The 5-Minute Advisor – August 28, 2026
Haven’t logged into the Thompson portal lately? It’s not the same site. We rebuilt the website and agent portal to be faster and easier to navigate, so the tools, resources, and case support you need are easier to find instead of buried three clicks deep.
Same people, same expertise, same responsiveness you’ve always gotten from us, just a faster way to get to it.
→ Take a Look →Discover our revamped IUL portfolio
Many clients struggle with a difficult trade-off: Preserving wealth for the future while feeling comfortable spending it in retirement.
As Life Insurance Awareness Month approaches, it’s an opportune time to explore new ways to help clients get more value from life insurance.
Join David Blanchett, Head of Retirement Research at Prudential, for a discussion on putting life insurance to work in retirement through our new “License to Spend” strategy.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Help clients feel more confident in retirement
- Uncover opportunities to grow your business
- Build stronger relationships across generations
From August 24 through December 31, 2026, any Symetra IUL case that comes back Standard gets bumped automatically to Preferred or Super Preferred. No negotiating. No crediting program hoops. Just a straight table shave applied to the client.
If you’ve got a client sitting on a Standard IUL quote from Symetra, or one you assumed wouldn’t qualify for better, don’t submit it yet. Call us this week. This could mean a lower premium, a longer guarantee, or a bigger death benefit for the same money, and it disappears at year end.
Where it applies:
- Symetra Accumulator (AIUL), up to $10,000,000: Standard to Super Preferred
- Symetra Protector (PIUL), up to $5,000,000: Standard to Preferred
What it looks like in practice:
John, 55, wants low-cost permanent coverage for his family. He’s in decent health with no red flags, but at 5’10”, 235 lbs, build alone puts him at Standard Non-Tobacco.
At Standard NT, $500,000 of Protector IUL runs $7,550/year, guaranteed to age 87, solved at 6%.
Bumped to Preferred NT under this program, same $500,000, same 6% solve: $6,297/year. That’s $1,253/year back in the client’s pocket, and coverage now guaranteed to age 89, two extra years for less money. He could also hold the premium flat and increase the death benefit instead.
Call us this week and we’ll re-run any Symetra IUL case you’ve got sitting at Standard.
| Guarantee / Surrender | AM Best | Carrier | Product | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3-year | A+ | Athene | MaxRate 3 ($100K+) | 5.30% |
| 4-year | A+ | Integrity Life | MultiVantage 4 ($20K+) | 5.05% |
| 5-year | A+ | Protective Life | Secure Saver 5 ($75K+) | 5.60% |
| 6-year | A | American National | Palladium MYG 6 ($100K–$249,999) | 9.60% |
| 7-year | A+ | Athene | MaxRate 7 ($100K+) | 5.65%* |
| 8-year | A | American National | Palladium MYG 8 ($100K–$249,999) | 5.15% |
| 9-year | A | American National | Palladium MYG 9 ($100K–$249,999) | 5.15% |
| 10-year | A | Lincoln Financial Group | MYGuarantee Plus 10 ($100K+) | 5.50% |
*Athene MaxRate — see product rate sheet as some states differ in rate %.
American National (ANICO) offers higher interest rate for the Palladium MYG MAX (No Liquidity, except RMD’s). Be sure to check ANICO current rate sheet.
A small town government lost $189,000 this year, and nobody hacked anything.
In May 2026, staff in Harpswell, Maine wired a routine payment to a vendor that had supposedly updated its bank details. The email looked completely normal. It wasn’t real. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report puts a number on how common this has become: $3.05 billion in business email compromise losses last year, most of it moved by wire transfer or ACH before anyone noticed. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service’s own watchdog reported more than 800,000 mail theft complaints between 2023 and 2025, many rooted in the same underlying move: someone quietly changing where something goes.
This week’s article is a fully updated change of address monitoring guide for 2026, broadened to cover both the personal and business sides of address redirect fraud. Inside, we cover:
- The exact verification step USPS added in 2023 to stop online change of address fraud, and the three ways criminals still get around it
- What a vendor payment redirect scam actually looks like sitting in an inbox, before anyone realizes anything is wrong
- The one confirmation notice most people ignore that is actually the earliest warning sign of mail fraud
- The specific phone habit that stops nearly all vendor payment redirect fraud cold, and why most accounts payable teams skip it
- How long you actually have to reverse a fraudulent address change once you spot it, and why that window closes faster than people think
Every week this fraud goes undetected, the odds of full recovery drop. There is no grace period once mail starts moving to the wrong place.
Read the full guide
