Is Life Insurance Good for Retirement Planning?
At first glance, the life insurance industry appears to be in trouble as it faces the millennium. As the large baby boomer market ages, these consumers have shifted their financial focus away from life insurance and towards assuring their future comfort. Although the industry has long recognized that its future lies in more in financial products than in life insurance, it has lately been losing its share of the retirement market. Between 1992 and 1994 alone, insurers’ share of 401(k) plans slipped from 34% to 30%, while mutual funds’ share leaped from 26% to 37%. Tax-deferred annuities sold by insurance companies fell in share of Americans’ total retirement assets to 16.61% in 1996 from its peak in 1990 of 22.56%. In individual retirement accounts, while banks’ market share fell dramatically from 61% in 1985 to 18.4% in 1996, insurance companies saw mutual funds and brokerage houses gain the fattest slices of the banks’ loss. Such developments can, however, be misleading. Two experts w
