Update News for August 2022

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • IMPORTANT: Check Your Midmonth Frequency Setting

  • Bugs in July

  • UL-T100 (Canada) versus No Lapse UL (U.S.)

  • Joint Life Last-to-die (Survivor)

  • Changes to the Program

  • OLD Software NEW Data

  • Then NEW Software NEW Data

  • 6 Plus 6 For 6
    40th Year Celebration Referral Opportunity

  • How Do You Make The Referral?

  • This is a SPECTACULAR Deal

  • Our Current Programming Plans for 2022

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

IMPORTANT: Check Your Midmonth Frequency SettingSubscribers have the option to decided how frequently the program checks for midmonth update. Midmonth updates can occur ANYTIME between monthly updates, and are incremental file updates to the current monthly update. The setting for this frequency can be 0 (zero) to 30 days. Some customers have the value set to 30 and this needs to be corrected, unless you want the system to NOT check for midmonth updates.

You set this value by going to the top of the Red Menu. Above the big buttons are:

Click on Options

In the U.S. the third last choice (fourth last choice in Canada) should say:

This should have a check mark next to it. If it does not, please click on that option to check it.

Once that option is checked, the following option asks:

We recommend that this value be set to either 1 or 0 (zero). If it is set to zero the program will check for a midmonth update every time it starts. If it is set to 1, it will check once a day for a midmonth update. If you wanted to NOT check for midmonth updates, you would set the value to 30. We have a couple of subscribers who use the 30 setting, but that is for VERY unusual reasons that do NOT apply to the VAST MAJORITY of our subscribers.

Bugs in JulyJuly required the release of an updated GOWIN.EXE program files as the Canadian customers required changes to accommodate a last-to-die (survivor) modification to facilitate a UL-T100 product that has been added to our database.

UL-T100 (Canada) versus No Lapse UL (U.S.)As background, there is a product in Canada known as Term to 100 (T100). A T100 product is best understood as a non-par, permanent plan that does NOT offer the traditional cash surrender values that are found in non-par whole life. If you buy a T100 product, pay premiums for 40 years and quit, there are no cash values. I understand this well, I have owned two of these products for 40 years and it would be crazy to stop paying premiums as there are NO cash values. On the other hand, they provide me $350,000 of permanent insurance for about $100 per month.

Subsequent to my purchase of the T100 products companies introduced a variation where you could buy a T100 within a UL product. In essence the level premium T100 Cost of Insurance (COI) replaced the more traditional yearly renewable term (YRT) COI. That was a much more attractive situation versus a bare Term to 100 as you could invest additional funds into the product and those funds, together with investment growth as a result of those funds, could be used to fund future payments for the T100. This would ensure that there would be no lapse of policy due to an inadvertently missed premium. Further, providing the additional funds did not exceed certain tax related maximums, the accumulated growth of the reserves in the policy would pass, together with the COI death benefit, as a total tax free death benefit to the beneficiary. Needless to say, for those that need permanent insurance, UL T100 is a very nice product assuming that the T100 component is competitively priced.

NOTE: Term to 100 has NOT been replaced in Canada with level to age 121. While the U.S. has adopted “121” as the new maximum coverage and maturity age for most permanent products (not all), the Canadians continue to go with 100. This means that in Canada, those who live beyond age 100 end up with paid up policies although some earlier versions of T100 did not become paid up at 100, they terminated at 100, a serious problem for those living beyond that point.

In the U.S. there is a similar product to T100 called no lapse UL. In that situation you have a traditional UL with a YRT COI but the product comes with a secondary guarantee that says that if you keep paying the predetermined no lapse premium each and every year, and you do not miss the payment of a premium, then your premiums and face amount remain fully guaranteed regardless of the account balance in your policy. In effect, and in particular in later years, should your account balance go negative, the product will still deliver the death benefit.

The immediate problem with this, unlike the Canadian products, is that if you OVER fund the U.S. product, and the account goes negative, the excess money that you paid into the policy goes right down into the sink hole. As a result it makes absolutely no sense to put additional funds into a no lapse UL plan and you should make preparations for paying those premiums external to the product.

This is what I have done with my two Canadian T100 products. Basically they are paid by monthly automatic withdrawals from a Canadian bank account that has more than ample funds to pay all future premiums. If you have additional money, you would do the same thing to fund a no lapse UL in the U.S.

Alternatively if you are buying a new no lapse UL product today, and you have additional funds to work with, then you should consider buying a limited payment no lapse UL which offers premiums guaranteed to be paid up within a certain period. For example you could choose no lapse UL product that have a paid up period of 20 years, 10 years, 1 year or to some age like 65. Just like the life pay alternative, providing you pay the predetermined annual guaranteed premium, the product will guarantee the death benefit to your beneficiary. And if becomes paid up, then you do NOT have to worry about missing any premiums.

Joint Life Last-to-die (Survivor)Canadians use the terminology Joint Life Last-to-die insurance to describe what Americans call Survivorship insurance. Both work the same way. A policy is placed on two lives and the death benefit is paid to the beneficiary on the death of the last insured to die. These policies are usually used for estate planning purposes to provide an estate with cash when the second of the two people has died. This relates to a typical husband and wife situation where taxes that may be payable when someone dies, can be deferred to the death of the surviving spouse who inherits the estate of the first spouse to die, and not be required to pay taxes at that point.

In Canada most life insurance companies arrive at a premium for these policies by solving for a Single Life Equivalent Age. Generally this involves a calculation process that in essence converts the two individuals to a similar sex and smoking status (not all). For those that do convert individual ages, you have two factors that must be dealt with. In the first example women, who live longer than men, are typically converted to an equivalent male age that will be younger than the female’s age. A 60 year old female may be considered the same risk as a 55 year old male. Another step may be to convert smokers to non-smokers. A 55 year old smoker may be considered the same health risk as a 63 year old non-smoker.

Companies typically provide charts for these conversions, and depending on ages, may make the conversion larger or smaller. Once the two sexes and ages are converted, the last step is to look up a final chart that determines the Single Life Equivalent Age for a particular sex and smoking status. With that age, sex and smoking status in hand you quote a single life policy which is in effect the survivor policy for the two lives.

Our experience in examining the pricing of U.S. survivorship policies is much, much more complicated. Typically life companies in the U.S. produce rates tables for every possible combination of individual risks, and the volume of data is enormous. There is no way that Compulife can even consider quoting survivorship in the U.S., whereas in Canada quoting joint life is not as enormous a challenge.

Changes to the ProgramThe VAST MAJORITY of information in Compulife is contained in data files. Our program is written to look at the data files and from the data files determine how a product works and how to look up rates to calculate premiums. Unfortunately the various methods used by different companies to calculate joint life ages and premiums is so varied that we determined the only way to handle it was to create internal routines in the program to determine how joint life premiums are calculated. The rates for the final premium calculation are stored just like single life rates, but all the age conversions are done internally by the software. To add a new set of calculations we did not have before requires changing the software and releasing a new program.

Prior to this new product in Canada, the last time we changed the GOWIN.EXE program was April. As we have advised you (repeatedly) we are working on a new version of our software which when released will be called CQS.EXE. CQS.EXE will be different from the existing software in two significant ways.

First, we will have removed the Delphi graphic user interface from the software. When you see the Red Menu and Client screen you are basically looking at images being produced from a software tool called Delphi. It looks old and dated because it is old and dated, we have been using that tool for 25 years. In order to update the look and feel we have had to convert the Delphi code in our software to C++ and that process is virtually complete. We are now testing that software and our programmer is addressing the myriad of bugs that turn up from a big change like this.

Second, we are reorganizing the menus to better work with the fact that we have added a lot of quoting options through the years and these have been “tacked on” to the existing menu system which we believe can be better organized to take into account all those options and to prepare for new and more options in the future.

During the course of that conversion work our programmer has found that some of our older routines needed to be changed and modified to be more compatible with the language compilers we are using. This required modifying routines that have been working well before in GOWIN.EXE. Unfortunately, having changed some of those library function new bugs have been introduced that were not tested out fully, and so when those modified library changes were linked into the new GOWIN.EXE that we introduced in Canada with the new GOWIN.EXE, those bugs appeared. As a result we were forced to go back to the previous GOWIN.EXE for a brief period, and then to introduce modified new GOWIN.EXE program files as bugs were found and corrected.

OLD Software NEW DataBecause data is the thing that changes the most in our software, having to fall back to older, previous editions of the program does NOT mean you end up with old quotes. When we went back to the old version of the software the ONLY product impacted was the new Joint Life UL-T100 which needed the new program in order to do the age conversions. Everything else that was quoting before, was quoting the same. As long as you are running the new data files (which you are), it does not matter if you are running the old or new program.

And that is exactly how it will work when we release the new CQS.EXE. You will be able to run it, or run the old GOWIN.EXE and both will talk to the current, up-to-date data files. If you think that there is an issue or problem with the new CQS.EXE, you can run GOWIN.EXE and see if you get the same or a different result. We will, once it is introduced, continue to work on CQS.EXE until we get to the point where it is rock solid versus the GOWIN.EXE. And then we will begin the process of weaning you off of the old GOWIN.EXE.

Then NEW Software NEW DataAnd that weaning will take a fairly long time. Once we have introduced the new CQS.EXE, and it has settled down and working well, we will begin the data overhaul and conversion process. At some point we will substitute the new data set to work with the new CQS.EXE, so that CQS.EXE is talking to the new converted data, and GOWIN.EXE is talking to the old data (both will be updated with product and rate changes as we more forward). At that point you will have two Compulife programs sitting in the same COMPLIFE folder. The old will only disappear when the new is determined to be rock solid.

6 Plus 6 For 6
40th Year Celebration Referral OpportunityFor the next 6 months we are going to offer a special “6 free month referral opportunity“.

As background, all new prospective subscribers to Compulife start out the same way. If a prospective subscriber contacts us directly, we give them a 30 day free trial for Compulife’s PC software. If that prospective subscriber does a 10 minute tutorial, to show that they have learned to use the software, then they get 4 free months of service.

We BONUS for referrals – both the person who made the referral and the person who they referred.

If an EXISTING subscriber refers that person to Compulife for a free trial, then the prospective subscriber gets 6 free months instead of 4. That’s a nice bonus for the person you referred. For you, the person making the referral, we give you a free term4sale “home” zip code for 2 years plus the balance of the current year that we are in. That’s for you, for making that referral.

For the Next 6 months we are doubling YOUR bonus!

For the next 6 months, as part of our 40th Year Anniversary, we are going to sweeten YOUR compensation for those referrals. IF your referral does the tutorial and signs up for the 6 free month subscription (no obligation to buy at the end of 6 months), then you can get compensated with your choice of:

• • 2 FREE local zip codes – for two years plus the balance of 2022

    or

• • 6 free months added to your annual subscription to Compulife *

* NOTE: This does not include 6 free months for the Compulife Batch Analyzer or the Compulife Internet Engine or bulk purchase sub-user licenses

For those of you who are active participants to Term4Sale, and always anxious to add more zip codes, this should be a NO BRAINER. 2 local zip codes can be added to your account and even IF you have maxed out on your allowed number of additional zip codes, then we allow those added HOME zip codes over and above that limit. FURTHER, local zip codes give you the option to “bump” subscribers out of your local area. While you cannot use the bump option until the week of November 7th, 2022, you still get to add those two zip codes IMMEDIATELY and choose zip codes on a first come, first served basis (which assumes the zip code does not already have 3 agents listed in it).

You can accumulate these bonuses!

If you refer 6 people, and those 6 all do the tutorial, you get 12 zip codes added to your account, and they will be considered paid to the end of 2024.

REMEMBER: For the Next 6 months we are offering an important alternative bonus.

If you don’t care about zip codes or term4sale, then those same 6 referrals who do the tutorial to get 6 free months will get you 6 X 6 months added to your subscription. Once again, if you did 6 successful referrals that would add 3 free years to your subscription.

There is no limit to the referrals.

If you refer more, and your referrals do the tutorial, you get ANOTHER 6 free months for each referral. The only limit is August 1st. If it is August 1st or later, you will have missed your opportunity.

How Do You Make The Referral?EASY, go to this web page:

Remember: There is NO limit.

How you don’t sit down and put in the name of EVERY fellow life insurance agent you know would be a mystery to me. I guarantee you that when this SPECIAL referral opportunity ends on July 31st, you will be kicking yourself for not having taken advantage of it.

Is there a catch?

YES there is always a catch. Your referral has to take the 30 day FREE trial email that we have sent to them, and they must DO THE TUTORIAL. If they don’t do the tutorial, then they don’t get 6 free months. If they don’t do the tutorial, and get the 6 free months, then YOU don’t get 6 free months.

You can help this process by making sure your referral knows that to get the 6 free months they have to do a tutorial. To review, there are two benefits for the prospective subscriber when they do the tutorial:

• • 1. They learn how to use our software

• 2. They get the software for 6 free months

I have said many times that if someone doesn’t learn how to use the software, then they won’t use the software. If they don’t use the software, they won’t find out that it will make them money. If it doesn’t make them money, then why would they buy it?

If they do get the 6 free months, there are 4 things that come FREE for those 6 free months:

• • 1. A free subscription to the PC program

• • 2. A free subscription to Compulife Basic

• • 3. Web quotes for their website

• 4. 3 Zip Codes At Term4sale

One more catch. The person referred cannot have had a subscription to Compulife in the last 24 months. (a subscription includes a 4 month free subscription)

And the biggest catch of all – you can’t get any of this if your don’t make a referral.

This is a SPECTACULAR DealEnterprising subscribers will be in a position to get a lot of free software, for a long time, by simply digging through their list of fellow agents and pitching them on the value of doing a Compulife Free Trial and Tutorial. And even explaining the value of Compulife is VERY SIMPLE. Just sent your potential referrals a personal email with a link to this:

So for 10 minutes of homework, your referral gets to find out for a period of 6 months if those Compulife subscribers are telling the truth. You’re a subscriber, you already know – they don’t.

And here’s the last catch which may be fatal to the concept. Many subscriber do NOT want fellow agents finding out just how good Compulife is, because if those fellow agents know what you know, they might end up one day competing with you. OK, I get that and if that is your logic then I can see how you would want to keep the big secret all to yourself.

But for those of you who are NOT worried about other agents being better than you, I think this 40th year anniversary special is VERY SPECIAL. We have NEVER offered a deal this good to our subscribers, and if you want to hang around and wait for the 50th anniversary special, to see if there might be an even better deal, then go ahead. But depending on how hard you work at making referrals, you may be able to get to the 50th year special without having to pay for software (20 successful referrals get you there).

Our Current Programming Plans for 2022The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing in 2022:

• • Introduction of New PC Version: CQS.EXE

• • Overhaul Of Current Product Data Files

• Introduction of Compulife Basic Plus (with Pick 12)

Anyone with questions about any of these upcoming projects can call Bob Barney to discuss:

Please don’t email me essay questions, just call. If I’m not in, email me your phone number, I’ll call you.

These planned objectives will easily consume our programming time during 2022. The good news is that once the product data files have been converted, and we have introduced the new CQS.EXE, and upgraded our internet engine to use the new data files, Compulife will be turning it’s full attention to our web based, Compulife Basic software. The long term goal is to have a web based product that does everything our PC based software does.