- ✓You do not raise taxes in a policy conversation, because premiums are not deductible.
- ✓Your highest earners weigh taxes heavily, and you stay quiet on the subject.
- ✓You hold back because raising one tax idea feels like it would require being an expert in all of them.
- ✓High-earning prospects sense a product being sold, not a picture being solved.
- ✓You compete on price and product, because that is the only lever you use.
- ✓The tax-planning conversation goes to someone else, and the client tends to follow.
- ✓You treat the absence of a premium deduction as the absence of any tax angle.
- ✓You have not had the conversation your best clients are waiting for.
High earners are, in a real way, the most underserved on tax. They earn enough to feel the burden acutely, yet they sit below the level where teams of advisors build custom strategies for them. The menu of moves genuinely available to them is short, which is exactly where the opening is. A broker who understands the few strategies that do work for this group becomes something rare: a real expert on a problem the client cannot easily solve elsewhere. Brokers who reach that point do not simply hold the relationship. They write considerably more coverage, because the client finally has someone who connects protection to the tax picture.
Two separate facts have been collapsed into one, and only one of them is true.
That life insurance premiums are not deductible is true. That there is no tax efficiency to be found in the case does not follow, and it is false. A high earner's tax picture has real room in it, through how they give, how they structure, and what they document, none of which depends on whether a premium is deductible.
The brokers who serve high earners well did not find a deduction for premiums. They stopped letting the absence of one keep them out of the tax conversation. That change alone affects who takes their call. It also carries a responsibility: tax outcomes belong to the client's own advisors, and the broker's role is to open the conversation, not to render advice.
A different conversation, and a different client
A different practice is available, one in which tax efficiency is the reason a client leans in rather than a subject you avoid. It is a genuinely different conversation, and it attracts a genuinely different client. It is also one you can enter without stepping outside your lane, by coordinating with the professionals who do the planning.
See selling on tax efficiency vs. selling on product →