Read The Actual Policy
Most clients haven't opened their own life insurance contract in years. We pull the current in-force illustration and the policy document and walk through what it actually says.
Insurance planning across life, disability, long-term care, and annuity policies. We read the actual contracts and walk through what you have, what you need, and what the fine print says.
Most clients haven't opened their own life insurance contract in years. We pull the current in-force illustration and the policy document and walk through what it actually says.
Where we earn a commission on an insurance product we recommend, we disclose it. Where we recommend you keep what you already have, we say so even though we earn nothing for it.
Every review starts by understanding what you already own. Old whole life policies, employer disability coverage, group life. The next conversation is whether what you've still fits.
Traditional LTC has become harder to recommend as premiums have moved. We'll walk you through when hybrid products, self-insurance, or no coverage at all is the right answer for your situation.
We meet on a real cadence, usually quarterly. The plan flexes as your life and the tax code change. Most relationships span decades.
Offices in Boca Raton and Plantation, plus licensed in all 50 states. Existing clients keep us when they move.
Most clients come to us with at least one insurance policy they bought years ago and haven't looked at since. A whole life policy from when the kids were young. A variable annuity from a previous advisor. A disability rider on a group plan they no longer have. The first job is reading what they actually own.
From there, the question is whether the coverage still fits the plan. Life insurance needs scale to dependents and debt, not to a fixed dollar amount. Disability sizing follows income replacement, not just a percentage on paper. Long-term care is evaluated against the size of the assets that could otherwise fund care directly.
Insurance is rarely a standalone product purchase. It connects to:
The hub. Insurance is one piece of the broader risk-management conversation.
See full financial planning →Long-term care and annuities are most often evaluated in the years leading up to retirement.
See retirement planning →Life insurance plays a specific role in estate liquidity and intergenerational transfer.
See estate planning →Insurance reviews matter most at specific life stages:
"I had a whole life policy from 1998 I hadn't looked at in twenty years. Beth pulled the in-force illustration, showed me what it was actually doing, and we ended up keeping it. She didn't try to replace it."
"The disability review was the part I had no idea I needed. I had group coverage that would have cut my income in half. We restructured with individual coverage that actually protects my earning power."
"Beth talked us out of a long-term care policy we were considering. She showed us our assets could self-insure, and we used the premium savings differently. Honest advice."
The right amount of life insurance in your 30s looks nothing like the right amount in your 60s. Early on, the case is straightforward income replacement: a young family, a mortgage, income the household would miss for 15-20 years. Term coverage sized to replace 10-12 times income covers most of that need at a fraction of the cost of permanent policies.
By the 40s and 50s, the calculus shifts. The mortgage is smaller, the retirement accounts are larger, and the kids are closer to independent. Some households need less coverage than they carried a decade earlier. Others need more, especially if a spouse stepped back from paid work or if college obligations still stretch a decade out. The right move is often a re-underwrite of the term policy at a lower face amount, not a permanent product pitch.
In the 60s and beyond, the conversation changes again. Income replacement matters less. Estate liquidity, pension maximization, and charitable planning become the reasons to carry a policy at all. A well-structured second-to-die policy can move meaningful value to heirs at a discount to the estate tax cost. A poorly structured whole life bought decades earlier can sometimes be repurposed through a 1035 exchange rather than surrendered.
Group long-term disability through an employer typically caps at 60% of base salary, and the benefit's taxable if the employer paid the premium. For someone earning $250,000 base plus a $100,000 bonus, the real replacement ratio in a claim can land closer to 30% of total compensation. That's a gap most high earners don't see until they run the math side by side.
The fix is usually an individual own-occupation policy layered on top of the group coverage. Own-occupation matters because it defines disability by whether you can perform your specific job, not any job. A surgeon who can no longer operate but could work in medical education is disabled under own-occupation; not under any-occupation. Group policies frequently use the weaker definition.
The other lever is the benefit period. Group policies often terminate benefits at 65. Individual policies can extend to 67 or 70. For a 45-year-old professional, the extra five years of coverage matters materially. We review each existing policy's definition of disability, elimination period, benefit period, and offset provisions before recommending any change.
Annuity contracts are typically 80-150 pages. The sales illustration is 3-5 pages of highlights. The gap between what the illustration shows and what the contract says is where most annuity regret comes from. Before recommending or advising against any annuity, we read the actual contract cover to cover, then translate it into a one-page plain-English summary.
The provisions that matter most: the surrender schedule (how long you're committed and at what withdrawal penalty), the rider costs (income riders often charge 1-1.5% annually against the benefit base, not the cash value, which is a materially different number), and the participation rate or cap on any indexed component. A 6% cap on an S&P-linked crediting method looks different when you see the historical years the market returned 15-30%.
Existing annuity owners often benefit from a 1035 exchange review rather than an outright surrender. If a policy has been in force long enough to clear its surrender schedule and its expense structure has become uncompetitive, a 1035 exchange to a lower-cost contract can maintain the tax-deferred status without causing ordinary-income treatment on the gain. We model both paths against simply keeping what you have.
Posts our wealth advisors have put together on this topic.
Sometimes. The traditional case for life insurance is income replacement for dependents. Once the kids are independent and the mortgage is paid down, that case weakens. But there are other reasons to carry life insurance into retirement: estate liquidity, pension maximization, charitable giving, or the existing policy has cash value worth keeping. We work through your specific situation.
Whole life is rarely a good investment relative to alternative uses of the same dollars. The reason to own it's the death benefit and the contractual features, not the rate of return. That said, if you already own a policy with substantial cash value and decades of paid premiums, replacing it's usually a bad move. The honest answer is situation-specific.
Often the answer is no, especially for clients with substantial assets who can self-insure. For clients in the middle range, the premium history and rate movement have shifted the math considerably. Hybrid life-LTC products have changed the picture somewhat. We evaluate your assets, family history, and comfort level against the alternatives.
We can offer fixed and variable annuities when they fit a client's plan, and we earn a commission when we do. Most of the time the right answer isn't an annuity, and we say so. When an annuity does fit (immediate annuities for lifetime income, certain deferred annuities for tax-deferred growth, or hybrid products for specific cases), we explain why and disclose the compensation.
Yes. Most insurance reviews for ongoing planning clients end with us recommending the client keep what they have, which means no commission for us. We do this because the right insurance review has to be honest. See how fee-based compensation works.
The first meeting is a conversation, not a sales pitch. We'll talk about where you are, what you're working through, and whether Intercoastal is the right fit. In person in Boca Raton or Plantation, or by video from anywhere.