Out of the top 10 AE Life producers, seven are new to selling life insurance! How did they climb the ranks so quickly? They achieved their success by refining their retirement planning process to include the discussion of life insurance. Not only do they understand the value life insurance provides as a unique asset class with solutions for long-term care, legacy and tax considerations, but they also introduce these concepts, strategically, into their client discussions.

In a comprehensive retirement plan, life insurance can play a vital role in your clients’ overall financial strategy, providing more than just death benefit protection. In addition to a tax-free death benefit, life insurance can offer tax-deferred accumulation potential, tax-free distributions via policy loans and tax-free accelerated death benefits, which can be used for living benefits to help offset the costs associated with chronic illness and long-term care. While life insurance can create a tax-efficient, diversified strategy and can help provide solutions for health care and legacy planning, the timing of the presentation of these benefits to your clients is key to creating understanding and closing the life insurance sale.

A successful retirement planning process with the use of life insurance begins during the initial visit with a discussion of the client’s current income, investment, tax, health care and legacy plans. A second client meeting consists of an analysis of risk, cost, income and Social Security as well as a tax and RMD analysis to generate the data necessary to create a draft of your proposed retirement strategy for your client.

Once your strategy draft is in hand, it’s time for your third meeting when you have a conversation with your client about the implementation details of the game plan for income, investment (if properly licensed) and advanced planning — tax, health care and legacy. This is where positioning life insurance comes into your planning discussion.

Positioning life insurance at this point helps to ensure you’ve established a relationship with your client and have presented a needs analysis before diving into the details of how life insurance may fit into the client’s overall retirement planning strategy. In your final planning meeting, you’ll reiterate the structure of the strategy, set expectations, review policies and accounts, establish a regular review process and explain the implementation of the advanced planning portions of the strategy.

Life insurance may be an ideal component of a client’s comprehensive retirement planning strategy to complement fixed-income assets and to help manage and potentially reduce total tax liability while addressing his or her health care and legacy concerns with the added protection of a death benefit. How you introduce these solutions into your client discussions is key.

Give me a call to discuss how you can kick your life insurance sales into a higher gear by effectively positioning the life insurance discussion in your retirement planning process with your clients.

All clients should be encouraged to seek the guidance of a qualified tax professional prior to making a decision regarding their personal situation. Discussion of securities and securities transactions by those lacking the appropriate registration places their insurance license at risk. Results from the use of these concepts are no guarantee of your future success.