Is Guardian Whole Life Insurance A Good Investment For Growing Your Wealth?

Is Guardian Whole Life Insurance a good investment? Well, not all insurance companies or insurance policies are all the same. So let's talk about Guardian specifically, about whether it's a good bang for your buck. All right, so let's talk about Guardian Insurance. The life insurance company is a big company out there, one of the biggest companies actually, a highly rated company, but is it a good investment when it comes to doing whole life insurance? That's what I'm talking about in this video today. As full disclaimer, I am actually appointed and licensed with Guardian Life Insurance, but I'll tell you, I'm an independent broker, so I'm going to give you more of my independent take on what I think about that company. Okay, so let's talk about Guardian Life Insurance Company. Guardian is one of the biggest insurance companies out there. They're ranked up there with like MassMutual and even up there with like New York Life and Northwestern and things like that. Great, solid company, very highly rated. If you ever go to the Comdex score, you'll see it's right up there almost at 100, which is like perfect score. It's right up there like 98, 99. So amazing, strong, solid company. Company I actually got appointed with myself. And by the way, I only like to get appointed with companies if I think they offer something that's kind of unique or if they could be potentially one of the best. I will tell you personally that Guardian, I would put in the top three companies in the rankings I do. I'd probably put my third favorite company. I would put it behind MassMutual and PennMutual. I think those companies have a little bit better advantage. Sometimes Guardian can be a little bit tough on the underwriting side and you're always trying to apply for a policy. Sometimes you get hung up in underwriting a lot longer than you could with other companies. But overall, Guardian is a good, solid company. But I will tell you this, just because it's a good, solid company does not mean you have a good policy. That is where it can vary. So let me talk about the pros and cons of this and kind of talk about some of the real life examples here. So the pros, like I already mentioned, big company, it's solid, it's highly rated, it's stable, it's secure. If you're worried about a company going under, Guardian is not likely to do that. And even if it could, remember, life insurance companies are required to have what's called reinsurance on them. Reinsurance companies are global insurance companies that will then back up those life insurance companies. So if they ever do go bankrupt or anything would happen to them, those companies will step in and cover your policy. So unlike banks, I mean banks have FDIC, right, which is always great. The one problem with FDIC though is that only about one and a half percent of all your savings accounts are protected. So if we have 10% of banks fail, we're in trouble, right? They're gonna have to scramble to find money, probably have to get the government to print more for them. That's what they're gonna end up doing, right? And so it's possible you wouldn't get your money immediately. Where with life insurance companies, because they're more stable than banks are, banks take high risks, you know, when they go and they try to do a lot of lending and things like that, they can lend out more than what they have in actual, in their possession. Insurance companies cannot do that. Insurance companies invest in things and they're generally invest in things such as like treasuries, bonds, T-bills and things like that. They might invest a little bit in mortgages or like some alternative investments. It's a very tiny percentage of their portfolio. They're usually going for things that are interest rate specific. So if interest rates go up, that's a great news if you're an insurance company and especially if you're in a policy holder like myself, you've got a whole life policy, you actually make higher returns on your policy when interest rates are higher versus the times when they're lower. So luckily we've been seeing interest rates go up. Guardian is no exception. Guardian has actually seen their dividend rate go up to about 6% as well like most of them have. So good, solid company. It's backed up by reinsurance. It's got some, you know, stable footing and it's paying some decent dividends. On top of that, you can actually design the policy with Guardian to have higher cash value in the first year. One thing I've noticed with Guardian is that for the most part, they actually are pretty competitive. I would put them almost neck and neck with MassMutual, which is another my second favorite company. MassMutual and Guardian are really like neck and neck with each other in how the cash value performs and produces. So I think that's one thing that's great about Guardian. The other thing I think is also good about them too is just the fact that they have been stable over the years. They've paid dividends much like MassMutual, PayMutual. They've been paying dividends for 170 years plus in a row. So that means they've paid more than their minimum guarantee every single year through depressions, recessions, and everything else. So again, a good solid company. Now, the cons of it. The con side, I would say is this. One, I mentioned the underwriting. Underwriting is not easy. It's not great when it comes to Guardian. The one issue is that sometimes it can take months to get approved. And that's not even true for somebody who's in decent health. So that's one thing I don't like. From the back end, from my end, of course, is trying to go through that. Now, granted, when you work with Guardian, much like MassMutual, you know, you do usually get some representatives and people that work for you to kind of help you with that kind of stuff. But I personally like to have a little bit more control. I like to be able to speed things along versus get sent in the backlog where there's an office manager that's getting overloaded. You might get pushed back a little bit, right? And that means that you're waiting, plus you're waiting for doctors and everything else if they have to wait for that or paramed exams because they will require paramed exams. While certain companies may not require a paramed exam, it does take longer to get through that process. You know, the other thing too is that I've noticed with most Guardian agents, even the independent ones, but especially if they're captive agents, you've got to be aware of many times they have to meet certain sales quotas and they might not make the best policy for you. So even though they could do a better policy, what I've noticed in Guardian is that most insurance agents do not do the best policy possible. In almost every situation, when I see the policy coming back, I even saw one recently actually, that it was good. It was a good policy, but it wasn't great. And it definitely wasn't the best it could be. So when I actually showed a comparison using even another company, it blew it out of the water. Like this guy was showing, you know, putting in money like over $100,000 a year into Guardian, but then it was going to cost them like $33,000 in cost. But I showed them mine, it's like, hey, you don't even have to do that. And it's like $15,000. It's like half the cost that you'd have to pay for that first year alone. So you got to be careful. Just because even if Guardian can do a good policy, this is just true with MassMutual, PennMutual, all these other companies too. It's all the same. Even if they can have good potential, the agent may not design it to where it could be the best possible. And many of the times, the companies just don't want you to. I know from working with Guardian really on and off for the last 20, almost 20 years now, it's been, it's 19 years. I'll tell you from my own experience is that Guardian is a very traditional mentality with whole life. You put it in there, you let it sit there forever, grow. Don't just keep pulling money out. They don't like infinite banking, really. They're not big fans of that. And so the culture teaches their agents to not focus on the short-term lower cost type policies. Now, they have gotten better at that, which I do appreciate. And that's why I still have an appointment with them. However, they're just not of the culture to want to encourage and really try to do what's best for the client to have more money short-term as well as long-term too. So here's the best thing I can suggest, right? Is that Guardian can be good. One warning I will give you too, that could be a or a bad thing. They do have a unique whole life product where you can actually add on a stock index. So like the S&P 500, you can actually get almost like index universal life combined with whole life, where it's not so much you get the index all the time, but on the paid up additions and even the dividends that you're earning, you can actually get paid potentially more with some extra stock market returns. I'll just warn you though, that even though it looks decent now, it's brand new. It's only been out for a year. This is, you know, it came out about 2023 or so, 2024. Even though it could be good based on if the stock market goes up, if the stock market doesn't do as well in the future, you may see worse performance out of it than what you're seeing there. And also it's brand new. And I don't trust any companies that's trying to experiment with things that are brand new. Often what I'll see happen is they'll change the rules as it goes along. They'll say, oh, I was giving too much interest to these people now. Let's cut back that interest. So just be aware that although it has something that could actually illustrate better than every other company out there, it doesn't mean it'll actually perform better. And they've tried to encourage me. I mean, they've been offered to pay me more money than other companies will pay me, but I keep coming back to, yeah, but the thing is, I don't trust that. I don't trust you yet. You have to prove to me over time that this thing is going to be consistent. And then maybe I might consider using that option. So they do have this hybrid option, I think is better than an IUL. It's a whole life with some index properties to it. But again, I would steer clear of that. I'd be kind of careful because I do believe that they might make some changes and alterations where the returns won't be as good down the line in the future. Now, if you're looking at options with Guardian, great. We can always run those kinds of situations for you ourselves because we are independent brokers. But I can tell you from all the experience and things that I've done, I've been able to consistently beat Guardian's numbers with other companies like MassMutual as well as PennMutual. And so if you would like to see what those numbers look like, you're thinking, well, I'm looking at Guardian, could there be something better than Guardian out there? Reach out to us just in the link below there. You can actually book a time, no consultation fee or anything like that, no pressure. But we can actually look at those numbers to see, can we do better? Can we actually make this design really well? And by the way, if they do design a Guardian policy really, really well, we'll let you know. We'll say, listen, the way they're designing it is the best that you can do with Guardian. But again, if you can do better than Guardian, why not? So be sure to reach out to us at the link below. Thank you.