Bogleheads.org

Thanks for posting that link. I'd seen it years ago but haven't visited in a while. He's spent a lot of time on that. yea funny thing is supposedly per his site, the insurance companies arent super fond of him posting so much info. i think they should be paying him for that site. He has a few flaws...

The visible policy is a good site although i bet an agent "friend" asked him to post here initially. Incorrect (at least the part after the "although" ;) ) As indicated far above, a friend did suggest I check out the boglehead forums, and told me to expect a cool reception conce...

I'm getting ready to update my spreadsheet for 2011. The spreadsheet includes annualized returns for VBIIX as of 30 April, going back to mid-90s. Something has shifted though. The historical adjusted close numbers are not the same as they were last year. Here is a table of Apr 30 Adj Close numbers a...

wander wrote:After 11 years, if the return is 8%, you would have about $23k (before tax). But on the other hand, you have peace of mind last 11 years investing in an insurance.

Where have you been invested for the last 11 years? I think I'd like a piece of that.

To summarize, whole life insurance is not a bad product if sold correctly on a total needs basis. That said, my 40 plus years in the insurance sales industry has proven to me that the vast majority of whole life sold in family markets with dependent children is sold incorrectly and the driving forc...

I talked to my insurance salesman and dropping the waiver of premium and changing to annual payments saves me $79.40 year which gives me a return of 4.95% a year. How I didn't know about these extra charges cutting into my yield before this, I attribute to my previous financial ignorance, but thank...

... Note I don't subtract the annual premiums from the divisor, and I might quibble with you whether that belongs in the divisor anyway. I pay monthly so that cash flow is spread out over the entire year. Maybe dividing my premium by half and including that in the divisor is more appropriate. I sti...

Cloud, some of your questions are discussed in another current thread: * Should I Cash-In Whole Life Policy after 11 Years Policy from: New York Life Insurance Company Whole Life Insurance - started 1987 Base Plan Death Benefit: $50,000 Annual Premium: $360.50 Total Death Benefit: $62,648 Net Cash V...

BTW - my annual return is about 7% so that's clearly a good deal. At 4.36% your decision is not so clear. 7% sounds abnormally high. 4.36% sounds a lot more likely, considering you are getting insurance on top of that. Before I mentioned that your formula was like BBAG, implying it was not exactly ...

Quasimodo wrote:I wonder what the european health insurance model does that prevents or avoids this issue.

Universal coverage. And assuming the nation has private insurers, they have to insure anyone. There are no cherry pickers when everyone is a grape.

Lux, you are welcome. You'll still need some patience. actuary guessed it would take five years to reach the break-even point using his method.

dr_g, we better watch out. Several non-negative posts about permanent life insurance in a row!

I'm willing to bet that as a general rule, mutual insurers play less games like this than publicly-traded insurers. They don't have pressure from up high to make the next quarterly report look good. (Or in the probable case of AIG, less bad.) Minnesota Life Insurance Co., mentioned favorably in the ...

penngy, your choice is broader than "keep it or sell it". Perhaps you are paying for an unnecessary rider such as "Waiver of Premium". Are you paying more premium than you need to? For example, on my policy it would have cost $132 a year more in premium if I had paid monthly inst...

... - Upon both parents deaths, the parents want to leave more $$$ to my friend, WITHOUT the other 2 siblings knowing. ... I don't know enough about the insurance options to comment, but ... woah! You sure you want to get in the middle of this? Getting involved in someone else's family secrets coul...

I don't know enough about VUL to give any actual advice. If you decide to get rid of it, one thing you might look into is a "1035 exchange". It allows you to exchange a cash value life policy for another policy, endowment, or annuity with no tax consequences. From the sound of it, your pol...

I wish I had done as you suggest, actuary. No use crying over spilt milk, though. It would have been kinda neat to be getting flamed here for showing my WL policy outperforming BTID. At least then I could understand the heat. :) The conversation could have gone like this: BruceM: You dreamer -- ther...

There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in our choosing of a 401k plan way back in 1999. That is a long time. Still, I expected some comments on how others weight past performance versus plan fees.

If no other comments, I won't make any more either.

Yeah, but if it's a woman or small teenager, will you call them a BBAGUETTE?

It now fulfills the role of the "tax-deferred bond-like-thingy" in my portfolio and provides life insurance, so I have decided to keep it for now. I might have gotten less static in this thread if I had started out saying something like that. When I got the whole life policy, it was in ad...

It's coming..... Not necessarily. In my case it was a $550 stereo system bought at Radio Shack. The date was 28 January 1986. You may not remember, but it was the day the Challenger shuttle blew up. As I was there, the store TV's were showing the disaster. Mesmerized and mind-numbed, I bought the s...

There has been a presentation sitting almost forgotten on my site for 11 years. Now that I'm a boglehead, it occurs to me some of you might be interested in it. Back in 1999 I was an employee representative to my company's retirement committee. At that point in time we were choosing a new 401k plan....

I forgot to mention that the actuarilly-accepted measure of annual gain on a cash value policy is called Linton Yield. It calculates an internal rate of return after factoring out the cost of insurance (COI). I accept that it works, but it is an "insider" calculation which presumes you hav...

I hope they applied your discount retroactively (assuming the discount existed when you bought your car).

One view of my present policy status is on the chart above, which appears on my ' Current ' page. Another is my latest activity table, which is a reconfiguring of the official statement, but with metrics added: http://r0k.us/insurance/images/NYL_activity14.png Statement Restated (In preview, image i...

My agent did not use any form of hard sell. I called him after looking up NYL agent in phone book. We set an appointment, and a few days later he met me at my house. He asked me why I wanted insurance, how much I thought I needed, etc. Then he left several brochures. They covered term, universal lif...

I don't think the Wizard is accusing you of being a LI salesman, only that perhaps your logic is a bit skewed. ... But if you think it provides this, then by all means, go for it :-) I don't know what on my site consists of wishful thinking, or even anything I've posted above. Thank you, mas, for r...

I find this Whole Life sales pitch quite hard to believe. Insurance companies are not the place to go for investment purposes. Buy term insurance for the amount and time-frame needed and invest your money in index funds with a company like Vanguard. End of discussion. "Sales pitch"?!? I p...

I think my answer would be is that I want the internal buildup of cash if it's going to be more than the value of alternative investments of roughly equal risk. In other words, what is the expected IRR net of the insurance benefit? Is there data on how whole life has performed net of the insurance ...

Duh, again. You see what happens when I don't have that dunce cap?

I was convinced in a PM to change the topic name from:

* The Visible Policy is not advocating anything

One hopes use of the phrase "whole life insurance" won't cause folks any anxiety attacks.

(1 + 0.032) * (1 - 0.0221) * (1 - 0.0267) * (1 + 0.0687) = 1.0497 = 4.97% (I'd say that rounding errors account for the .04 difference) Duh -- compounding! I knew that. (Anyone have a dunce cap I can borrow for an hour or so?) Yahoo publishes a column called "Adj Close" which is meant to ...

I'd like to improve a comparison for performance of VBIIX with another investment that has an anniversary date as of 10 May. I don't expect to find annualized returns for mid-month, and April 30 is pretty darn close. Lacking some table of monthly annualized returns going back to 1996, I could fall b...

Wow guys, thanks. This is a better reception than I expected. My friend told me to expect skeptics of permanent life insurance, and maybe worse. That's why I came in with full defensive ambiguity, beginning with the topic's title. Even with all the posts so far, there hasn't been much actual discuss...

The Visible Policy is a non-commercial website which analyzes and attempts to explain my personal participating whole life insurance policy from New York Life. A friend suggested I join Bogleheads and see if any of you all would like to check it out and comment. I sense here that hackles may rise a...