How Your Life Insurance Tools Are Selling

What You Need to Know

Sales of indexed life increased the most.
Traditional universal life sales dropped.
Whole life produced the highest new annualized premiums.

In the first quarter, clients flocked to individual life insurance products with performance that was tied to investment indexes, according to new life sales survey data from Wink.

Clients also increased purchases of simple, classic whole life policies.

Clients reduced purchases of traditional, middle-of-the-road universal life policies.

Wink is a life and annuity market tracking firm based in Des Moines, Iowa. Its U.S. individual life survey figures reflect only the performance of non-variable, permanent life products, not of products such as term life or variable universal life.

What It Means

Clients seem to be going with plain vanilla products when their top fear is volatility, and with products that offer access to big performance gains when their top fear is inflation.

The Wink results are relevant to retirement advisors as well as life insurance professionals and estate planners, because clients often use permanent life products in income planning arrangements and other complex planning arrangements.