Swapping morbid stories and statistics is a reliably good way of having a conversation with an insurance person.

Russell Hutchinson looks at the vexed question of what insurance advisers who are RFAs can do with clients with whole-of-life policies.

Rationing is alive and well in healthcare. It isn’t even that controversial these days: everyone accepts that there isn’t enough money for everything we want. It just gets messy when we disagree over where the money should be spent.

Do you still remember how to sell? You would be forgiven if you had forgotten, fed on a constant diet of compliance fears and ‘solutions’.

At a conference recently I had someone challenge me when I linked savings and insurance together closely.

When insurance is seen as something very ordinary, mundane, and ho hum – then it becomes what we dread: a commodity, an afterthought, and forgotten. When it’s seen as central to a client’s core values and goals in life they become engaged in the process and outcomes are always better.

I hear all the time amongst insurance people that insurance is about paying claims. I hear brokers talk about it, and I hear clients doubt it. I hear company managers talk all the time about the claims they pay - but we talk less often about the claims we don't pay.

If your broking service looks the same as everyone else's, then your results will as well. There is a reason that most people are in the middle - it's because it is safe there.

We get into a lot of trouble with shortcuts.

Surely everybody knows that standard fire and general cover for your home "doesn't cover flooding here!" Doesn't everybody know that total and permanent disablement doesn't cover the loss of only one leg? Doesn't everybody know that six months business interruption insurance isn't enough?

Whether you read that headline as a good thing or a bad thing may have something to do with how old you are.

Just this morning I heard two comments about the value of client bases. One was from a commentator who told a broker that whatever he paid for a client base last year - the value today was ‘half'.

When Bill Clinton lost control of the legislature in 1994 he went on to success due to a policy called ‘traingulation' - the ability to win back the public at the expense of the Republican House.

Recently the president of Happy Life Insurance Limited (of China) told me about how to harvest wild Chinese Gooseberries (otherwise known as Kiwifruit) with a stone or stick in their native province. As he did so I got a chance to reflect on the differences between the life insurance business in New Zealand and China and how that provides some clues to where this business is headed in the next decade.

It is proverbial that political careers always end in failure. Does that have to apply to advisers? Well, not as dramatically as losing an election, obviously. But over the next few years the industry is set to lose a number of advisers - anything between 10% and 40% depending on a number of heroic assumptions.

Quotation software has to be one of the most annoying things for an insurance adviser.

Sincere apologies, but as with so many things I have discovered over the past 10 years or so that I was wrong about something. A long time ago, when I'd answer the phone and prepare quotes for insurance brokers all day long, I still remember doing quotes for a broker who I thought, cordially, was insane.