December 2009
“You can only buy life insurance when you don’t need it. When you actually need it, it’s too late to buy it. Life insurance is like parachutes, spare tires and life jackets that way.”
— Jim Ruta, from his Nov. 5 “Ruta’s Rant” e-newsletter titled “Plain Vanilla”
Top 3 reasons people give for not buying life insurance:
1. “Too expensive” (58%)
2. “Just haven’t gotten around to it” (23%)
3. “Don’t know enough about it” (22%)
Source: Brian Ashe, CLU’s “Family Feud” trivia during his “Leveraging LIFE to Build Your Practice” seminar at during NAIFA 2009 in Orlando.
13% - Decline in Total Group Term Life (Basic and Voluntary) sales premium in the first half of 2009 compared to sales reported in the first half of 2008.
Source: JHA 2009 U.S. Group Life Mid-Year Market Survey
65% - Americans planning to cut back on overall holiday expenses this year such as gifts, travel and entertaining.
Source: Consumer Reports Holiday Shopping Poll
From the Archives - Dec. 1933
Editor's note: The following excerpts are from the December 1933 issue of Life Insurance Selling.
Playing Your Hand in the New Deal
By Clyde W. Young, Monarch Life Insurance Company, Springfield, Mass.
As a nation, we have in our hands practically all the elements required to stage a steady and positive recovery.
… Barring the unpredictable, the worst is over. More than four million men have returned to work, and many more are expected to return during the next few months. This means increases purchasing power and more men who need protection. And surely millions upon millions will seek to revive their life insurance. What they dropped was let go through sheer force of necessity, not because of any dissatisfaction with the institution or the service of insurance.
… Having wrestled with difficulty after difficulty through the prolonged, painful period since the 1929 panic, it behooves every individual, every family, every organization, to resist quitting now that better days promise to dawn.
… Let us grit our teeth and heroically resolve to keep on keeping on. Triumph often is nearest when defeat seems inescapable.
Make the most of the New Deal!
How I Sell Special Christmas Remembrance Policies
By Robert H. Smith, Life Insurance Company of Virginia, San Antonio, Texas
Several years ago, during the holiday season, I secured a large Group contract, amounting to almost three million dollars. While working on this case, I found that any number of my prospects carried a large volume of life insurance, and when I ran up against this situation, I merely suggested that the group policy be used as a special Christmas present to the prospect’s wife and family. The suggestion met with remarkable success and I am firmly convinced that this one idea helped me close many sales which otherwise might have been lost.
Since life insurance is so close to the heart of everyone, since it is so closely intertwined with the social, religious, and financial structure of our nation, the average person will readily listen with interest to the salesman who suggests the idea of a life insurance policy as a means of providing a perpetual Christmas present to some loved one.