Since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ?I’ve been watching how estate planners, tax advisors, investment advisors and life insurance agents are adapting their messaging in response to the new law. My focus is on the messaging in two broad markets, the very wealthy and the merely well-to-do.
Marketing to the Wealthy
Those who work with or aspire to work with and sell to the very wealthy are fashioning their OBBBA-adjusted marketing approaches just as I would expect. With estate taxes of less concern to more individuals and even income taxes more benign than feared before the OBBBA, the marketing had to become more creative, comprehensive, technically oriented and richly textured than before. It makes great sense to me. After all, marketing abhors a vacuum, and with the estate tax fear factor having less motivational value to advisors, they’re filling that vacuum with income tax-based and asset protection strategies, among others. Basically, the OBBBA has allowed planners to give a more multi-dimensional hue to multi-generational planning.
An Encouraging Trend
It’s also been interesting to watch the marketing of some planning strategies and products, especially life insurance strategies and products. Sure, there are still the same old distortions and intellectually dishonest avoidance of the downsides of a particular strategy or product. But, perhaps because the advisors to the wealthy have learned over the years to trust but more rigorously verify promoters’ claims, the marketing has taken on an ever so slightly more consultative tone, one that not only promotes the strategy or product but also tells how clients and those cautious advisors can rely on the promoter to tell the whole story and design the strategy so that it works. This is an encouraging trend. Apparently, the promoters are beginning to realize that not every question is an objection, and risk isn’t necessarily a four-letter word.
Marketing to the Merely Well-to-do
But what about the OBBBA-adjusted marketing to the middle market, particularly the upper middle market, the merely well-to-do? The response to the OBBBA in this demographic has been far less, well, responsive. As I’ve written, the OBBBA told these clients to put away any concern about estate taxes, if they had any such concern in the first place. I would have thought that the estate planners and life insurance agents who’ve lost market territory to the OBBBA would promptly revise their messaging to focus on the substantial non-tax benefits of estate planning and life insurance, respectively. Still, good things are happening.
Estate Planning
I’m starting to see some encouraging green shoots in that regard, with more interest in the planning involved at the intersection of estate planning and personal financial planning, which is precisely the location of the merely well-to-do’s needs, as I pointed out in “Alleviating the Anxiety of the Merely Well-to-Do Boomer.” As that interest grows, supported by educational programs and conferences, estate planners will be increasingly able to get their prospects to overcome their reluctance to plan. See “Helping Prospects Overcome Three Fundamental Planning Obstructions.”
Life Insurance
The life insurance side is starting to look more promising to me. That’s because I’m beginning to discern some recognition that:
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In times like these, the merely well-to-do, let alone the rest of the middle market, need as much life insurance for as many reasons as they ever have. And more agents, with the support of their carriers and brokerage general agencies, are embracing the holistic financial planning required to address those needs.
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The OBBBA’s extension of favorable income and capital gains tax rates is causing a recalibration of the trade-off between the tax deferral offered by cash value life insurance versus its cost and often maddening but poorly explained complexity. See “Life Insurance as an Investment for Retirement.”Sure, there will still be a market for this narrowly targeted application of life insurance, but a well-constructed, holistic planning approach will prove to be the faster route to sales and will keep the business on the books longer as well.
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Much of the life insurance marketing discourse is so opaque, polemic and fraught with controversy about products and companies that it has to leave any reasonable consumer dazed, confused and reluctant to buy anything other than the most basic protection. Perhaps the tone of the discourse might be softening as part of that new-found embrace of holistic planning.
Sadly, we’re seeing the last of the agents who were raised to program and sell to needs and not just to sell the product or strategy du jour. Fortunately, I also see green shoots here, with plenty of education available on holistic planning. I can only hope that more agents or whoever is selling life insurance these days will take advantage of it. They’ll be glad they did, and so will we.
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