After announcing West Coast Life’s planned term insurance rate increase a few days ago and the following up yesterday with a summary of their rules for transition to the new rates I queried West Coast about the huge discrepancy in time allowed between agents in the field and their in house Telelife process.

Clearly giving us two weeks to have applications signed and three weeks for them to be in the home office is not on a level playing field with Telelife having two months to get the application and exam done. I shot a question out to Greg Zabel, the author of the memo, to see if perhaps there was some mistake or perhaps there might be some room for negotiating a more equal treatment.

His answer was that since Telelife doesn’t have a lot of control over getting exams done or applications back in West Coast felt they should be given more time. So let me explain a bit more about Telelife.

Telelife is a service that West Coast Life provides to agents who don’t want to do the work of sending out applications and ordering exams. Once the agent has made a sale he turns his client over to Telelife. They create the application and send it out and then they order the exam. It’s still up to the agent to make sure the application gets signed and returned and the exam gets done. For the record we don’t use Telelife and we have about a 10 day turnaround on applications and exams, mostly having to do with finding a workable exam date.

So, I’m thinking it is truly a pathetic excuse for an agent who would need an extra 5-6 weeks more than me to get an application and exam back in, and West Coast Life is giving them the slack??

Anyway, just me having a little whine with my rate change. It won’t impact my ability to serve my clients. Thought it might be useful for anyone that comes across an agent that is big on a process called Telelife.

Bottom line. That rate change is coming no matter what, another nail in the downward term insurance rate coffin. If you’re dragging your feet on the decision to get life insurance you may end up very disappointed in a pair of worn out shoes and higher rates to go with them.