OUR PROCESS

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Blue Star’s approach to clients is simple.  We are the member of your financial and estate planning team that will give you unbiased, expert information about whether or not there are any life insurance products that can help you meet financial goals (including reducing taxes and better managing investment risk).  Unlike your attorney and CPA, we don’t charge you fees by the hour.  Instead, we generate revenues by earning commissions from the insurance company if and when you purchase life insurance, annuities and other financial products from us.  While that may sound like a negative at first, it’s complementary to your fee based advisors.  The reason is that fee based advisors must wait for specific direction from clients (authorizing time).  Conversely, Blue Star proactively spends whatever time necessary in developing solutions for you because this has no effect on your costs.  So, the best team approach is a commission based, proactive financial and estate planner (like Blue Star) combined with fee based advisors (attorneys and CPAs) that you direct to review our recommendations.  This results in the best possible results for you.

Shown below is the Blue Star recommended process for how we work with you (our client) and your existing CPAs and estate planning attorneys:

1. Don Prehn, President of Blue Star has a 20 minute call with you to get some general information about your estate.  All information is confidential.  If requested, Blue Star and Don Prehn will sign an NDA.
2. Next, Blue Star creates a financial model with a forecast to determine what estate tax liability (if any) your estate might have between now and some day in the future.  (Some clients want this analysis run to age 90 or 100, other clients want it run all the way out to age 120.)
3. If there appears to be a future tax risk, Don meets with his tax/legal specialists and develops alternative solutions to solve the problem (again, keeping you in control of your assets at all times as a non-negotiable pre-condition for any new planning).
4. Don then schedules a second follow-up call with you to discuss options.  If you like any of the solutions, then Don requests that you authorize him to explain these proposed solutions to your existing estate planning attorney.  Of course, if you don’t have an existing estate planning attorney, Don can refer a couple good firms in your area.
5. If your estate planning attorney determines that any of Blue Star’s solutions merit additional consideration, then Don sets up a joint conference call to review plan options.  On this call would be you, your estate planning attorney, Don and possibly one of Don's tax/legal specialists.
6. You are only responsible for paying for time billed by your own advisors.  This typically includes your existing estate planning attorney and CPA.  In about 50% of new estate planning cases, new life insurance is recommended as part of the overall plan recommendation.  The reason for this is that life insurance is an effective and straightforward tool for creating estate liquidity without causing additional income or estate tax liability.  This liquidity gives your estate flexibility, control and leverage in a myriad of important areas including funding taxes, covering administrative expenses, allowing more time for the orderly sale of business or real estate assets, equalizing estates between children that may work in the family business and those that don't, etc. etc.  In any case, if new life insurance is purchased then Blue Star is paid by the insurance company.  Blue Star does not charge consulting fees to you.
7. In about half the client cases, Blue Star will recommend to you that you should NOT purchase additional life insurance.  This is due to the fact that in some client circumstances, new life insurance is unnecessary or there are more cost effective ways to solve a particular planning problem.  We advise clients this way because it’s the right thing to do and also because our guiding principle is to do everything in our power to earn your trust as your expert, unbiased source for life insurance information.
8. Blue Star can also review any of your existing life insurance policies to make sure they are continuing to provide the best results for you (often not the case).  To help us with this policy review assessment, Blue Star has a close relationship with Veralytic, an independent life insurance research company.  The way this works is that you provide us with some basic information about your policy.  Then, Blue Star will pay for your customized Veralytic report which will compare your existing policy to every other life insurance product currently available in the marketplace.  Then, this report provides you with a 5 star rating system summary showing how your policy compares to other products in each of the following categories:

A.    Financial strength of the insurance company

B.    Competitiveness of policy costs

C.    Stability of pricing offers based on historical behavior

D.    Accessibility to cash values (i.e. restrictions on distributions, surrender charges, etc.)

E.    Actual historical performance

We can then replace any existing policy with better products if (a) the policy is underperforming or not meeting the client’s current needs and (b) the client is still medically insurable.

Contact Us at Blue Star for more information