Agent's Sales Journal: Five New Articles

Long term care cost inflation is creating new challenges for financial professionals and their clients, as uncertainty about equities, a soft housing market and rising health care costs have stunted the growth of many retirement portfolios. Advisors today are facing a common conflict: How to help clients re-adjust expectations for retirement.

A friend of mine who has a contract with Prudential recently sent me an ad he had received from them.  It was actually pretty good.  Directed toward agents rather than consumers, it listed thirty uses of life insurance and their respective support pieces for the agent's use.  But the list of what life insurance can be used for would make an excellent one-page handout for our clients. So, here it is.

The benefits of innovation never seem to last long. Even in our industry, where change sometimes seems maddeningly slow, an innovative product or process may be quickly emulated and copied, becoming the new standard within a year or two.

In the early phases of health care reform, the medical travel benefit option stands alone as an opportunity for agents to offer employers a quality health care option at greatly reduced prices. In recent years, medical travel has made an interesting shift to encompass a growing number of U.S. Centers of Excellence, where patients can choose from superior clinical results in elective and specialized surgeries. Even better, they're priced at 20-40 percent less than the average cost of these surgeries.

Clark Hogan is an opportunist in the very best sense of the word. Having started his career as a financial advisor, he moved into a business development role during the late-'90s tech boom. Fast-forward to 2008 and Hogan felt the itch to do something different. He wanted to "find a new industry where I could create maximum impact in a sort of disruptive way," and saw opportunity in the life insurance policy space, where seniors and even Baby Boomers had policies they no longer needed, but no one to help them analyze the value or organize a sale. And so, he set off to revitalize the industry.