Estate, Business, and Retirement Solutions

Life insurance is a key component of the overall personal financial strategy for many business owners, entrepreneurs, professionals, and families.

No other asset can provide what life insurance does: immediate, liquid, certain, tax and creditor free cash, at an unpredictable, but inevitable time.

Life insurance can:

• Solve liquidity concerns, prevent forced sale of your assets at death, and enable you to provide equitably for all your beneficiaries upon your death.
• Enable business owners to affordably acquire other ownership interests and help preserve the financial security of the deceased business owner’s family.
• Solve family financial issues relative to, for example, second marriages, children from different marriages, domestic partners, and other beneficiaries.
• Give beneficiaries flexibility to either keep a private company, or sell it on favorable terms.
• Allow you to retain control over your assets during your lifetime, while protecting your family and solving tax and liquidity concerns upon your death.
• Enable you to provide family with the inheritance you want them to receive, create wonderful legacies for charity, and eliminate tax liabilities.

Beyond basic strategies such as marital deduction and annual exclusion gifts, there are three strategies that are particularly important for wealthy people to consider:

• Valuation Discount Strategies
• Charitable Gifts
• Life Insurance

Careful strategies for affluent individuals should always include consideration of potential life insurance solutions, appropriate for your particular circumstances.

Executive Benefit Services

In order to attract, retain, and motivate top quality executives, successful companies implement properly designed and maintained compensation programs.

We design, implement, and administer supplemental plans for key executives, to provide benefits and income security, beyond their current compensation, qualified retirement and group insurance plans. We also help companies and executives make estate planning an integral part of their business and personal financial strategies, to help ensure both the company’s ongoing success and the executives’ personal needs.

These plans include, for example:

• Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans (SERP’s)
• Elective Deferral Plans
• Split Dollar Plans
• Group Term Carve Out Plans
• Bonus Plans
• Death Benefit Plans

Through us, you have access to proprietary products, valuable guaranteed issue and simplified underwriting. In conjunction with your other professionals, we assist with:

• Plan Design
• Documentation
• Enrollment
• Accounting Treatment and Earnings Impact
• Asset/Liability Management
• Security Devices
• Cost Recovery Funding
• Reporting and Compliance (special requirements for financial institutions)
• Benefit Tracking

You may benefit from our creative designs and policy service. Executive compensation strategies can be combined with asset transfer solutions, assuring executives that their executive benefits and personal assets are appropriately coordinated.

Guaranteed Issue Executive Life Insurance Plans

The Downey Group specializes in the design, negotiation, and administration of guaranteed issue life and disability insurance programs for large U.S. based professional firms.

Currently, we service over 40 firms with 50 – 1,000 partners per firm. This array is made up of over 3,300 insureds and $3.3 billion in face amount. Approximately 2,000 are active partners and 1,300 are “portables” – partners who have retired or changed firms.

We offer cutting edge products and responsive, high-quality service, specifically tailored to your needs.

• All policies are individually owned, portable, and adaptable to your funding and ownership goals. Through us, you may obtain, in specific cases, special policy terms unavailable through other brokers, favorable pricing, and guaranteed issue underwriting.
• We provide streamlined, complete enrollment and administration, and if desired, on-site education.
• We are advocates for you, to keep the life insurance carrier responsive to your needs. We have long experience with many life insurance carriers, leverage, and credibility in obtaining policy and service improvements for you.
• Before our involvement, many clients were unimpressed with the service provided by their insurance carrier. We provide that high quality service at no additional cost to you, and often we are able to secure sponsor premium savings.
• Our clients are always served by the “first team” — by the key professionals who have thorough knowledge and experience in this specific type of life insurance program. We are not a brokerage providing commoditized planning and products. The field of executive life insurance planning is relatively vast.
• We also provide excellent ongoing service to “portable” policyholders who have left their firms and continue their coverage. This speaks not only to the value of the policies acquired at the firm, but also to the quality of our service after they leave.

Ultimately, all business owners must decide in what capacity they want their business to continue, what their own long-term individual contributions will be, the best way to ensure the ongoing care of their clients, and the optimal direction and strategy to execute those objectives. If your business has not yet developed or communicated a plan for business continuation in the event of an unexpected incident or catastrophe (e.g., the unexpected death or disability of an owner or key decision-maker, or a natural disaster), you may be missing an opportunity to safeguard your business from potential devastation.

While financial considerations are often the primary focus, philosophical and emotional considerations that may not be as clear also play a vital role in the approach and design of a succession plan. We will work closely with you and your team of professionals to identify areas of concern and opportunity and provide solutions that help to bring certainty to the future of your business. We design plans intended to help your reputation—with your business identity within your community, among your customers, and within your industry—remain intact in the event of a significant change.

Disability And Long-Term Care

Income and asset preservation are important components of a sound retirement strategy. Effective disability and long-term care planning, both pre- and post- retirement, is a critical part of a successful financial strategy, helping to ensure stability, growth, and preservation of income and assets for the long term.

Disability Insurance

A disability could be devastating to the income and accumulation goals of executives on your team. As an employer, you want to provide adequate coverage to key executives on a cost-effective basis. Understanding the risk, assessing the income preservation needs of your key employees, and designing effective solutions that benefit both the employer and the employees can make a significant difference.

Employers should carefully weigh their choices and balance cost and administration with the need for adequate coverage. There are many factors to consider, and we will help better prepare you by finding the right protection for you and your executives.

Long-Term Care Insurance

Long-term care is usually defined as a chronic condition for which an individual requires assistance with his or her usual activities of daily living (ADLs). ADLs are commonly defined as eating, dressing, bathing, toileting, maintaining continence, and transferring from bed to chair. When an individual needs physical assistance or verbal reminders to perform his or her ADLs, they are generally classified as needing long-term care, whether they need the assistance occasionally or full-time.

Diagnostic, therapeutic, preventive, and rehabilitative services all have their place in a comprehensive long-term care program. The primary focus of long-term care however, is on the personal care and support that will preserve an individual’s lifestyle, daily independence, and dignity.

It can be difficult to plan for long-term care needs because there are multiple factors influencing the decision making process, including:

• Ambivalence about long-term living arrangements as physical capabilities decline.
• Inability or unwillingness of family members to provide periodic or ongoing support when the time comes.
• Misinformation about long-term care options or services available through health programs, Medicare, etc.
• Difficulty in juggling financial and family priorities when planning for long-term care.

The financial implications of a disability, chronic disease, or other debilitating condition are often underestimated. Along with health care costs in general, these costs are expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. As most health insurance will not pay for the majority of costs associated with an extended period of illness or injury, long-term care insurance offers a solution with tax-free benefits that are aimed at protecting valuable assets that would otherwise be severely reduced or lost entirely.

Proper estate planning better supports the current and future financial possibilities for you and your family, allows you to transfer your assets according to your wishes, and can help reduce unnecessary taxes and expenses.

We are committed to working with you and your family to help determine your long-term personal financial goals and plan accordingly. In addition, we will structure your estate assets to help minimize tax liabilities and maximize value to future generations. Our professional team will work with any additional advisors you may have, such as an attorney or accountant, to develop and implement a plan of action. All of these strategies will be coordinated with your insurance contracts in order to provide a sound, workable plan. Periodically, we will review with you in order to assess our progress in accomplishing your long-term objectives.

Ultimately, our goal is to assure that you and your family have taken prudent steps to reduce your tax liabilities and to create the most effective means to help finance any future tax liabilities.

At a time when social responsibility has taken on increasing importance, charitable planning offers a strategic way for you to connect to causes that you and your family feel passionate about. Whether your aim is to develop a philanthropic legacy for your family, or simply to support your community, tax-favored aiding programs create ongoing opportunities to transfer family assets to public and/or private charities. These charities often include family foundations that are managed by family members, in which the family retains control over the gifted assets and access to income generated by these assets. Often, charitable planning provides a balance to estate and life insurance plans, while taking on personal meaning for you and your family. We offer creative solutions aimed to help achieve your personal or familial philanthropic goals without interrupting your family’s long-term financial possibilities.

An important component to any estate plan is gifting, which allows you to reduce the size of your taxable estate by strategically transferring the wealth you have worked so hard to create for your family members.Gifting enables you to take advantage of the substantial tax advantages available through the use of lifetime gifts. Thoughtful use of these gifts through the use of planning vehicles such as trusts and life insurance can help maximize the value created for your heirs. We can help you determine a gifting strategy that is consistent with your planning objectives.