collection of work-related benefits can be a mystery, a source of comfort or a place to look for easy savings.

An advisor might have to struggle to get a client to find, and bring in, the paper bag full of papers explaining just what the client bought at the office, or to help the client recover the password that leads to the email account that can help the employee break into the employee portal, to see just what the employee bought.

In a crisis, the right benefits could save a client’s way of life.

The Numbers

LIMRA collects data on several different measures of benefits sales trends.

For an advisor in the individual market, the most interesting set of measures may be the one that reflects ups and downs in the number of people who have certain types of coverage, whether they have the coverage as a result of the sale of employer-paid group coverage, worker-paid group coverage or individual policies sold at the work site.

COVID-19 helped make the fourth quarter of 2021 a great quarter for new life insurance benefits sales.

The increase in the number of new holders of work-related permanent life coverage could be of especially keen interest to an advisor, because a client may be able to turn the policy into a retirement savings vehicle, borrow against the policy cash value, or even sell the policy into the life settlement market.

Here’s what happened to the number of people with some other types of newly purchased work-related benefits included in the LIMRA data: