Life Resource Planning Sells Insurance Products
February 6, 2018 | by the National Care Planning Council
As Life Resource Planners we typically work with the children of aging seniors to help their parents through the difficult years ahead. Aging seniors are faced with making a number of difficult decisions about their final years. These seniors often have an impaired ability to make rational decisions so they rely on their children to help them make the right choices. We complete a Life Resource Survey for their aging parents that we present to the children. We identify the potential challenges for final years that the aging parents and the children are not aware of. Aging seniors can't ignore the reality of these challenges and are forced to rely on their children to make decisions to get around these barriers.
Financial products or insurance products typically fit into the solutions for these difficult challenges facing the parents. By focusing on the planning process, we are not selling products, we are offering solutions. Because we have the answers to their parents challenging dilemmas, the children regard us as advisors and not salespeople. This advisor / client relationship further allows us to provide retirement and investment solutions to the children without having to act as salespersons and peddle products. The children will trust us and listen to our advice. If we have an honest product solution for them, the children will usually purchase it from us.
The Life Resource Survey we complete with the children will often lead to a more detailed planning approach which we call a Life Resource Report. The Report allows us to go into greater depth on various challenges and offer more solutions. If the children choose not to do a Resource Report, the Life Resource Survey provides enough information to identify potential areas that need to be addressed and the Survey alone will lead to product sales. In future articles we will discuss how we uncover various challenges and how that leads to a number of insurance product sales. Here, we will just mention briefly what types of insurance product sales that Life Resource Planning will lead to and a brief description of the path to those sales. It should be noted here that the children are typically in their mid-50s through mid-60s. This is a perfect age for planning for retirement and for implementing the attendant products that come with that planning. Here are the product sales.
- Income annuities are the result of preplanning for Medicaid for the aging seniors.
- Medicaid funeral trusts and life insurance estate trusts are also the result of preplanning for Medicaid. The children will also be interested in establishing Medicaid funeral trusts for themselves.
- Reinvestment of assets gifted to children are also a result of preplanning for Medicaid
- Retirement planning with accompanying investment strategies, allocation strategies and tax strategies are a result of the relationship we develop with the children.
- Long term care insurance for the children is a natural consequence of planning for the final years for their parents. Children recognize the devastating effect that the need for long term care has on assets and income and will readily buy the insurance for themselves.
- Annuity sales and life insurance are realized for many of the children as they are in the right age bracket to take advantage of Social Security benefit planning. Oftentimes, the annuity or life insurance will be combined with long term care benefits.
- Medicare insurance products are also realized due to the age bracket of the children we are working with.
- Health Insurance sales are always a possibility through the relationship developed with the children.
Look for future articles that go into more depth on how you do this solution-based planning and how it leads to the sale of insurance products. We will also show you how to tap into the aging senior market. .
