Many agents and brokers choose their own type of in house, or existing book-of-business lead generation which will create potential sales for the company. While this is the most affordable and reliable way to advertise life policies, there are other opportunities available for agents who have exhausted their existing clientele lists.

Online life leads can be obtained through various sites. Each of them charge a specific amount per lead, however, most will offer a certain amount of free leads as incentive to try the service. The leads are usually emailed to the agents inbox immediately for quick contact, and are live inquiries of consumers looking to buy insurance. Contact information as well as underwriting information will be collected by the generation site, so the agent can prep the conversation.

While life sales are definitely the more difficult type of insurance contracts to close, a qualified agent will know how to build rapport, create a relationship and show the need to the client. In this economy, where so many have cut out unnecessary costs, agents need life insurance lead generation where they can show the importance of preparing for their family’s future.

A term policy is simple in that every aspect of it is clearly defined. In return for paying fixed monthly amount, known as the premium, over a defined amount of time, known as the term, you receive a guarantee from the insurance company that should you pass away at any point during the life of the policy, your loved ones, the beneficiaries, will receive a defined amount of money, known as the payout amount or death benefit.

The important thing to understand is that if you outlive the duration of  a standard term policy then nothing will be paid out to your beneficiaries or refunded to you. Normally the length of time for which a term policy is in force is 20 to 30 years. This is a long time, but statistically a great majority of people who purchase term life do outlive their policies, and this enables insurance companies to keep premium amounts quite low. As you research the options that you have  for this kind of policy you might be surprised at the amount of coverage you can afford,  for premium amounts that are quite low, say less than $20/month.

Here’s a final word on the relative merits of term life versus so-called “permanent” life insurance. Insurance agents might try to sell you on the idea of a more expensive variety of permanent life insurance, such as whole life or universal life, by touting its investment benefits over the long term. The problem with permanent life insurance is that the premium amounts tend to be much, much higher than term life insurance, and most insurance experts agree that the price is too high to justify as an investment. You are probably better off getting a good term life insurance policy and investing whatever money you can each month in a sensible long-term investment portfolio.

Either way, do talk to trusted, financially-savvy relatives and friends, as well as a investment professional before you buy life insurance, as it is a very long-term financial commitment.

The insurance business is recession proof. People buy in good times, but buy more in bad times as they know what it can be like if they leave their family behind with no money. The insurance industry can provide many with stable careers in a bad economy.

As an insurance mentor with over 30 years of selling and marketing experience, I can tell that one of the most over looked career opportunities today is the insurance industry. Selling life insurance is a fantastic opportunity, but it does not fit everyone.

Teachers, educators and communication specialist are some of the best people to come into the life insurance selling profession.  Why? Because our job as a life insurance sales person is to communicate ideas to people, as well as educate them.  Plus you want to be an extrovert and not an introvert.  Type A would be good also.

One of my best producers, a few years back was a young man who just graduated college with a communication degree. I never even knew they had some thing like that.  But he just took off gang busters and was the top producer in our agency for a number of years and then he went on to management.

The great thing about this career is a person can build a fantastic career with very little or no up front capital requirement, and create a substantial income.

They can expand into management and even move on to corporate.

The life insurance industry has made it tougher for part-time people and the fly by nighters over the last 10 years. The Insurance agent’s sales force has shrunk to about 1/2 of what it use to be because of a more positive approach as to who the insurance companies are hiring today.

What does this mean to a new person? Quite simply, there is a bigger piece of the pie for you and less competition. There is more opportunity to build solid and stable careers in a bad economy with the insurance industry.

Today’s insurance professional enjoys the opportunity to work with banks, CPA’s, attorneys and many others to assist in their client’s welfare.

It is a very professional business.

Insurance professionals can work in a number of areas such as:

..Selling life insurance

..Selling Property and casualty Insurance

..Selling Medicare supplements

..Selling Annuities and annuity marketing

..Selling Business insurance

..Selling Disability insurance

..Selling Health Insurance

And in each of these career fields a person can specialize in what we call specific target marketing such as:

..Small business insurance

..Mortgage term life insurance

..Estate planning

..Structured settlements

..Plus many more specialty areas.

Read more about “How to become an insurance agent”, along with many articles and training concepts to help existing and new agents succeed in the insurance industry and building stable careers in a bad economy at www.an-insurance-agents-career.com/insurancejobs.html.

Business sense and common sense needs to prevail.

(Basic common sense class 101=.Refer back to economics 101)

You cannot be taxing the medical suppliers and raising taxes on insurance companies (as indicated in this Bill) and having another layer of government agencies involved and expect the insurance premiums to go down. Even the simplest mind has to realize that those costs will have to be passed through to the consumer. (Of course, our elected leaders never attended Economics 101) Their operating economic policies are called (Economics deep pockets 101), meaning they can just continue to tax the people to make something work. No scientific data needed here.

Another big bucket of our money for the Washington Boys to play with

But here is the really big concern. If this health bill passes, all we have done is give the thieves in Washington another bucket of money to play with and they will use to meet deficits and then tell us they need to raise taxes again. Just like social security and Medicare, they used those funds till they broke the bank and now they have no way to pay that back. And they now want to add another entitlement program. Are we going to really let them do this to us at such a critical time in our economy? They have never run any of those programs in a business-like manner. Why, because we just let them keep taxing us, taxing us and taxing us, because they know they can get into the taxpayers deep pockets by just raising taxes. What part of the word stupid don’t we understand?

To quote Margret Thatcher “socialism is a great idea till you run out of other people’s money.

Well guess what, this is really what is happening today. We are screwing our next generation big time. The government is already printing bogus money, borrowing billions from China, (Our Leaders have given already China a first mortgage on our country’s assets last year.)

They are now looking to create another tax bucket, as well as creating new ways to tax the free enterprise community, etc.  Why, because they cannot make due by taxing the entire working force. So they move to the next level and then the next level and so on. They can’t get enough money from the entire working population, so let’s tax, the rich, let’s tax the business community, and let’s penalize those who won’t play our health care game, and so on.

The way for real change

Yes there needs to be changes in the health care system. But how we are approaching it is the absolute wrong way. Our culture towards the health care delivery system must change. We need to streamline health care in our society. The insured’s, the doctors, hospitals, lawyers and insurance companies need to sit down and come together and start taking accountability for the problems that each segment is creating. If not, this national health bill concept will tax us to levels beyond our imagination.

Remember, there is only 100 cents in a dollar.

Our Country, our morality, our integrity, our freedom, our American way is being given away piece by piece, day by day and these politicians cannot see it, because they live in their world and not ours. Please speak up and write or E-mail this article or any parts of it to your senators and congress people if you agree with any of this.

We need some other people to chime in on what they think. Let us know your thoughts.

Thanks…Ted

See Part 1 on the National Health Care Bill

We are not identifying the real problems facing our health care.

These so called politicians are just that, and they have no business sense or economics sense. They are on a feeding frenzy like a pack of sharks. They are selling us hype. They are all dealing under the mob mentality syndrome. (If you don’t know how that works. Please look it up on the internet) and they are now wanting to add another bucket of money to their coffers and drag us, the taxpayers into it.

Why do we have a bill that is over 2100 pages in length? Because you have over 400 politicians writing a bill, and they have to all protect their own interests instead of the interests of all the American citizens. Otherwise it would probably be limited to 10 percent of those pages.

As usual our government leaders are dealing in a reactive way rather than a proactive way. Think about it, they are attacking the problem from the wrong direction. They are treating the problems rather than fixing the problems. Just like someone having to clean water out of their basement every time it rains, rather than fixing the crack in basement wall. The problems need to be fixed first.

And herein lays the problem, no one wants to be accountable and attack or control the real core problems. No one is even discussing how we remove or control all the issues that are creating the higher costs. If we could make them more manageable and control them, then insurance companies could probably offer more lucrative coverage, which would result in the spreading of the risk, (more people owning and paying) which would then result in more people affording it. The National health Bill is trying to somewhat do this, but they are approaching it from the wrong direction. Their concept and approach only adds more fuel to the fire.

Some more problems

It is a known fact that certain doctors continue to have and refer patients for unneeded tests and procedures. Who is suppose to slap their hands and say stop that. And how many specialty clinics do we really need to have?  These just continue to drive up doctor’s overhead and operating costs.

Hospitals and doctors’ offices can sometimes over bill or double bill patients. Who watch’s out for the patient? Who audits the bill? When they send the patients bills to the insurance companies, the patient don’t care what’s on that bill as long as it is paid. Who takes ownership of these problems?

Additionally, each and every doctor sends out their own bill and there is no uniformity. Because of this, unless the patient is a CPA, they cannot figure those bills out. (Been there, done that. it’s a nightmare)

Malpractice need to be brought under control. There needs to be a common sense approach to this issue. Should someone age 50 who is earning $40,000 a year be given a $12,000,000 (million dollars) settlement, when they may only have the ability to earn another $700,000 in their life time?  Maybe they should be given $2,000,000 and have all associated medical costs taken care of during their life time. If insurance companies had a cap on malpractice they could start dealing with a known factor vs. an unknown factor and that would help reduce rates.

These and other unknown factors are a serious problem.

When you start to add or include additional unknown factors into the health insurance premium equation (such as pre-existing conditions, fraud, unethical claims, malpractice lawsuits) then the health insurance companies must deal with these unknown factors. We cannot continue to have these ongoing core problems persist and think National Health care will solve them.

Remember economics 101.  You need to accept the reality that there is only 100 cents in a dollar.

As an analogy…Let’s say you fill your gas tank in Rapid City, knowing you can drive from Rapid City to Sioux Falls on Interstate 90, based on the exact mileage of 329 miles. But let’s say, along the way, you run into a detour and you have to go off the interstate and travel down to Nebraska to get to Sioux Falls, then this unknown factor you had to deal with is going to require you put more gas in your tank to get there. Then you run into a ditch and have to get towed out. So because you had to deal with all these unknown factors that you had no control over, it costs you more money, so the price to get there goes up.  This is same problem Insurance Company’s face.  Unknown factors (“There is only 100 cents in the dollar.”)

See Part 4 on the National Health Care Bill

See Part 1 on the National Health Care Bill