Update News for December 2025

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

• • Merry Christmas 2025
    
    
  • Term4Sale Listing Warranty
    
    
  • The Rise and Fall of Rates of Return
    
    
  • Rates of Return and Permanent Products
    
    
  • Why Compulife ONLY Quotes Guaranteed Premium Products
    
    
  • Some Agents Like To Sell in the Danger Zone
    
    
  • Our Current Programming Plans
    
    

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

Merry Christmas 2025

Christmas is the time that Christians remember the birth of Jesus Christ. Many of us use this time of the year to reflect upon the reason that He came into the world.

In this year’s Christmas greeting I explain why ALL human beings are family; we are all cousins. Using the Bible, and what it says in both the Old and New Testaments, I look at why Jesus came into the world.

There are three stories often considered “far fetched” found in the Bible. They combine to tell us HOW and WHY Jesus was sent to save us from sin. You can learn more here:

 

Term4Sale Listing Warranty

Google’s Artifical Intelligence (AI) seems to have a pretty good summary of the Compulife Warrant for Zip Code listings.

 

As of the writing of this bulletin, it says:

 

• The “warranty” for Term4Sale zip code listings is a guarantee provided by Compulife (the owner of Term4Sale) to its subscribing agents regarding the volume of email contacts generated by those listings.

Warranty Details

• • • Contact Threshold: For every three zip codes an agent lists, they are warranted to receive at least one legitimate email contact through the Term4Sale system per year.

 

• • • * Exclusions: Test contacts, duplicates, and contacts from a spouse or partner are not counted towards this threshold.

 

• • • Credit/Adjustment: If an agent does not receive the warranted number of contacts, they will receive a credit. The next year’s listing for those specific zip codes will be free, and the warranty carries over to the following year as if the full fee had been paid.

 

• • • Process for Claiming Credit: Agents who believe they are entitled to a warranty adjustment must contact Compulife near the end of the year (typically late December) to review their total contacts and receive a credit against their upcoming invoice.

Agents can manage their zip code listings and access tools like the Zip Code Analyzer through the Term4Sale website if they are a Compulife subscriber.

NOTE:   * This is not worded well. A duplicate means a quote on the SAME insured. If a husband and wife, (or partners) each obtain their own quote (different lives) and there is an email for each of those different quote, that will count as two contacts.

If you believe you have a claim under the warranty, do NOT pay your zip code renewal invoice until the end of the month. Please contact us by email (service@compulife.com) between December 26th and 31st; the best days being the 29th and 30th.

Please mark those dates in your calendar. When you contact us we will do an AUDIT of the emails you have received, and compare that with the number of zip code listings you have. If a credit is warranted, we will issue that and you have until Friday, January 9th to pay the balance to renew your additional zip codes for 2026.

The Rise and Fall of Rates of Return

In 1979, when I first began selling life insurance in Canada, I primarily worked with a company called Maritime Life. Maritime was significant for its introduction of a line of whole life products called “adjustable whole life.” Those products were designed to take advantage of the high interest rates of that time. 1979 was the coming end of the Carter presidency. The years before and after were a period of high inflation and high interest rates.

As you should know, high rates of return on investments have a significant impact on permanent insurance products, and financial planning in general. That is why, very early on in Compulife’s evolution, I designed three analytical tools that we called:

 

• Interest Adjusted Cost Analysis: $279 (comparing two insurance policies with interest)

 

• Income from Capital Analysis $179 (calculating how a lump sum produces income)

 

Retirement Investment Analysis: $179 (calculating how contributions over time build an investment)

Those software products were originally sold as stand alone tools and could be purchased without having to buy the life insurance comparison software. Today those analysis products are bundled into the comparison/quotation software, and are included in your annual subscription.

NOTE:   I have included the old prices from the 1980’s next to the list above.

Notice that the price of a personal use (agent) version of Compulife is actually lower today than what we charged for the Interest Adjusted Cost Analysis 40 years ago. Even so, I remember how many agents told us that they were able to pay for those analysis tools in just one sale. If you have not examined those options in Compulife, you are missing out on some great tools.

Rates of Return and Permanent Products

Back to Adjustable Whole Life, which no longer exists today. Those old adjustable whole life products offered VERY competitive premiums versus the traditional par and non-par products of the day. The “adjustability” was based upon 5 year guaranteed interest rates. Every 5 years after the initial purchase, the company contractually had the right to increase or decrease the face amount (or premium) based upon changes to interest rates in the market. If interest rates went down, insurance coverage went down or you could opt to pay a higher premium and retain the same face amount of coverage. Alternatively, if interest rates went up, insurance face amount coverage could increase. This was all based upon a repeating 5 year review cycle.

In that very high interest period, this concept had an enormous impact on lowering premiums for permanent life insurance products. And the shorter the premium payment period, the more dramatic the impact on insurance premiums.

At that time you could purchase a single premium version of the product and that single premium was so low that you could take the cash value and dividends from a traditional policy, roll those values into the single premium product, and end up with more coverage and no more premiums. Then, you could top that off by taking the premiums that were being paid and buy a life pay adjustable product and ending up with a huge increase in coverage. In most cases the guaranteed minimum face amounts set out in the policy (a secondary guarantee) were still higher than the guaranteed values of the existing product.

In those days that led to a lot of insurance replacement going on, and all of that was peaking at the very same time as I came into the Canadian market as an agent. I sold competitively right from the beginning. If a consumer could get a better deal I was not shy in recommending that they make a change.

In reality ALL life insurance products that do not offer a fully guaranteed premium, or have some variable components (such as par products with dividends) work in much the same way.

For par whole life, higher rates of return result in higher profits for life companies, and therefore higher dividends being paid to par policy holders. If rates of return went down (which they did years later) then dividends decreased. The problem with par products is that the results of those higher yields are passed onto the insurance buyer much later. Adjustable whole life offered a way to participate much more quickly.

Not long after I began selling life insurance, Universal Life first appeared in Canada. Many credit a company in Canada called Dominion Life with introducing Canada’s first Universal Life policy and I remember going to some of the first meetings where the concept was laid out.

It is obvious that Universal Life is the product that can participate the quickest with respect to the ups and down of rates of return. But the only way Universal Life can function is if there is a way of separately keeping track of the values in each and every policy. Until computers became more cost effective, more powerful and more widely available, that was not a possibility.

It was the widespread availability of computers that not only allowed life insurance companies to keep track of all their customer’s individual Universal Life accounts, it also gave them the ability to provide life insurance agents with illustrations. And it was the same increased availability of low-cost computers that got me into the software business in 1982 (1982 in Canada; 1987 in the U.S.).

Universal Life was pitched to the agent/consumer as a “build it yourself” life insurance product. Using mortality costs (YRT term insurance / Cost of Insurance) and investments, you could construct whatever type of life insurance you wanted. If you wanted life pay whole life, you could build it. If you wanted 10 pay whole life you could build it. If you wanted 10 year term, you could build it. If you wanted to start with 10 year term, and then make it 10 pay whole life, you could build it. Just stick the targeted values and assumptions into the computer, add an interest assumption, and presto, you had a policy illustration showing how much premium it would take.

It is the interest (growth) assumption, that single pesky little variable, that is the problem with universal life insurance illustrations. Depending on what future values you assume, 3%, 6%, 9%, 12% or 15%, the impact and outcome of future results was and is HUGE. I remember a time when agents were very happy to forecast using 15% returns and some thought that was conservative. I never understood that.

Given the transition from high interest rates in the late 1970s and earlier 1980s, to the benign interest rates of the rest of the 20th and earlier 21st century, I have witnessed the impact on consumers of what happens when things do NOT go as projected. And that has affected ALL kinds of permanent products including par products.

In Canada there was a big push to sell vanishing premium whole life. These were very high priced (premium wise) par products with BIG dividends (projected) where it was expected that if you bought one of these that after 7 or 8 years the annual dividends would be sufficiently large that they would pay your premiums. Premiums, as the name suggested, could “vanish.” With the downturn in interest rates those premiums did NOT vanish and consumers were very ticked off. Why? Because they were over-promised and the products under-performed.

Universal Life products have the very same problem but often the problem is hidden from the consumer who, if they don’t pay attention to their annual statements, has an investment reserve heading down and YRT renewal premiums heading up. Eventually the investment account dries up and they are left with a VERY high priced YRT policy that demands a higher premium year after year just to keep the insurance coverage. Those UL buyers are also ticked off, and are actually in worse shape that the consumers who bought the vanishing premium par products. At least the par policy buyers can continue their policies by paying a level premium that does not increase.

Why Compulife ONLY Quotes Guaranteed Premium Products

Having witnessed all this over the years, I quickly came to the conclusion that an agent NEVER has to apologize for selling the consumer a fully guaranteed product. And all you need is one VERY unhappy consumer whose experience with a non-guaranteed product is bad enough that they sue. And they don’t just sue the insurance agent, they sue anyone and everyone that is connected to the sale of that product.

Knowing this Compulife has, for a very long time, avoided quoting such non-guaranteed products, particularly the most volatile of these permanent products. And if we do quote a product that has some kind of adjustability, we HEAVILY emphasize the base guarantees in the product. Our product today is really all about quoting fully guaranteed products, term and permanent. And the market has evolved to offer a wide array of such guaranteed products, from multiple companies. The reason companies provide those products is because there is a serious demand for those products.

Some Agents Like To Sell in the Danger Zone

Having said that, we routinely are asked why we do not quote UL or Variable Life products such as indexed life. If you consider what I have talked about to this point, you can quickly appreciate that with these products agents have the ability to modify the interest/growth assumptions in the illustrations that they produce. And the life companies provide them with illustration software that allows those growth assumptions to be entered by the agent who gets to PROJECT within the ILLUSTRATION what they and their client believe is reasonable.

IMPORTANT:   Notice that Compulife does NOT refer to the quotes and comparisons that we produce as illustrations. There is a very clear reason for that; we do NOT produce insurance product illustrations. You don’t get to enter assumptions that change the number in the life insurance quotes produced by our software.

As we discussed earlier, UL products rely upon a YRT cost of insurance component, and a “rate of return” on the investment portion of the premiums and upon the accumulating account values (reserve). Because most typical UL products do not guarantee either the cost of rate of return, a comparison of UL products would be like comparing different brands of jello. Everything can move and change and a comparison is virtually useless or would be SO complicated as to be useless. And whether the product is based upon interest bearing investments, or equity linked investments, no two products are the same.

The exception to this in Canada is UL that is sold with a Term to 100 Cost of Insurance (versus YRT). For U.S. customers reading this, Term to 100 is a non-par, life-pay whole life that has NO cash surrender values. Those products have lower premiums than traditional whole life simply because should they lapse (intentionally or not), the life insurance company keeps the reserves of the lapsed policy. Those reserves can be used to help offset the costs of those people who persist to pay premiums and whose policies eventually pay a death benefit. Actuaries build lapse assumptions into their pricing which is how the prices are lower than a product with cash surrender values.

In the U.S. there is a similar way to get fully guaranteed lifetime premiums, by buying a UL product that offers a secondary, no-lapse guarantee. The guarantee sets out that providing the insurance buyer pays a specified premium, each and every year (NO SKIPPING PREMIUMS allowed), then the company guarantees that no matter what happens to the account/reserve values in the policy, that the company will continue to provide a fully guaranteed death benefit for that specified premium.

Versus Canada’s T100 products, this is the same horse of a different color. With either T100 or no-lapse UL, if you miss a premium you are in VERY bad shape as the insurance policy owner or beneficiary.

Compulife is easily able to compare these guaranteed premium products by simply comparing the guaranteed premiums for a given face amount. Even in Canada, where some UL products contain a T100 cost of insurance (versus YRT COI), they all specify a minimum premium that must be paid annually in order to have the contract. That premium is usually just a little higher than the comparable actual T100 cost within the policy, or a Term to 100 product that is not within a UL product. Not only can you compare these types of product in Compulife, I am personally of the opinion that they are the BEST permanent products for consumers who need permanent insurance. Personally those would be the products I would own for that reason.

Which brings me to WHY I began this discussion at all. If you have not seen this story, I would urge you to have a very close look at it and to follow it closely:

 

In the coming months I may tell you WHY I wrote to Kyle Busch, and warned him about the agent’s E&O insurance in this litigation, and how he and the agent who sold him the policy may end up in bad shape in the likely situation that the E&O insurer takes the position that the agent committed fraud.

And it is the E&O insurer alleging fraud in a case involving Compulife, which is why I asked everyone to tell me their own stories about “fraud exclusions” in insurance policies in these bulletins:

 

So far, there has not been much interest in this subject shown. I may have further news on that, as we move forward. I am waiting to see how this all plays out.

Our Current Programming Plans

The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing moving forward:

 

• • 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.