NORTHMRK LIFE Book a call
Headshot
1200 × 1500
goes here
Agency Owner
Licensed life insurance broker · Northmrk Life

Agent Name

I work for you, not the insurance company.

Book a 15-minute call Save my contact Verify my license

Check me before you talk to me

Don't take my word for it. Take the state's.

Insurance licenses are public record. Search my name or my National Producer Number, and confirm my license and its status before you tell me anything personal. If an agent will not hand you this, that tells you something.

License lookup
Verify my license

01

About me

01

Expert guidance on select products

Different problems take different products. Part of my job is telling you which one you actually need — including when the answer is none of them.

Already own a policy?
02

Policy review options

Most people never read the policy they bought. A review costs nothing and takes one sitting — I read it out loud with you, tell you what it actually does today, and tell you plainly when the answer is to keep exactly what you have.

Bring me the policy — a statement, an annual report, or just the carrier's name and your policy number. Fifteen minutes tells us both whether it's still doing its job.

Request a policy review
03

How this goes

No home visit, no pressure, no obligation to buy anything. Here is the whole thing.

04

IUL, answered straight

Indexed universal life is the most oversold product in this business and the most misunderstood. Here is how it actually works, including the parts nobody puts in the ad.

Why people care

Why some people choose an IUL instead of putting all of that money straight into the market

  • Downside protection. In a bad market year the policy's credit is buffered instead of taking the full loss.
  • Tax advantages. Growth isn't taxed year to year, and structured properly, access comes through policy loans rather than taxable sales. A properly structured loan isn't treated as taxable income, so pulling money out doesn't push you into a higher bracket the way a withdrawal from a qualified plan can.
  • Used correctly, it's a tax shelter. Congress wrote the tax treatment of life insurance into the code deliberately. A properly designed contract lets money accumulate without an annual tax bill, come out without being reported as income, and pass to your family income-tax-free. Very little else does all three.
  • Borrowing without a bank. When you need money out of the policy there's no loan application, no credit pull, no income verification, and nobody deciding whether you qualify. Your cash value is the collateral, so the answer is always yes — and a bank's answer, timeline, and interest rate don't enter into it.
  • Built for 1099 earners. If you've never had a W-2 job, there's no employer plan and no match waiting for you, and above the Roth income limits that door closes too. This is one of the few places a self-employed earner can build supplemental retirement income with real capacity behind it.
  • A death benefit runs underneath it. The dollars aren't only trying to grow — they're protecting your family the entire time. It also settles any outstanding loan for you: die owing $100,000 against a policy with a $1,000,000 death benefit and your family isn't handed the bill. The carrier nets it out and pays them $900,000. Money you borrowed and spent while you were alive never becomes a debt your family has to repay.
  • Know the trade-off. Some strategies use caps; others are uncapped and use participation rates, spreads, or bonuses instead. Upside varies significantly by carrier and strategy, and in certain years an uncapped option with a strong participation rate can credit substantially more than a traditional capped one. The goal was never to "cap the market" — it's a different risk-and-return profile with downside protection, tax treatment, and several ways to participate in index growth.
Option logic

Why uncapped options can matter

Some IULs offer uncapped indexed options. That simply means there's no hard ceiling like a 10% or 12% cap. In a strong year that can let the policy capture more upside than a capped strategy.

  • Main benefit: more room in strong years.
  • Why people like it: it removes the frustration of watching the market have a big year while a capped strategy gets trimmed.

F&G crediting options · 2008 to 2025

Crediting methods and current rates: F&G Annuities & Life. Other carriers on my shelf publish different caps, participation rates and spreads — the shape of the trade is the same, the numbers are not.

The columns are what the S&P 500 actually did each calendar year. Every row beneath is what an indexed policy would have credited that year using F&G's crediting methods and their current published rates — one of the carriers on my shelf. Losing years credit zero or the floor instead of the loss — 2008, 2022. Winning years get trimmed to the cap — 2013, 2019, 2021. That trade is the entire product.

$100,000 left alone for those eighteen years · F&G crediting

Notice what the blue bars never do: fall. Money parked in an indexed account doesn't ride the market down. 2008 took nearly forty percent off the index and the policy credited zero — not a loss, zero. That's the trade you're actually buying: you give up the very top of a monster year, and in exchange your accumulated value stops going backward when the economy does. Every dollar you don't lose in a crash is a dollar that never has to be earned back.

Sources & assumptions
Index crediting only, before the cost of insurance and policy charges, which come out every year regardless — a real policy nets out lower than every bar shown. S&P 500 calendar-year price return, December close to December close, dividends excluded; index crediting never includes dividends. Crediting methods and rates are taken from a current F&G rate sheet and applied retroactively — those rates were not available in the years shown, and caps, participation rates and spreads are set by the carrier and can change. The bonus option is modelled as 1.00% added to credited interest each year. Monthly point-to-point sums twelve monthly index changes, each capped at 3.50% on the upside with declines uncapped, floored at 0.25%. Shown to compare crediting methods against one another — not to project what any policy will do. Past index performance does not predict future crediting. Hypothetical, for education only.
Going further

More, if you want it

Reference briefs, written to be read rather than skimmed — the Rich Man's Roth strategy, an honest 401(k) comparison, how a policy review actually works, every question I get asked, and the carriers I place business with.

The Rich Man's Roth 401(k) vs IUL Policy Review FAQ Carrier partners
Licensed. Verified. Independent.
Start here

Fifteen minutes tells us both whether this is worth doing.

Tell me what you're trying to protect and I'll tell you straight whether I can help. If I can't, I'll say so.