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Are Insurance Costs Increasing Your Volatility?
Each
month, insurance costs are taken from your Universal
Life policy. Often the contract will default to
taking a proportionate amount from all investment
accounts. However, if taken from the wrong account
at the wrong time, you could be drastically increasing
the volatility of your UL investments, and over
time potentially significantly reducing your return.
Assume you invest $10,000 in a UL policy which earned
6% in one month and -5% the next. At the end of
the two months you would have $10,070. Now let’s
reverse the order and say the investment returned
-5% the first month and gained 6% the second. You
would still end up with $10,070.
Now let’s add insurance costs of $300 per month
into the equation. If the costs are taken out at
the beginning of each month, and the investments
return 6% and -5% respectively, at the end of this
scenario you would have $9,482.90. If we take the
second scenario and reverse the returns while taking
the charges out, you are left with only 9,449.90
– a difference of $33 over a two month period!
As you can see by the above example, the timing
of returns has an impact on your UL investments
when insurance costs are taken into account. Over
a long time period, this effect can greatly increase
the volatility of your UL portfolio. In periods
where there are a lot of early negative returns,
even a "fully funded" policy can lapse. Since there
is no way to predict the returns of equity-linked
investments, how do you protect yourself?
To protect yourself from this scenario, the best
method is to allocate some of your investments to
fixed-income accounts and have the costs deducted
only from these accounts. This will not necessarily
improve the performance of your investments, but
over time it will greatly reduce the volatility.
If you wish to discuss this Universal Life strategy,
or have any other questions about insurance, feel
free to give us a call at 1-877-628-6762
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This website is not meant to provide legal or account advice. As
each situation is different you should consult your own
professional advisor for advice based on your specific
circumstances.
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