for agent use only | life insurance post pandemic by Mitch Long

I hope everyone is doing well and I am excited that in North Carolina we appear to be moving in the direction of opening up the state. However, I think this experience may cause some permanent changes in how customers purchase life insurance and we need to be prepared. To that effect, here are a few thoughts I have been contemplating and I welcome your thoughts and ideas

1. Now more than ever we need to stay in contact with our clients. The way we do this may change to social media, email, or phone versus face to face meetings as some clients may still be reluctant to interact in person.

2. Taxes will increase on our target client base. The government will need to recover the subsidies sent out to lower-income folks. I think it will be hard to argue that taxes won’t increase for those people that the government considers “wealthy” (if you did not get a subsidy check this means you). This makes cash value life insurance attractive as a potential source of tax-free income.

3. Life insurance is more important than ever. Over the past six months, more Americans have died due to the COVID-19 pandemic than those lost in the Vietnam War. How many of those people had life insurance and if so, did they have enough?

4. Life Insurance companies are going to change products and change prices. This may include further changes to conversion rights in current contracts. We need to review our client’s life insurance to ensure they take advantage of their rights in the policy.

5. Business Owners need planning. The pandemic experiences bring home the risk to a business if they do not have continuation planning. The death or disability of a key person or business owner could devastate a business

6. Product Delivery will change. The method by which we deliver our product to the customer will change. I have submitted more cases online and delivered more cases electronically via email and secure cloud servers than I did all of last year, and I did a lot of that in 2019. If you haven’t tried these processes yet, the technology and capabilities are available on our KazSource website or within many of the carrier portals

Please let me know your thoughts or suggestions about life insurance post pandemic at [email protected]. As always, I am here to help you in any way I can.

Mitch Long