Update News for May 2025

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

 

• • Body Mass Index
    
    
  • And Then There Is Rounding
    
    
  • Problems With Term4Sale Contact Requests
    
    
  • SPAM, SPAM, SPAM
    
    
  • CQS.EXE – Pick 12 Still Has Bugs
    
    
  • Our Current Programming Plans for 2025
    
    

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

Body Mass Index

Some life insurance companies are beginning to wander away from providing height/weight charts that allow agents to determine which preferred health criteria may fit their clients. The companies doing this are instead identifying a BMI (Body Mass Index) value(s) for accepted weight ranges.

Use of a BMI value is EASY for the life insurance company. It’s a “one size fits all” number for all heights. The problem is that Compulife does not store a BMI value in our Preferred Health Analyzer, and I simply fail to see why we would. As a former life insurance agent myself (many decades ago), the first problem is that most people have NO CLUE what BMI is or what their own BMI value is. On the flip side, if you ask the average person “What is your height and weight?” most people have a very good idea of what that is.

BMI, when applied to height, will generate a weight value so there is NO problem converting the BMI to a weight calculation for any given height. The PROBLEM is what calculation scheme is the life insurance company using, and what method of rounding are they applying? It is easy to end up a pound on either side of what they think is OK for a given height.

A couple of companies who have gone to BMI have not responded when we have asked them for a ht/wt conversion chart based upon their BMI values. THAT is not helpful! It’s not helpful for Compulife and it is certainly NOT helpful for our subscribers who use the preferred health analyzer. When we get caught in an impasse on this, it just means that the ht/wt charts are no longer in our system. Instead of getting a green check or red-X decision on a quote, you end up with the dreaded yellow question mark. A yellow question mark simply says that we do NOT have the data to give you a decision, which was why you wanted to use the preferred health analyzer in the first place.

All that to explain that if a company is producing a yellow question mark, that is saying we could use your help. Does the company have a height/weight chart? If yes, then you know from the yellow question mark that we don’t have it and we would deeply appreciate you providing it if you do have it. If the life insurance company has a BMI converter on-line, and you can give us access to that, we will be happy to run the various scenarios and come up with a ht/wt chart based upon that calculator’s output.

NOTE:   Compulife is NOT going to use a GENERIC BMI calculator (lots of them on the web) simply because we have no idea if the company’s calculation agrees with that particular GENERIC calculator. On the other hand if the life company tells us which GENERIC calculator they are using, then we can move forward and do the work of making the conversions.

To sum it up, Compulife does NOT make up data. We want the output from Compulife to be as accurate as possible and we do not guess.

And Then There Is Rounding

To the highest degree possible Compulife does all we can to match insurance quotes exactly. Having said that, some companies adopt some very peculiar rounding practices in their calculations, and that can leave us with premiums that are slightly off; usually a penny when it happens.

NOTE:   That penny can grow to 12 cents if the rounding applies to the monthly premium which is then used by the company to determine the annual premium.

The most common of these rounding issues will be modal premium calculations. Our system allows for two basic types of calculation. One applies a modal factor to the premium (rarely a problem there), and the other applies a modal factor to the rate (an exception to the norm). When applying the factor to the rate, we assume that the rate is then rounded (up, down or nearest) to 2 decimal points. From time to time we run into companies that modify that and round differently. This can lead to values that are different, typically by a penny.

Another complication is when a company applies rounding to a waiver separate from the basic premium. When we apply a modal factor to the premium, we apply it to the total, not each component individually. Again, this can lead to a penny discrepancy.

These issue did not exist in the “good old days” when a number agents still used rate cards (books) and a calculator. Companies could not afford to engineer complex calculation schemes as they would have made it VERY hard for agents to come up with the right premiums in a manual calculation. The advent of computers has given actuaries a wide variety of options to mess up what should be simple calculations.

Things can also get strange when we apply ROP factors to premiums (or rates). When and where rounding occurs can vary widely and can lead to different results. Further, in our Canadian product, where we quote UL products that have T100 as the COI, and where there is a provincial tax calculation, again the rounding problem can come into play. The problem there is that you can get a compounding affect with multiple calculations rounding in different places and in different ways; frustrating.

We want you to know that we are aware of this issue and we hope to address it after we have completed our data overhaul. Once the overhaul is completed, that will then allow us to make changes to our database to permit more calculation options when setting up products in the system.

Problems With Term4Sale Contact Requests

On April 1st (go figure) the Term4sale site received a BOGUS Term4sale email request (we do not call these leads) from a person claiming they wanted to speak with an agent. The person who filled in the form, the perpetrator (perp), made up the identity.

This happens from time to time but the problem in this case is that the perp used the phone number of another person that was a genuine phone number. Agents calling the person who had that phone number caused that person to contact Compulife complaining that we were giving their phone number out to dozens and dozens of insurance agents and that they were getting swarmed with calls. While this unhappy incident was initiated by the perp who used this personal phone number in the contact form, the incident did turn up a SERIOUS problem that we want to discuss here.

As background, the concept of Term4sale is quite simple. Consumers can get free term life insurance comparisons (the best available in the nation), and if they want to buy life insurance but don’t know who to buy it from, can obtain a list of three agents (Compulife PC software subscribers) who they can then email through the system or call by phone. Notice I said a list of three “agents”; I did not say a list of “agencies”. Any subscriber listed at Term4sale who has asked to just list their agency and not their name has been told, straight up, that there must be the name of a specific agent in the listing. That has always been the requirement.

Further, Compulife expects that those individual listed agents are the ONLY agents who will receive the consumer’s information through our email system. We don’t tell you what to do if the consumer phones you, but an email directed to an agent is an email to that agent, NOT a group of agents. And that’s where this incident exposed the problem – and it is a PROBLEM that you need to take seriously if this applies to you.

Some of our Term4sale listed agents are affiliated with other agents who are also listed at Term4sale because they also have a separate subscription to Compulife. They may be getting a bulk buying discount, because they are affiliated with an agency buying multiple copies of Compulife, but each agent must have their own subscription. As you might expect one agent’s success with Compulife can and will lead to some of their colleagues also becoming involved and we end up with multiple agents, who work together, being listed at Term4sale. The fact you work together is not a problem, as long as a consumer who sends an email request to an agent “Bill Smith” does not have Bill Smith passing that information on to his friend and fellow agent “Jim Brown”. If the consumer is expecting to hear from Bill Smith and instead gets a call from Jim Brown, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Term4Sale agent contacts that go to one agent are NOT to be shared with another agent(s). If we find out you are doing it, you will no longer have those listings.

Many consumers are PARANOID (for good reason) about putting their personal information into websites on the internet. They are AFRAID that if they do so, their information will be passed on to many, many other people who will be contacting them to sell them anything and everything. Many consumers feel that persistent and unrelenting sales pitches by phone or by email is a form of terrorism. That is why there is an entire technology industry built up around stopping and preventing this by labeling some emails and phone numbers as SPAM. More about SPAM in the next article.

What this incident turned up is that some of our subscribers have created software that captures the email when it is received and takes the data and place it into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software program. The agent then contacts the consumer from the record that has been created in the CRM (taken from our email). The problem with this is that some of our subscribers, affiliated with others, share a common email address because they share a common CRM.

Now we get it, and we understand why that adds convenience to maintaining a record of these contacts, and we understand why agents who are affiliated together share the CRM (shared cost), but they MAY NOT share the client record as if it belonged to all the agents using the same common CRM.

Let’s make this clear. You MAY NOT do that. That is prohibited by Compulife.

The technical problem is that if you share a common email among more than one agent, and that email comes into and is processed by a common CRM database, how does your CRM know which consumer is reaching out to which agent.

That is a VERY simple matter to resolve, but as this incident demonstrated, it is clear that some of our customers have NOT bothered to implement the solution.

When Compulife invoices for zip code listings, those listings are listed for a particular agent. You need, within the CRM, to replicate and allocate those lists so that your system knows which zip codes belong to which agent(s). If you are NOT doing that, then you better start doing it because as of this bulletin, moving forward, if we find out tate a consumer was trying to contact agent Bill Smith and they were instead contacted by Jim Brown, because the email for Bill Smith went to Jim Brown, then Bill Smith will no longer be able to participate at Term4sale.

And just to be clear, those agencies who are sharing a common CRM email will be getting a separate email from us in May pointing to this bulletin and advising them to address this issue (if they have not already) ASAP.

Now there is one exception to this that we will accept. If an email comes in for Bill Smith, and Bill Smith is on vacation or otherwise unable to handle the contact, then we do not mind Jim Brown acting on Bill Smith’s behalf but Jim Brown needs to be VERY careful to indicate to the consumer (I would do it by email and in writing) that Bill is not available at the moment and that Bill has asked his colleague Jim to handle his customers in the interim.

What we don’t want is a consumer believing that Term4sale is mass distributing their personal information beyond the three agents that we told them would be receiving their email.

And finally, I fully understand that the perp who did this is ultimately to blame for what happened. We also suspect the perp did this to the victim on more than one website and that they did not get all the calls as a result of Term4sale. They probably wanted many sales people terrorizing the person whose phone began ringing off the wall.

In communicating with the complainant (for about an hour by phone and email while I was on vacation) I pointed all that out. Further, I sent them a copy of the email contact from Term4sale so that they could see what our three customers received by way of information. The complainant realized that the ONLY personal information that had been used by the perp was their phone number. The rest of the information, the name, birth date, etc. was all fabricated and was not the correct information of the victim.

NOTE:   Compulife receives a copy of EVERY email contact that is sent through our system. That allows us to do an audit of the calls our subscribers receive. Those emails are NOT given to others.

In doing an audit of the calls that the victim received (they had a list of phone numbers that called them) we found out that they received 2 phone calls from 2 different phone numbers related to the same Compulife subscriber that was listed. I called each number to find out who it belonged to and discovered the connection. I then spent another hour on the phone with the customer to explain why it better not happen again.

This bulletin is now “FAIR WARNING” to everyone else.

Sorry to sound tough on this, but over the last quarter of a century we have built Term4Sale into a very important brand that enjoys a LOT of goodwill in the consumer advice world and it takes VERY little to tarnish a good reputation. And yes, when I say over a quarter of a century, January 25, 1999 was the first time that archive.org recorded our website in their database:

 

We actually launched the site in 1997, but it took some time for archive.org to pick it up. Archive.org itself first began storing website data in or about 1996.

NOTE:   In that early version of the site we had not yet added the zip code lookup system. That was first recorded by archive.org on March 21st of 2000 which you can see here:

 

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM

I personally have the unfortunate situation of some of my email addresses and phone numbers being flagged as spam.

As I write this, if I send an email from either bob@compulife.com or barneyrl@compulife.com, to a gmail account for the first time, gmail will flag my email as spam and then puts my email into the recipients spam folder. If I send the SAME email from my gmail account, it is NOT flagged as spam.

NOTE:   If I send an email from my gmail account to a person’s hotmail account (Microsoft) for the first time, that email is marked spam. Spam is in the eye of the beholder, and it is clear that skunks do not mind their own stink.

These examples will underline how “big tech” applies the “guilty until proven innocent” strategy to their decision to issue a spam label.

The same applies to phone numbers. Ironically, when the agent involved in the previous incident called me to discuss the problem of two different phone numbers being used to contact the consumer, the phone number he called me from was flagged on my caller ID as “Possible Robo Call”. I asked him if he knew his phone number was being flagged as ROBO and he did not. I then explained that it may have only recently happened and that it did not mean that all phone system providers, were labeling his call the same way. I am something of an expert on this as I have had a large number of my phone numbers marked as spam.

Back to emails. Gmail is arguably one of the biggest email providers. According to AI, gmail handles between 25 and 30% of the emails in the world. Here in the U.S., gmail claims to have over 75% of the market. And the problem there is that NOT all email addresses that use gmail have a gmail.com in the email address. You can have your own domain name, and use that in your email address with gmail.

All of that to say that if your email is flagged as spam by gmail, you have a problem. I know, because I have that problem. And because I am aware of this I typically will send an email from my gmail account to a first time gmail email inquiry that I have just sent an email from compulife.com. I warn them my compulife email probably went to their spam folder. Once the recipient moves my compulife.com email from their spam folder to the inbox, further emails from compulife.com should be OK.

Having said that, all of this is a HUGE pain in the butt. I fondly remember the good old days when we did not have these problems.

And yes, it is a problem for every gmail customer. Most people using gmail do NOT check their spam folder. If an email is NOT in their inbox, it will never be seen or read. And even when they find out that some important emails end up in their spam folder, they will still not check it. And if your gmail address is using a domain name that is not gmail.com, then personally I am flying blind and have no idea if you are getting my email or not.

Personally, I think all of this is a clever scheme that gmail uses to drive people to use gmail, in an effort to gain a monopoly on email systems. And I am quite convinced that their competitors are playing the same game.

Phone numbers are even easier to be flagged as spam. In the case of phone numbers, especially cell phones, the phone provider will often ask after a phone call if the phone user wants to report the last call as spam. I have watched people when they do not recognize a phone number hang up on it without even answering it and then reporting the number as spam not knowing who was calling or why. Not only is big tech using “guilty until proven innocent”, many people are quick to declare “guilty until proven innocent”.

In general, resistance to receiving information is HUGE. People are being more and more empowered to reject any attempt by someone to contact them.

When I am making volunteer political calls, I use my outbound Voice Over Internet Phone (I never use my regular phones to make outbound calls). I have had those marked spam in the past, and they are no longer exposed to that problem as I rarely use them for outbound calls. On the VOIP phone I have acquired a library of about 25 phone numbers that I use. Surplus phone number are easy to purchase, I get them here:

 

When I am doing a heavy call volume, it takes about 2 weeks before I learn that my latest phone number has been flagged as spam. And it can take some time before you discover that, because each phone provider maintains their own spam lists. There may be some sharing of that data (I don’t know for sure) but that would take time.

After I know the number has been flagged as spam, I then switch to another number in the library and use that until it gets flagged. Never mind that each call I am making is individually dialed, and never mind that I am a real live human being, I can still get flagged as spam simply because someone I called, along with others, have said that I was spam after the call.

NOTE:   Having been flagged as spam a phone number will typically lose its spam flag after about a year. If phone companies did not do that, eventually every conceivable phone number would eventually be marked spam.

Most low cost phone numbers available on numberbarn (prices typically start at $5) start life as spam and you should be prepared to acquire and hold a number for a while to lose the spam label. Personally I would also avoid buying phone numbers in a series as I suspect spam on one number in a series generally leads to spam being quick to be assigned to another number in the same series. I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect that to be the case.

All of this to say that the average consumer out there is HIGHLY RESISTANT to any contact from people that they do not know. Hopefully that helps you understand WHY we are being VERY tight fisted with Term4sale and email contacts.

CQS.EXE – Pick 12 Still Has Bugs

We had hoped during April we would have the bugs worked out of the CQS.EXE – Spreadsheet (menu option) – which is called Pick 12 in GOWIN.EXE. Unfortunately we are still struggling to get those bugs cleaned up. Therefore the release of CQS.EXE will be delayed for at least another month.

As a reminder, when this is released we are going to ask you to test the spreadsheet option to ensure that you are getting the same printout as you get with the Pick 12 in GOWIN.EXE. From our work to date, it is clear that our new language compiler for Windows has made some MAJOR changes to fonts and laying out pages for printing, and we are still working to fully understand all the differences. Complicating this further is that what works fine in Windows 10 may not work fine in Windows 11, and so we are searching for solutions that work the same for both.

We first discovered this when we released the GOWIN.EXE late last year, which had been built with the new language compiler. We ended up with a printing bug on some computers. Once again, the same code when processed through the old compiler is NOT an issue. We are STUCK and will be delayed with the new release until we get this figured out. The good news is that progress is happening, but for every two steps forward, we end up taking a step back.

FRUSTRATING, but after 40 years of this, it’s not our first time at this rodeo.

Our Current Programming Plans for 2025

The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing in 2025:

 

• • Introduction of New PC Version: CQS.EXE.

 

• • Overhaul Of Current Product Data Files.

 

• Introduction of Compulife Mobile 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 the balance of this year and throughout 2025. 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 its full attention to our web based, Compulife Mobile software. The long term goal is to have a web based product that does everything our PC based software does.