Our Work
Customized Solutions: While many of our clients share characteristics with other affluent families, no two situations are identical. Every client engagement deserves and receives a customized approach and a plan design that is uniquely tailored to meet their needs. We routinely design new strategies that incorporate new life insurance product offerings and combine them with innovative estate planning strategies developed with other advisors.
Independence for Optimal Client Results: In order to help ensure optimal results for our clients, we maintain relationships with over 20 life insurance carriers. No single company has the best solution for every client, and even with the advantage provided by M Financial Group’s proprietary products, other companies win some of our clients’ business through innovative policy design and competitive underwriting.
Informal Underwriting Process: Because each carrier often underwrites differently and offers different products, it is imperative that we match the best insurance policies and companies with the best underwriting. Our affiliation with M Financial Group and our excellent reputation provide added market presence, collective buying power and negotiating strength, delivering direct and measurable benefits to our clients.
Many people falsely assume that underwriting classifications are generally consistent among competing life insurance companies. On the contrary, we have many clients who have received “standard” or even “preferred” offers from one or more companies while being declined for coverage by others. While variations are not always this dramatic, carriers maintain their own underwriting assessment methods and have varying levels of comfort with specific medical issues, such as cancer and heart disease. Other carriers may place significant weight on lifestyle habits or other indicators, or they may simply be influenced by market conditions or the desire to increase market share. Because it is nearly impossible to accurately predict the underwriting offers from each company, we eliminate the guesswork by informally underwriting every case, typically with 15 companies. Our approach, which includes collecting our clients’ medical records for submission to several carriers, takes more time and effort than the typical broker’s effort, but we are convinced that it is vital to ensuring optimal results for our clients.
This informal underwriting approach is also designed to protect our clients’ confidentiality and flexibility while minimizing intrusions and annoyances. Only when the clients and advisors have determined that a desired result will be achieved do we schedule medical exams and begin the formal application process.
Compensation: We are typically compensated as brokers, receiving commissions from insurance companies when we sell new policies. While this may appear to be inconsistent with our consultative approach, we believe that it fits our long-term outlook and commitment to establishing and maintaining relationships. In situations in which a significant amount of work is required with little or no chance of compensation from a sale, we sometimes enter into a fee-for-service relationship, either on an hourly rate or total project fee basis.
Insurance Portfolio Administration and Service: After policies are placed in force, Tenzing Insurance Strategies remains a resource and advocate for clients and advisors. Clients with large portfolios or complex funding strategies may require more monitoring and maintenance than those with simple term insurance or fully guaranteed coverage. We provide periodic reviews of our clients’ policies to measure performance against both original and revised expectations. We routinely schedule and provide premium reminders and are happy to provide Crummey administration support when desired. Regardless of the level of periodic reviews and administration that is required for each policy, we are always able to provide quick, accurate responses to any requests, be they for updated information or for a coverage modification brought about by changing client needs.