Ruminations On Term Insurance As An Investment

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Ruminations On Term Insurance As An Investment



Insurance Author: Admin

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The title of this paper may have surprised you since rarely would someone call term insurance an investment. I don’t sell insurance, however, I think there is an opportunity here in some situations by using a term policy with a return of premium rider. Essentially, this is a normal 20 or 30-year level-term life insurance product, but the client pays extra premiums and at the end of the term gets a refund of all of the funds invested. This means that the time value of money has paid the cost of the insurance. This is a non-taxable event since from a tax perspective the client simply received his or her basis back.

Let’s look at an example.

This is very close to being a best-case scenario – it is not typical but it should get your attention. Assume a 25-year-old male who has great health needs $1,000,000 face, 30-year, level-term insurance. It would cost $770 per year, but he could also get it with ROPR for $1,095 per year. The difference of $325 is the “investment”? which is put in at the beginning of each period. At the end of 30 years, he is returned the total premiums of $32,850 (1,095*30=$32,850).

Note it is important to compare the best policy without the rider with the best policy with the rider. Many times the company that offers ROPR doesn’t have the best rates on the insurance without the rider. The “investment”? should be the differential between the insurance that would actually be purchased in each case, not a single policy with and without the rider.

On a financial calculator, the calculation is simply:

In beginning mode (because premiums are paid at the beginning of the period)

N=30 (the number of years)

PV=0 (there is no value initially)

PMT=-325 (this is the amount saved each year, it is negative because it is paid out)

FV=32,850 (this is the amount rec’d at the end, positive because it is coming in)

Solving for I, you get 7.0%

In Excel, the same calculation looks like: =RATE(30,-325,0,32850,1)

This is a guaranteed (assuming you live and pay the premiums), after-tax return. For comparison, as I write this, 30-year, triple-A-rated, tax-exempt bonds currently pay about 4.5%.

Another way to look at it is to assume the funds would be put in CDs instead. If the taxes were paid out of the fund and the person were in the 25% federal bracket and a 6% state bracket (combined a 29.5% rate assuming they itemize), the rate needed on the CD to accumulate the same amount of wealth is 9.9% [7/(1-(.25+(1-.25)*.06))]. If they are in the top federal bracket (35%), it would be 7/(1-(.35+(1-.35)*.06)) or 11.5%.

A few caveats:

  1. Obviously, that is significantly higher than current rates, but it is a 30-year program and thus very illiquid.
  2. A Roth or IRA would be better if you could get 7% on a guaranteed investment in them.
  3. Even if you can’t quite get as high a guaranteed return in a tax-sheltered account, if the rate difference were small I would be inclined to use the retirement account for the improved flexibility.
  4. The client must need the insurance anyway for risk reduction. The numbers are abysmal if the insurance is not needed. In that case, the entire amount of the premium is the investment rather than just the differential over the cost of pure insurance.
  5. In general, the younger and healthier the client is, the higher the return.
  6. The client’s asset allocation target should be kept in mind. The asset allocation should drive the investment selection, rather than the reverse.
  7. Of course, if the insured dies, he/she paid too much for the insurance, but the probability of dying with a term policy is so low that even including that eventuality (and weighting it appropriately) shouldn’t change the results more than a very trivial amount.

You may wonder how the insurance companies can afford to have implied rates this high. I can think of two reasons: 1) lapses allow the insurance company to pay better, and young, healthy customers are more likely to lapse their coverage, 2) the purchaser of this product has perhaps “signaled”? to the insurance company that he/she is a good risk – poor risks wouldn’t tend to buy it. In other words, the purchase of the rider may give useful mortality information to the insurance company that can’t be captured another way.

I ran calculations for a male in excellent health at ages 25, 35, and 45; and for 20-year and 30-year time horizons (i.e. 6 different scenarios). The 20-year policies are not as good relatively speaking, and in one case (35-year-old) a company had a 20-year term policy without the rider priced so attractively, buying the policy with the ROPR is actually worse than just saving the difference in municipal bonds.

I was also curious if the same results could be achieved with traditional insurance. Because of the much larger contribution amounts, this would be a significant strategy if the numbers were similar. To make equivalent comparisons, I used a non-participating whole life policy so the returns would be just as guaranteed as the previous calculations. I also liquidated the policy at the same 20 and 30-year horizons and compared the results. Unfortunately, the non-participating whole life strategy underperformed buying term insurance and investing the difference in munis by almost 2% per year on average. It underperforms the term with ROPR strategy by about 2.6% per year – again averaged across the six combinations of age and term. Throwing out the one case where the ROPR shouldn’t be used (see the previous paragraph), the difference actually averaged 2.8% annually (again, net of tax).

If you are relatively young and healthy and need life insurance coverage, and can afford to save in an illiquid vehicle, these products are certainly worth investigating.


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