Update News for February 2013

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

• • We Have Moved – Address Change

     

     

  • We Have Acquired www.term4life.com

     

     

  • Term4Sale Listing Renewals

     

     

  • Some Further Thoughts on Actuarial Guideline 38

     

     

  • Can You Help Us Add More Forms?

     

     

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

We Have Moved – Address ChangeDuring January Jeremiah was able to complete the move from our old office in Nicholasville, KY to his new home at Lake Herrington near Harrodsburg Kentucky.

Here is the address for the new office:

Compulife Software, Inc.
1509 Paradise Camp Road
Harrodsburg, KY 40330The toll free number for the office is the same but the fax line has changed to:

FAX: (859) 748-8139Which is a little like old home week, given that my very first cell phone number was 519-748-XXXX.

The move completes a process that was about four years in the making. Just about 4 years ago Compulife had the opportunity to acquire a 7.5 acre lot with 300′ of frontage on the lake. We bought the land as an investment with the view that someday, a long time in the future, Jeremiah and his wife Aimee (Bob and Pat’s daughter) might be able to build a new home on the lake.

Last winter it was decided to gamble that interest rates would stay low until the U.S. elections were over in 2012. Jeremiah and Aimee decided to put their previous home up for sale, not wanting to start the new project until they knew that they had their old house sold. That sale happened relatively quickly and so they moved into a town house, hired a contractor, and got the project started.

As part of the deal Compulife made an investment in the basement of the new home. Instead of 8 foot basement walls, we deepened the basement to 10 feet so that the finished space would give us a minimum 8 feet under the support beams and infrastructure. The basement is a walkout facing the lake. The views from the new office are quite spectacular and a huge upgrade from the old offices where we had the back of a strip mall out the front windows and a storage facility out the back windows. In addition we have about 3 times the space that we had at the old office, which was cramped.

Needless to say, Jeremiah no longer has far to travel to work and is already enjoying it. That’s only fair given that Bob and Compulife’s two Canadian employees already work from offices in their homes and we all like it. This change means that all of Compulife’s staff can now work from home with one exception. The only person now faced with travel to work is Pat, who will have the bonus of getting to see the grandchildren each day when they return from school.

All in all we think the changes will make life much better here at Compulife. Thank you for your patience with us during the transition. We should be a little easier to get a hold of moving forward.

We Have Acquired www.term4life.comFor a long time there has been some minor but routine confusion with our domain name term4sale.com and term4life.com. I’m not sure why, but you could tell someone the web address “term4sale.com” and they would respond “term4life.com”. I think it’s the connection in peoples’ minds “term” and “life”.

Anyway, it didn’t happen all the time but it happened enough that we knew it would be helpful to own term4life.com and point it to term4sale.com. After years of trying to purchase term4life.com a deal was finally struck in January. While it was a moderate investment to acquire term4life.com (we bought it from the current owner), it is now our domain name and it is currently pointed to term4sale.com.

One of the challenges that you have with any domain name is the different ways people can forget or misspell it. You learn, after time, which are the most common mistakes that people make. Through the years we have continually added domain names that we thought were confusing similar or which were typically typed in incorrectly. Some are obvious at the beginning (termforsale or termfoursale) and you should obtain those at the beginning. Some you will figure out later, as you have more interaction with visitors. term4life.com was one of those after the fact names.

Now that we have term4life.com, we are tempted to possibly creating a new site where we offer simple comparisons of no lapse UL products, life paid to age 121. We would not load it up with other limited pay versions.

When you think about life pay no lapse UL, “term for life” is really all that it is. Low cost no lapse UL is term for your lifetime.

If we created such a separate site (it would have links to term4sale.com and back) we would treat it the same as gi4sale.com, and allow those agents who are listed at term4sale.com to also be listed at the new site. Further, we are also thinking that we would require (on that site only) the consumer to identify themselves first, before allowing them to run a quote. While I would not want to do that with term comparisons at term4sale.com, it seems to me that it would be interesting to see how many people actually told us who they were, before letting them run a quote. We get asked about our consumerID option for web quotes, and there is an ongoing debate about the wisdom of not letter the consumer get a quote before requiring them to identify themselves.

We would appreciate your feedback on this, and you can send your comments to: service@compulife.com

Term4Sale Listing RenewalsWe apologize for not getting the mass email out to subscribers earlier in January, letting them know that all the renewal changes have been posted to Term4Sale. As occurs each year a certain number of subscribers do not renew and that opens up previously full zip codes for agents who have been wanting them.

Bob Barney took two weeks of holidays during January and it was decided that it would be telephone overload if Jeremiah had to handle the calls resulting from an email why Bob was gone. The email went out on January 30th.

Regardless of whether you got the email, you should feel free to check now as to which zip codes are now available (any zip code that doesn’t have 3 agents listed). You can do that at:

Zip Code AnalyzerAs always, paid zip code listings are on a first come, first served basis. Once a subscriber has paid for a zip code, they can only be bumped by a subscriber asking for that zip code as a “home” or “free” zip code. If you don’t understand how that works, you can read about it at:

Zip Code AnalyzerSome Further Thoughts on Actuarial Guideline 38We are not aware of any of the most competitive no lapse UL products that have not had a rate change as a result of Actuarial Guideline 38. Having said that, we fully expect additional rounds of rates change for these products.

In case you hadn’t noticed, some rates seemed to change a lot, while others changed only a small amount. In particular, some companies seemed to change very little, while others changed much more. We suspect that actuaries took their best shots at these re-pricing challenges and that some missed by more than others. While actuarial science is science, there is some guessing (assumptions) that are more subjective. As companies review what they have done, by comparison to other companies, we expect there will be additional changes.

Can You Help Us Add More Forms?During December, I had the following email exchange with one of the users of our internet quote engine:

 

• • —– Original Message —–

 

• • From: Bob Barney, Compulife

 

• • To: Jon Johnson – JohnsonServices.com

 

• • Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 4:02 PM

 

• • Subject: Re: Forms database

 

So it would appear that we are missing:

American National
Aviva Life and Annuity Company
John Hancock
Lincoln Benefit Life
MetLife (All Companies)
Minnesota Life
Mutual of Omaha
Nationwide
United of Omaha

Bob Barney
Compulife Software, Inc.

My Office Toll Free (888) 798-3488
Main Office (800) 798-3488
===============================================================

 

• • • • —– Original Message —–

 

• • • • From: Jon Johnson – JohnsonServices.com

 

• • • • To: service@compulife.com

 

• • • • Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 12:01 PM

 

• • • • Subject: Forms database

 

XXXXX XXXXXXX, a Compulife user, wants to leave iPipeline and user our web system but
there is a difference in forms access. Do you have a recommendation?

Thanks

Jon

Available to XXXXX from iPipeline

American General Life Companies – All states except NY (AGL)
American National
Aviva Life and Annuity Company
AXA Equitable
Banner Life
Genworth Life and Annuity Insurance Company
Genworth Life Insurance Company
ING ReliaStar Life Ins Co
ING Security Life of Denver Ins Co
ING USA Annuity and Life Insurance Company
John Hancock
Lincoln Benefit Life
Lincoln National Life Insurance Company
MetLife (All Companies)
Minnesota Life
Mutual of Omaha
Nationwide
North American Company for Life and Health Insurance
Protective Life
Protective Life (Institutional)
Prudential Financial
SBLI (Savings Bank Life Insurance Co of Mass)
Transamerica Life Insurance Co.
United of Omaha

COMPULIFE

American General Life Insurance Company
AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company
Banner Life Insurance Company
Centrian Life Insurance
Genworth Life and Annuity Insurance Co
Genworth Life Insurance Company
Lincoln Life & Annuity Company of NY
Lincoln National Life Insurance Company
North American Co for Life and Health
Protective Life Insurance Company
Pruco Life Insurance Company
Pruco Life Insurance Co of New Jersey
ReliaStar Life Insurance Company (ING)
ReliaStar Life Insurance of NY (ING)
Sagicor Life Insurance Company
Savings Bank Life Insurance Co of MA
Transamerica Financial Life Insurance Co
Transamerica Life Insurance Company
United States Life Ins in the City of NY
William Penn Life Insurance Co of NY

After that email exchange, I went ahead and produced the following email to each of the life companies that were on the list of those whose forms we don’t have. Here is what I wrote:

As you will see from the following email exchange [I copied each of the companies the above exchange], I have a subscriber who would love to switch over to using Compulife’s life company forms database but is delaying that decision as we do not have the forms for [name of the company I was writing] in our system.

NOTE: From the attached email exchange it is clear you are providing your forms to Ipipeline.

Apart from this subscriber, who is also one of your brokers, wanting to save some money (Compulife’s form engine is much less expensive than the one offered by Ipipeline) let me offer some other important reasons why you should also be providing your forms to Compulife.

• • • • 1. Compulife does not charge you ANYTHING to have your forms in our system. Agents pay Compulife for our service, there is NO CHARGE to life insurance companies.

2. Compulife ONLY provides LOCKED forms to agents. In this way you can be assured that the forms you provide us are not something an agent can tinker with. That gives you security.

3. Competition is healthy. We believe that the more competition that Ipipeline or any other forms provider has, the more competitive those form providers will need to price their products. Remember the good old days, when you had to provide paper forms to agents, and the cost of printing and shipping those forms?. Today those forms are available as PDF files, and your costs to provide those forms should be nothing. Agent/brokers should have as little expense as possible in having access to those forms.

Forms can be added to our system very quickly (we have done some entire companies in a single day). We will do all the work if you can provide the following:

• • • • 1. A copy of each of the forms. If these are available some where for download from the web, we can obtain them that way. We would need a link.

2. A list (usually a spreadsheet) showing:

• • • • • • a) Name of form

 

• • • • • • b) Comments regarding form use

 

• • • • • • c) States in which the form is used

 

• • • • • • d) Which products the form is used with

 

• • • • • • e) any additional information you may have on file re. the form

 

3. Add Compulife to your normal/routine communications for updates to forms. We need to know is a form has been modified, discontinued or if states have been added or removed.

Bob Barney
Compulife Software, Inc.

My Office Toll Free (888) 798-3488
Main Office (800) 798-3488
===============================================================

The point of sharing this with you is that I heard back from one company who wanted to know how many of our subscribers had been asking for their forms in Compulife. That was a nice way of saying they were only interested in greasing a squeaky wheel. In other words, if you didn’t care if the company’s forms where in Compulife, they didn’t care either.

So here is what I am asking you do to. If one or more of the following companies is a company that you do business with, would you please email the company and tell them that it would be very helpful to you if you could have their forms available in Compulife. And just to make it easy, here’s the list of companies we’d like to add:

• • American National

 

• • Aviva Life and Annuity Company

 

• • John Hancock

 

• • MetLife (All Companies)

 

• • Minnesota Life

 

• • Mutual of Omaha

 

• • Nationwide

 

• • United of Omaha

 

NOTE: Lincoln Benefit Life has already begun the process of providing us with their forms.

And if there is a company not on any of the above lists, that you would like to add to our forms library, please don’t be shy in letting us and them know that you want their forms in Compulife