The craziest part about
Why Whole Life Insurance is a Bad Investment
As i share you my experience of buying an insurance policy. I was contacted by an insurance agent who wanted to sell me a life insurance – whole life insurance policy. Where term life insurance only lasts for the term you select upfront (for this policy, 20 years) whereas,whole life insurance is set up to offer a death benefit no matter how old you become.
I instantly stuck with the idea of buying whole life, and for more reasons than one. But here’s why I haven't buy whole life insurance, and why i stuck to term life insurance policies suit our family just fine:
1.Whole life Insurance are absurdly expensive
To get a real sense of the value of term, let’s compare a term policy and a universal life policy. Say a 40-year-old nonsmoking male has a choice between a $250,000 Met Life universal policy with a $3,000 annual premium and the same amount of renewable term coverage with a 20-year fixed premium of $350. At the end of one year, the universal policy, assuming it paid 5.7% per year, tax-deferred, would have a cash value of exactly zero (cash value is the amount you would get back if you canceled the policy). But say he had instead invested $2,650 (the difference between $3,000 and $350) in a no-load mutual fund that averaged a total return of 10% annually. At the end of the first year, he’d have $2,841, accounting for taxes on the earnings at a 28% rate. At the end of 10 years, he would have accumulated more than $46,000 in after-tax savings in the mutual fund. Over the same period, the cash value of the policy would have climbed only to $31,819.
Here is a calculator from selectmypolicy.com
Obviously, this is just one estimate from one insurer, and I might pay more or less for whole life insurance based on the provider I select. Still, it just goes to show how much more expensive whole life insurance can be versus term coverage. In this case, it costs more than 10 times as much for the same level of coverage
⏩
2. Whole life returns are not guaranteed
One of the biggest selling points of whole life, or permanent life insurance, is that it builds cash value you can borrow against. Many whole life insurance policies also pay dividends, but they aren’t guaranteed. As a result, some companies falsely market whole life insurance policies as a complicated mix of life insurance and investments.
Life insurance salesmen like to talk about the returns on their policies as if they are guaranteed. They are not. Neither are the returns from stocks or bonds, but don’t be misled into thinking that whole life insurance returns are somehow on a different level.
The illustrations these salesmen present showing beautiful long-term growth are simply projections, and rosy ones at that since the company is trying to sell you. There is plenty of risk that the actual performance will be worse than what is shown during the sales process.
With that said, there is actually a small guaranteed return on these policies, but even this is incredibly misleading. For example, a policy may have a “guaranteed return” of 4%, but when you actually run the numbers using their own growth chart, after 40 years the annual return might amount to less than 1%.
There are a number of explanations for this difference, including fees and the way in which the interest rate is applied. But the bottom line is that you can’t take that “guaranteed return” at face value. It is incredibly deceptive. Run the numbers for yourself and see if you’re happy with the result. The reality is that you can often get better guaranteed returns from a savings account or CD that’s also FDIC insured.
But, it’s hard for me to understand the benefit of overpaying (possibly tenfold) for a life insurance policy just to build a quasi-savings account I can potentially access. It can certainly be more nuanced and complex than that, and I’m aware that whole life insurance can be a smart way for wealthy families to leave tax-free money to their heirs. Still, is there actually a benefit for the average family to pay so much for whole life just to build cash value and potentially score dividends?
3: Positive returns take a long time to appear
In the rosy illustrations, beyond the guaranteed portion mentioned above, a policy that’s held for 40 years or so will show a return of around 4%. That’s not bad, although 10-year Treasury Bonds have historically returned about 5.4%.
The problem is that it takes a long time for the returns to reach that level. There will be many years at the start of the policy where your return will be negative, and many more years where the return will be only slightly positive. If you stick with it for a long time, you eventually get into a reasonable range of returns. But if at any point before that you decide you want to do something different, you will have spent many years and a lot of money getting very poor returns.
Keep in mind that this is very different from the possibility of poor returns from stocks and bonds. While stocks and bonds guarantee nothing and certainly might deliver poor performance over certain periods, whole life is almost guaranteed to have very poor performance for at least a decade and often upwards of two decades.
This is not the
⏩
4: Whole life insurance is illiquid
Investopedia defines liquidity as:
“The degree to which an asset or security can be bought or sold in the market without affecting the asset’s price. Liquidity is characterized by a high level of trading activity. Assets that can be easily bought or sold are known as liquid assets.”
Liquidity is important because it gives you options. While you hope to never have to touch your long-term savings, the reality is that life happens and the more options you have the more financially secure you can be. Having access to your money gives you options.
Whole life insurance is illiquid for several reasons:
- For the first decade or so, you are almost guaranteed to have negative returns. This means you can’t even expect to get back the amount of money you put in.
- Many policies have a surrender charge, which is essentially a fee you have to pay if you decide to cancel the policy and withdraw the cash value. If you surrender, there will also be income tax consequences on any earnings.
- Most policies will allow you to borrow against the cash value, but you have to pay interest. This is true even if you are borrowing only the amount of money you have put in, not what it has earned above that.
All of these factors make it difficult to get to your money if you need it. In theory, you should be compensated for this difficulty in the form of higher returns, but as we saw above this is not the case.
I have seen it argued that retirement accounts are also illiquid because of the penalties associated with early withdrawals, and this is certainly true to some extent. But I have several counters to this argument:
- 401(k)s and
- With a
- Regular old taxable accounts have no inherent liquidity issues, give you the full range of investment options, and can be used in a tax-efficient manner.
⏩
5: Less cash flow flexibility
A corollary to the liquidity issue is the concept of flexibility of your contributions. Even with a 401(k) or IRA, where you can’t access your money without penalty, you can always choose to stop contributing for a period of time if you need that money for other purposes. In the meantime, your account stays intact, steadily earning tax-deferred returns on the money you’ve already put in.
With whole life insurance, you can’t just decide to stop paying premiums. Well, you can, but if you do then the policy lapses and you’re forced to withdraw the cash value, which will subject you to taxes and possibly a surrender charge. And if you haven’t had the policy in place for multiple decades, you will also be left with meager, and possibly negative, returns.
Are you ready to commit to paying that huge premium year after year, no matter what happens in your life? Of course we all want to keep our retirement contributions steady, and even see them increase, but life happens and there are many instances in which having options is incredibly helpful.
Those options are much more limited with whole life than with other investments.
⏩
6:The claim of “tax-free” withdrawals is misleading
One of the big selling points of whole life is the “tax-free” retirement income. What they’re describing is your ability to take out loans against your policy, which are not taxed. This can indeed be an attractive feature of the policy, but it comes with several warnings.
First, although there are no taxes, there is interest. When you borrow from your policy, interest starts accruing from day 1 and keeps accruing until you pay back the loan. If you’re using it for
Second, these loans reduce the death benefit of the policy, which may or may not be important to you.
Furthermore, you can run into complications when you withdraw too much from the policy and there’s no longer a big enough cash value to support the premium payments. When this happens, you either need to put more money into the policy (likely not part of your retirement budget) or the policy will lapse and then you will face tax consequences.
So no, there aren’t “taxes” applied those to loans, but there are plenty of costs. Whole life insurance policies are fraught with complications like this that the salesmen never tell you about.
⏩
7: Lack of transparency
Whole life policies include many fees that are never explained to you. There’s the commission to the salesman. There are administrative costs. There’s the cost of the insurance.
I challenge you to find an example of a whole life illustration that clearly details these costs for you, similar to the way a mutual fund has to tell you the expense ratio, sales commissions, and other fees. They just aren’t transparent, which makes it impossible to understand what you’re truly paying for.
And there are many other terms and conditions that make these policies very complicated. One such example is the issue described above where borrowing too much from your policy can cause it to lapse. Another is the “guaranteed” interest rate that’s actually much lower than what they state.
Even the salesmen selling these policies often don’t understand how they work. One salesman, after I asked a number of questions he didn’t know the answer to, showed me his watch and said that he didn’t know how it worked, he just knew that it worked. Whole life, he said, was the same way.
Is that really the kind of person you want to trust your money with?
⏩
8: There are plenty of other options available
Whole life insurance might be more attractive as an investment if there weren’t so many other good options available.
Many people have a 401(k) or other retirement plan with their employer. Just about everyone has the option of
And if you’re worried about some day wanting the permanent life insurance coverage, know that any
⏩
Whole life insurance is a bad investment
There are certain instances where whole life can be useful. If you have a genuine need for a permanent death benefit, such as having a disabled child, it can serve a valuable purpose. If you have a large amount of money, have already maxed out all of your tax-deferred savings, and you can afford to front-load your policy with large payments in the first several years, it can provide better returns than was discussed above. So it is a useful product in a limited number of cases.
But the majority of people to whom whole life is sold do not fit these criteria. The majority of us do not need a permanent death benefit and do not have the large amounts of money on hand to make these policies a reasonable investment.
For most people, whole life insurance is a bad investment. You’re simply better off investing your money elsewhere.
The Bottom Line
As Consumer Reports notes, several factors make it difficult to figure out whether whole life insurance is ideal. For starters, they note, insurers aren’t required to disclose what part of the annual premium goes to pay life insurance and which part builds cash value. As such, it can be difficult to calculate or even surmise any sort of “rate of return.”
Not only that, but the huge commissions agents earn selling whole life serve as ammunition for the hard sell. Brian Fechtel, a financial analyst and life insurance agent, told Consumer Reports that commissions on whole life insurance can be as much as 130% to 150% of the first-year premium, which can easily be $10,000 dollars or more. How can you trust an agent’s advice when your decision to buy – or not buy – could easily mean a difference of thousands of dollars for them? In my opinion, you can’t.
But, that’s not the only reason I would never buy whole life insurance. At the end of the day, I try to keep our lives – and our finances – as simple as possible. For me, that means buying a cheap term life insurance policy and keeping control over as much of our hard-earned cash as we can. If I want cash value I can borrow against, I would rather build it in a savings or investment account with my name on it.
This post have 0 Comments
EmoticonEmoticon