Our
Thinking

For many of our clients, selling a business is the defining financial event of a lifetime, the return on years of risk and discipline. The closing table feels like the finish line. It is the starting line, and it comes with a clock most sellers never see running.

This month, Jay sits down with Jonathan Donfeld, President of Donfeld Insurance Services Corporation and the holder of one of the larger PPLI books in the industry.

This month, Jay sits down with Catherine Runge, Director of Insurance Strategy at Sunflower Bank, where she leads the insurance group within the bank's Private Wealth division. She and Jay talk about serving first-generation entrepreneurs who rarely see the risks they carry, why insurance works better inside a coordinated wealth, trust, and banking platform than as a standalone sale, and how senior producers actually develop the next generation.

We are fielding more questions this year about a structure that, for a long stretch, sat quietly in the background: guaranteed variable universal life. Guaranteed variable universal life is an individually underwritten policy, and the growing interest in it among our clients comes down to two things: a desire for a real say in how the policy performs, and the legal architecture that keeps the cash value out of reach of the insurer's general creditors.

This month, Jay sits down with Josh Caron, Vice President of Government Relations at M Financial Group, where he built and now leads the producer group's advocacy effort from the ground up.

Nobody wants to talk about long-term care. Not the clients. Not the advisors. Not the family. It forces a conversation about decline, dependence, and cost at a scale that surprises even affluent families. So it gets deferred, year after year, until it cannot be ignored. By then, the options are narrower and the math is less forgiving.

This month, Jay sits down with Katie Comer, Divisional Sales Manager, AVP – Specialty Life Partners, Executive Benefits and PPLI at Lincoln Financial, where she leads wholesaling for the firm's executive benefits, premium finance, and private placement distribution.

Survivorship life insurance, by design, is a long-duration commitment. It covers two lives and pays a death benefit only after both insureds have died. For high-net-worth couples, the structure aligns with the timing of estate tax obligations, which in most cases are deferred until the second death thanks to the unlimited marital deduction. The problem is that the first death is not a neutral event for the policy. It is the single most significant change in the risk profile o

This month, Jay sits down with Michael Cowart and Michael Cowart, Jr., partners at The Cowart Group, the Mobile, Alabama executive benefits firm now doing business in 28 states.

The estate plan was done correctly. The documents were drafted. The trusts were funded. The exemption was used efficiently. On paper, everything worked. And then someone died. What followed was not a tax problem. It was a cash problem. The estate consisted largely of a privately held business, a portfolio of appreciated real estate, and a concentrated equity position built over decades. Substantial wealth. Very little liquidity. The tax bill arrived on schedule. So did admini

This month, Jay sits down with Ken Foley, Chief Executive Officer of Spearhead Administrative Services. Ken has spent 26 years in the PPLI market and shares what he has watched too many participants do with that complexity...use it as a sales tool, and share only the information that serves their position. They discuss how Spearhead's model works in practice and how that approach produced $4 billion in assets under administration in four years.

In high-net-worth planning, clients and advisors spend considerable time focused on wealth accumulation, tax efficiency, and legacy design. Yet one of the most consequential risks our team at Life Insurance Strategies Group experiences with our clients is addressing a family’s financial stability too late when a client becomes unable to manage their own affairs.

Indexed Universal Life (IUL) is routinely described as “market-linked growth with downside protection.” That shorthand is directionally accurate, but it often creates a misunderstanding that matters in real-world planning.

This month, Jay sits down with Michael Ashley Schulman, CFA®, Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Running Point Capital Advisors. Michael shares his perspective managing investment portfolios inside private placement life insurance structures, explains where expectations around PPLI investing tend to break down, and discusses why structure, governance, and balance sheet discipline matter more than ideology or illustrations.

This month, Jay sits down with Grayson Dufresne, Managing Director of Vie International in London. Grayson shares his two-decade perspective working with globally mobile clients.

Foreign investors love U.S. real estate for the same reasons domestic investors do: depth of market, rule of law, institutional managers, and an almost endless supply of projects and strategies. The friction point is rarely the investment thesis. It is almost always the tax plumbing, particularly FIRPTA (Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act) and ECI (effectively connected income) taxation. If a foreign investor invests in a structure that is treated as owning a U.S. r

This month, Jay sits down with Jamie Rowley, President and CEO of Alaska Private Placement Solutions . Jamie shares her unconventional path to becoming a leader in sophisticated wealth planning, explains why Alaska has emerged as a premier planning jurisdiction, discusses her firm's expanding fiduciary consulting practice, and shares memorable client stories, from pet trusts with yachts and vacation homes to family treasure maps preserved for future generations. Read on to l

For families with very large estates, life insurance plays a fundamentally different role than it does for most households. It’s not about income replacement, mortgage protection, or meeting basic financial needs. Instead, life insurance becomes a structural element of generational planning, including providing liquidity, managing tax exposure, supporting legacy objectives, and protecting illiquid assets from being dismantled under pressure.

This month, Jay sits down with Jagruti Panwala, President & CEO of Wealth Protection Strategies and the first woman to serve as Chair of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA).

This month, Jay sits down with Ani Hovanessian, Partner in the Private Client Group at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher LLC, for an inspiring conversation about the intersection of technical mastery and human connection in estate planning.