Can Life Insurance Help Minimize Taxes for You and Your Family?

As your financial plan becomes more complex, your insurance needs may change with it. When you’re just starting out, the primary focus is often on protecting your family if something should happen to you. Although that may continue to be a concern throughout your lifetime, as your situation changes, the right insurance solutions can often change as well.

For example, you may consider a death benefit simply for the protection of loved ones, but it can also be a powerful tool to help maintain your lifestyle in retirement, pay off a mortgage or other debts, fund your long-term care needs or offset state and federal taxes. There are even opportunities to provide a death benefit for family members and provide income for you at the same time. Built-in flexibility is an often-overlooked opportunity when choosing the right life insurance.

Insurance as a Tax Solution

Imagine you’re retired and no longer need to worry so much about the financial needs of your family. If required minimum distributions and income from investment accounts have you worried about bumping into a higher tax bracket, you could withdraw income from an overfunded cash-value insurance policy instead of your investment accounts for a tax-free way to support your lifestyle.

Overfunding a cash-value insurance policy can also be a good opportunity to invest with tax diversity — especially if you’re already maxing out your retirement plan contributions and have additional income you are looking to save for retirement. Your insurance investment will accumulate tax-free and if you do pass along a death benefit to your family, they can benefit tax-free as well.

Is the Time Right to Review Your Insurance Plan?

Ask yourself these questions to determine if a review might benefit you and your family:

• When was the last time you reviewed your life insurance policy with a Financial Professional?
• How has your life changed since we last spoke?
• What are your family’s top priorities today? How will they change in the next five or 10 years?
• Do you know the reasons why your life insurance policy might lapse?
• Does your current policy have features to meet extended care needs?

Whether you’re in the market for a better insurance solution, or you simply want a complimentary review to see if the products you have currently support your financial situation, contact us. We’re happy to discuss ways to help maximize the benefits of insurance as part of an overall strategy.