Update News for November 2024

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

• • November 4, 2024, 12pm EST – BUMP Week Begins

  • Here’s What We Said Last Month

  • You Should At Least Have 4 Local Zip Codes

  • We Had a Question for Legal Reasons…

  • Our Current Programming Plans for 2024

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

November 4, 2024, 12pm EST – BUMP Week BeginsThis opportunity comes only once a year and it starts:

November 4, 2024, 12pm EST.

Once every year we offer Compulife subscribers who participate at Term4Sale a “bump week”. If you have taken advantage of this opportunity before, you may still want to pay attention as it was not that long ago that Compulife gave you the opportunity to increase your number of local zip codes from 3 to 4 (6 to 8 for agency/standard subscribers).

And if you have no local zip codes, this is the perfect time to get started.

Here’s What We Said Last MonthLocal zip codes have two key benefits:

• 1. Lower cost ($12 per year instead of $21; no change in prices for 2025)

2. The ability to push out (bump) those in your local area (20 mile radius). You can only bump subscribers who are not located in that same local area but purchased that zip code in your local area because it was vacant and unused by a local subscriber.

Compulife subscribers can purchase ANY available zip code in ANY state in which they are licensed to sell life insurance. To find out which zip codes are available you need to use a tool that we have built that we call the:

If you have NOT used the Zip Code Analyzer before, enter the zip code in which you are located and press the ENTER key on your keyboard. In the spreadsheet that appears, the first column tells you the current number of listed subscribers in that zip code. If the number is three, then the zip code is FULL and you can’t buy a listing there. That is where bump week can change that for you.

If you are within 20 miles of that zip code, and one or more of the three people listed in that zip code are not using that as a local zip code listing, then you can use one of your local zip codes to bump them out.

NOTE:   If you do bump them out that does NOT take place until January 2025. People who pay for “additional zip codes” ($21 per year) own a zip codes until the end of the respective year in which they made the purchase.

If you own an additional zip code, only two things can remove you from that zip code:

• 1. You were bumped out by a subscriber who qualifies and claims it as local.

2. You fail to pay your subscription renewal for that zip code listing.

If you own a local zip code, you cannot be bumped from it unless you move more than 20 miles from that zip code. In some cases people with local zip codes, such as an agency subscriber who has 8 local zip codes and another 8 because they bought a second license, can’t really make use of all their local zip codes within 20 miles. If that is the case, we let you still use the cheaper $12 zip code listing in any state you are licensed to sell insurance, and we call that zip code a “bonus”. “Local” protects you from being bumped, “bonus” does not. Bonus is just an additional zip code at a lower cost to you.

IMPORTANT:   We ONLY assign local and bonus status to a zip code if YOU specifically request it. Make sure you are taking advantage of all your discounted zip code options.

To find out what your current zip code list is, and the status of each of your zip codes, request a PDF list of your zip codes by emailing:

NOTE:   You do NOT have to wait until bump week to change the status of zip codes you already own.

You only wait for bump week because you want a zip code that is currently full. If you are wondering about the status of a particular zip code, and want to know if there are any subscribers who can be bumped from that zip code, you need to call us for that information. You can reach either of us at:

We both have access to the database that tells us the status of each of the three subscribers currently listed. Remember, if there are NOT 3 people listed, then that zip code is available NOW.

WARNING:   After we issue additional zip code renewal invoices for 2025 (these are sent November 15th) the zip code list is FROZEN until Monday, January 6, 2025 at 12pm EST.

The reason that the list is frozen until then is because every subscriber has the right to keep their zip codes by paying their renewal which is sent on or about November 15, 2024. The deadline for paying the renewal is Friday, January 3, 2025. Some like to take the expense in the following year, rather than the current year.

IMPORTANT:   Unpaid zip code renewals on January 3rd mean those zip codes become available to ANY subscriber to purchase on January 6th.

You Should At Least Have 4 Local Zip CodesIf you have NO zip code listings at www.term4sale.com you should at least be using your local listings.

NOTE:   Only a subscriber to Compulife’s PC version of the quoting system is allowed to purchase zip codes at term4sale.

It is possible to purchase a subscription to a product we call “Compulife Mobile” which is only $110 per year (versus $215 for the PC version).

Compulife Mobile is a web based product that will run on any device with a browser including a PC or a Mac. It is less expensive than the PC software because it has and does less. And because the PC version of Compulife INCLUDES a FREE copy of Compulife Mobile, the PC version is only $105 more than the Mobile version. That means Mobile subscribers can upgrade to our better quoting tool for just $105 more per year. If they do then they have the opportunity to participate at www.term4sale.com.

NOTE:   One of our future development goals, after introduction of the new CQS.EXE program (to eventually replace GOWIN.EXE), is to make our Mobile version much more like our PC version. As that happens the price for the Mobile edition will increase. We may offer two variations, Mobile and Mobile Plus, to keep a less expensive (current) Mobile edition for our penny pinching customers. Regardless, PC subscribers will continue to have FREE access to the BEST Mobile version we offer, as it becomes available.

Here’s why I believe 4 local zip codes should be a no-brainer.

First, the lower cost. $48 per year gets you 4 local zip code listings.

Second, and MORE important, the Zip Code Warranty. Our warranty is very simple. We warranty that for every 3 zip code listings you have you will receive at least one email contact from term4sale that year. If you do NOT have an email contact, then your renewal cost for those 3 zip codes is waived for the following year.

If you have 30 zip codes, the warranty guarantees you will get 10 emails (each unique – NO BOGUS).

NOTE:   If you receive what you believe is a BOGUS term4sale email, notify us immediately. We will investigate and determine if that is the case. If it is, we will move that email (for all 3 subscribers) from our inventory of that year’s term4sale emails. It is that inventory of emails that we use to audit the accounts of those who request such an audit at the end of the year.

If you have 30 zip codes, and you only have 5 emails (determined from the requested audit at the end of the year), then a credit is issued against your renewal invoice. You will be charged for only 15 zip codes and you would keep all 30 zip codes for the following year.

Here’s why 4 is a no-brainer: we round UP the expected number of emails. Even though the warranty would say you should get 1.33 emails (if you have 4 zip codes), we round that number up to 2. So, 4 local zip codes means we warranty that you get 2 emails. If you get only one email, then you get a credit of $36 against your next renewal for the 4 zip codes. You would pay $12 to keep all 4 zip codes another year. It’s hard to imagine how you lose on that deal.

We Had a Question for Legal Reasons…Last month we received the following email/question:

• Hi Jeremiah,

Quick question – how can we be sure the quotes from the Compulife API for ????.com are reliable? This is important for legal reasons, so I’ve included ?????, our legal counsel, in the thread to get clarity on this and understand how it works.

That email was redirected to me, and this was my response:

• ????,

• I have decided to use your question (anonymously) and the following answer for an article in our monthly Update News for November. Your question, prefaced by “legal reasons”, deserves a thorough response. As there may be someone else out there who has a similar question (now or in the future) we will memorialize all this in the next monthly bulletin which we can later refer to.

• First, let me highlight the following information for “legal reasons”.

• At the bottom of every quote produced by our PC software, which we have now offered for sale to agents for over 40 years, we say:

• • NOTE: Every effort has been made to assure the accuracy of this information but we cannot guarantee accuracy and are not liable for errors or omissions.

• On our www.term4sale.com website we say at the bottom of each quote that we offer to the public:

• • About This Comparison

• • The information used in this comparison has been taken from the rate cards and rate manuals which life companies routinely publish and distribute to life agents and brokers. To the best of COMPULIFE’s ability we have done everything we can to ensure that the information contained in this comparison is up-to-date and accurate. However, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE ACCURACY.

• • In the event that there is a discrepancy between the information contained in this comparison, and any life company authorized illustration and/or policy, the policy shall govern.

• • Any consumer who is FIRST to discover an error in any of the premiums quoted in this comparison is entitled to receive a “finder’s fee” of $50 from COMPULIFE. To receive your $50 please mail a copy of the comparison which contains the error, with a copy of the life company illustration and/or policy, together with your name and address, to:

• • • COMPULIFE Software, Inc.

• • • 1509 Paradise Camp Road

• • • Harrodsburg, KY 40330

• • • (888) 798-3488

• NOTE: We have had to pay the $50 bounty less than a handful of times over the 25 years. I can vaguely remember two instances.

• I remember a competing company/service that use to offer a similar warranty with a $500 guarantee. I collected once and a friend of my wife’s, with my assistance, collected another time. We were both told, in a legal letter that accompanied the payment, that we no longer could make a repeat claim. I always thought the $500 reward was “hype” as from first hand experience I know just how hard it is to keep this material up to date.

• Compulife’s www.term4sale.com has been serving the public with quotations for over a quarter of a century. You can check the history yourself at www.archive.org, a website/service that preserves a history of internet websites over the years. The first time that archive.org preserved a copy of our webpage was January 25, 1999. You can see the page here:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990125103806/http://www.term4sale.com/

• We had been offering services at term4Sale for about 2 years prior to that, but it was the first time archive picked us up. I only became aware of archive.org a number of years later, but now use it routinely in my work that is website related.

• Term4Sale relies upon the same database of product and rate information that is in our PC software, which is the same data that is used by our Internet Engine to power ALL our web quoting options including our API. In fact we changed the Term4Sale service to use our API about two years ago. We did so as a way to ensure that our API is “up and running” for ALL subscribers to the API service. We prefer to know ASAP if the service (for any reason) is not working properly.

• www.term4sale.com does over 1,000 quotes per day and many of those are agents taking a “free roll”, who are too cheap to buy our agent software. Those agents are quick to call us if the site is not working, for whatever reason. To give you a sense of the volume of quotes here’s a brief record of counts that I record about once a week:

• • 7,488,369 August 2nd

• • 7,505,121 August 9th

• • 7,527,205 August 17th

• • 7,552,155 August 24th

• • 7,570,600 August 30th

• • 7,602,421 September 6th

• • 7,624,262 September 13th

• • 7,650,888 September 20th

• • 7,674,729 September 27th

• NOTE: Sometimes our counter data file resets to ZERO (I don’t know why) and I use the weekly inventory to reset the number to what is a reasonable but understated value.

• Given our longstanding history on the internet, of offering quotes to the public, I would encourage you to use google to do some research as to what people are saying about Term4Sale (and/or Compulife).

• Finally, and for “legal reasons”, I would point you to these paragraphs from our license agreement:

• • 8. Exclusion of Warranty The Software is being provided to the user AS IS and all warranties are excluded. Compulife makes NO WARRANTY either express or implied with respect to the Software Package. All warranties as to merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose are hereby disclaimed.

• • 9. Limitation of Damages Compulife shall, under no circumstances, be liable for consequential or indirect damages in any way relating to the Software Package.

• • 10. Limitation of Remedy Compulife’s obligation in the event of breach of contract, negligence or otherwise with respect to the Software furnished hereunder shall be strictly and exclusively limited to replacement of the Software. Having laid the legal foundation, from a practical point of view I can assure you that mistakes are a reality for everyone. The first programmer who worked for Compulife liked to say (about software) “the last bug is never found”. EVERY software product has bugs. Every file containing data has errors. Compulife’s product is no different.

• In case you do not follow it, Boeing has been attempting to get a spacecraft certified that it calls “Starliner”. The first test flight was an embarrassing failure with the vehicle unable to reach its proper orbit because it did not initiate a rocket boost at the correct moment. It turned out later to be a software error, where the system clock was not initialized with the correct time.

• The point is that EVERYONE makes mistakes and there are no exceptions, even companies that spend billions of dollars developing their product(s).

• It could be said that Compulife is the most inaccurate quoting software available; EXCEPT for all the rest. At any point in time there will be new information that is different from the old information in our system. Why do we still have the old information? Simple, because we have not been told that there is new information.

• In fact the lateness of my response to your email points to a mistake that I made. You emailed me on September 20, 2024, but I am only now replying to you. Why the delay? What prompted this reply was the fact that Jeremiah sent me a copy of your email yesterday, telling me I needed to be the person to respond. I received the email in the evening, after the power was restored in our area of Kentucky after we had lost the power in the morning thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

• After receiving Jeremiah’s followup email, I checked the emails in my deleted folder to find that I had deleted your email without reading it. It was Jeremiah’s email that first brought it to my attention.

• My apologies, I was not ignoring you, I simply made a mistake.

• By the way, I do NOT use spam filtering software to remove emails from my inbox. I don’t trust spam filtering software. In fact with some regularity, the first emails that are sent by Compulife to others (in particular gmail account holders) end up going straight to people’s spam folders. What really ticks me off is when those emails are (literally) replies from us to an email that we were sent by the individual. That just drives me nuts and that’s why I am copying this email to my gmail account, and will forward it from my gmail account to everyone in the thread again, because you may or may not get the original from compulife.com’s email account as it may end up in YOUR spam folder. Generally emails sent from gmail do NOT go to spam folders (although I have had instances where they have). But I refuse to rely upon gmail for all my email communications because I do not want to support what is a growing monopoly in the email world. If gmail ever becomes the monopoly that they are trying to be, we will all be subjects to their edicts.

• Because I don’t use spam filtering software it means that I go through hundreds of emails each day, doing my best to find the good among the bad. And as hard as I try to NOT miss an email that I need to read, I missed your email and it was deleted by mistake. Once again, MY mistake.

• The BIG question is, what happens when a mistake is found. What happens at Compulife is we FIX the mistake ASAP. Once it is fixed it is updated to the web in one of our mid month updates to the PC software. Right after the PC software is updated, we then upload the data files to our web quoting platforms. We have three different platforms and they ALL use the same data files. A mistake in one is a mistake EVERYWHERE which is good, and increases the likelihood of it being found and reported.

• If you are a subscriber to the PC version of Compulife, right after a mid month update has been processed, a mid month bulletin will pop up explaining what changes have been made to our program. The following was about one of the changes made in September, to the Canadian software:

• • 3. Empire Life – new rates

• • September 16th – On September 6th Empire Life introduced new rates for their 15, 20 and 30 year term products. They emailed me in August but the email was deleted as spam.

• • NOTE: My mistake, I am my own spam filter.

• • There was no followup communication.

• • Late Friday one of Compulife’s subscribers brought to our attention the our 15 year quotes were not matching Empire. I sent an email to the company and they replied this morning to confirm the rates changed. I searched my deleted emails and turned up the rates.

• • My apologies for the delay, and my THANKS to the subscriber who brought this to our attention. The rates are now updated and a 10% coupon has been given to the subscriber as our way to say THANK YOU for keeping us on our toes.

• Notice that was another email that I inadvertently deleted and that it was a Compulife customer that reported the issue.

• The reason I shared a note from the Canadian mid month update news is because I could not see any mistakes that I made that I talked about in our U.S. software for August or September. I have gone back further in time for an example from the U.S. system and found this:

• • 4. North American Life – to age 85 correction

• • June 11th – We had the WRONG rates for North American’s Custom Guarantee UL, level to 85. The rates we were quoting were TOO LOW.

• • The problem was ONLY for that level period.

• • I found, as I entered the correct rates, that many of the rates were no different, where other ages the rates were increased. I think we somehow missed a rate change for that product, at some point in the past. It’s now fixed.

• • Our thanks to the subscriber who reported it, and our thanks to the company for helping us figure it out.

• Both examples are evidence of the mistakes that I make from time to time. They are also evidence about our transparency when mistakes are found and corrected. As our mistakes can impact the reputation of our customers, both the agents who use our software and the consumers who use our term4sale website, I try to be as transparent as possible about what we encounter and correct.

• The question is NOT if we make mistakes, clearly we do, the question is how quickly do we act to fix the problem. I do not believe we would have lasted over 40 years in business by ignoring mistakes and/or being slow to respond.

• But in the end, it is what I said at the beginning:

• NOTE: Every effort has been made to assure the accuracy of this information but we cannot guarantee accuracy and are not liable for errors or omissions.

Feel free to ask me any questions about the above material.

Our Current Programming Plans for 2024The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing in 2024:

• • 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.