Joseph Belth — a longtime life insurance educator, journalist and analyst — died July 12, according to an obituary in The Herald-Times.
Belth was professor emeritus of insurance at the Indiana University business school and the publisher and editor of The Insurance Forum, an independent monthly insurance periodical that operated from January 1974 through December 2013.
Belth also wrote "Life Insurance: A Consumer's Handbook," "The Insurance Forum: A Memoir" and other books.
He was known for his attacks on what he believed to be dishonest or harmful practices in the life insurance industry. He helped start or advance attacks on practices such as sales campaigns leading to systematic, unnecessary replacements of consumers' in-force life insurance policies; questionable finance arrangements for universal life insurance premiums; some state regulators' moves to let life insurers use special arrangements to increase admitted asset totals; and "stranger-originated life insurance," or efforts by individual and companies to persuade ordinary consumers to apply for life insurance policies, so that the policy originators could sell the consumers' policies to life settlement firms.
Belth sometimes called STOLI "spin life," or "speculator-initiated life insurance," rather than "investor-initiated life insurance," as some other commentators did, to emphasize that the people behind the creation of the policies were speculators, not investors.
He was a strong, early supporter of the idea of applying a fiduciary standard to life insurance sales, and requiring agents to put the customers' interests first, rather than simply requiring agents to verify that the policies sold to consumers suit the consumers' needs.
Belth's early life: Belth was born in 1929 in Syracuse, New York, to Irving Belth and Helen Bright Belth. He grew up in Syracuse and graduated from the city's Nottingham High School. In the 1950s, he served as a radio operator in the New York National Guard.
He earned an associate degree from Cayuga Community College, while working as a life insurance agent at Continental Life Insurance. He also earned a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he was a fellow of the S.S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education. He earned the Chartered Life Underwriter and Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter professional designations.
He married Marjorie Lavine in 1955. Belth is survived by his wife and three children.
Belth's career: Belth began teaching at Indiana University in 1962.
Belth started his own publication partly because he was frustrated by what he saw as censorship by the editors of the trade journals and other publications.
He was president of the American Risk and Insurance Association in 1974. In 1986, he sued the association in a state court in Wisconsin after the association acted on the advice of its lawyer not to publish an article about a possible case of plagiarism because of concerns that the article might be libelous.
He shifted to blogging online, at JosephMBelth.com, and he kept blogging up until May 2022, when he was 92.
Honors: In 1991, Belth received the George Polk Award, a major award for investigative journalists, for his tough coverage of the life insurance industry.
He also received the 1999 Solomon S. Huebner Gold Medal from the American College of Financial Services and the 2017 John Newton Russell Memorial Award for his service to the industry from the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors.
Sheryl Moore's view: Sheryl Moore, the head of Wink, a life and annuity data tracking firm, drew attention to Belth's death by writing about it on her LinkedIn feed.
"Financial advisors who read ThinkAdvisor should care about who Joseph Belth was because he worked hard to protect their business — always writing about problematic products, elusive regulations, troublesome practices and more," Moore said. "Like me, he wanted to save the life insurance industry from itself. His research was groundbreaking. His impression on the life insurance will be felt for years after his passing."
Joseph Belth. Credit: Indiana University
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