Our company serves individuals, families and businesses throughout the important stages of their financial lives. Our clients seek the experience and wisdom of professionals who assist them in implementing guaranteed strategies to protect, maintain and transfer their wealth.
“Among the most important financial decisions you will make in life is about choosing the right professionals”, says Ted Bernstein of Life Cycle Financial Planners.
We are advocates for our clients, assisting them with:
- Succession planning.
- Wealth transfer and inheritance plans.
- Insurance for income and asset protection.
- Long term care planning.
- Retirement planning; and
- Strategic business planing.
Financial services specialists offers our clients the best thinking from each discipline. We excel by staying focused on insurance and retirement solutions and by working as a team with other trusted advisors, including accountants, estate planning attorneys, asset managers and financial planners.
Our practice style is consultative and educational. We help our clients create better insurance and retirement solutions – and then implement them in ways that are easily understood. As a columnist and contributor for our industry publications, I contribute to the betterment of our industry by raising awareness about important issues facing consumers and insurance companies. I was recently interviewed and quoted by the Cato Institute about taxation issues facing the insurance industry.
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to develop several innovative products that changed our industry. Life insurance without commissions is one example of how these innovations have transformed the life insurance industry. The Installment Payout Option is another. This option lowers annual premiums and creates better policy value. For many families, having the option to protect beneficiaries with guaranteed payments over time is better than lump-sum payments, which often creates serious planning problems. Lump-sum payments often fail a family when the proceeds do not last as long as intended.
We offer guaranteed income solutions that are 100% liquid from day one with everything guaranteed, including the lifetime income you receive. This alone has created another industry-wide transformation, helping to bring annuities out of the dark ages and into the mainstream. Fixed indexed annuities are now the Private Pensions of our era.
Innovation can be hard to recognize in the world of financial services. Yet, there are many good examples including mutual funds, ETF’s and indexing strategies. Many of the innovations I have introduced to the market have several things in common:
- Better value creation;
- Elimination of surrender penalties;
- Customization;
- Transparency; and
- Lower premiums for life insurance and annuities.
The Future Is Bright
Personalization = Customization: The future is bright for consumers who choose to work with experienced professionals. Flexibility, disclosure and transparency are the keys to acting in the best interest of each client. Newer and better solutions are constantly emerging as a result of innovation throughout the industry. The future will continue to offer more options to customize life insurance and retirement plans, providing consumers what is needed to meet their goals and objectives. To succeed, we will need to stay focused on the following:
1. The issue of trying to define “best interests” and how misinformation about fees and commissions is viewed.
2. The continued negative perception of annuities by those who need them most. There is widespread misunderstanding and it is costly. Some of today’s annuities, especially many indexed annuities, are high performance tools that must be considered in every retirement plan. It is time for the insurance companies to take a proactive position to control the dialogue about the virtues of their core products. Insurance companies should be advertising directly to their end users.
3. Guaranteed, income for life. Professors and economists from Harvard and Yale are on the same side about the need for lifetime income in retirement. It is the linchpin of well balanced retirement plans. Offering superior product solutions that can be liquid from day one, guaranteed to never lose principal, guarantee income for life and ensure that all gains are added to the guaranteed principal.