By city

Infinite Banking in Sarnia

The word guaranteed appears throughout this subject. It is worth knowing exactly who is doing the guaranteeing, because the answer is not a government and not a bank.

At the mouth of the lake

Sarnia sits where Lake Huron narrows into the St. Clair, with the Blue Water Bridge to Port Huron and Chemical Valley running south along the river. Canatara Park holds the beach, Sarnia Bay the harbour, and Aamjiwnaang First Nation adjoins the industrial south end. The refineries and petrochemical plants have set the working economy since Imperial Oil arrived in the nineteenth century.

A city built on operations where people are trained to ask what happens when something fails. This page applies that habit to a life insurance contract.

The guarantee is the insurer's promise

This is the page's central point. When an illustration shows a guaranteed column, those values are contractual obligations of the issuing insurance company, and they depend on that company's financial strength and its ability to pay claims. They are not government guaranteed.

That is a meaningful promise, not a weak one. Canadian life insurers are federally regulated by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which sets capital requirements and monitors solvency, and the sector has been stable for a very long time. But it is a company's promise, and knowing that is different from assuming a government is standing behind it.

Assuris is not CDIC, and the difference matters

People routinely assume deposit insurance applies. It does not. CDIC covers eligible deposits at member banks and does not cover insurance contracts at all.

Protection for Canadian policyholders comes from Assuris, a separate not-for-profit organisation that Canadian life insurers are required to belong to. If a member insurer fails, Assuris works to transfer policies to a solvent company and protects benefits up to published limits. Those limits are set by Assuris, published on its own site, and are the only figures worth relying on, so check them there rather than taking anyone's summary, including this page's.

Anyone who tells you a policy is CDIC-insured is wrong about something you can verify in two minutes, and the error tells you how carefully the rest of what they said was prepared.

What follows practically

Ask which insurer is issuing the contract, by name, and look up its financial strength rating. The rating agencies publish these and they are free to read. This is ordinary due diligence on a forty-year commitment, and no reasonable practitioner will find the question odd.

Note too that the guaranteed column is the part backed by that promise. The illustrated column is not: dividends are not guaranteed, they are declared annually by the insurer's board based on the participating account's experience, and the scale can be revised downward. Two different kinds of number sit side by side on the same page, and only one of them is a commitment.

Ontario rules and where it does not fit

Insurance in Ontario is supervised by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, and a professional here holds the licence of a Life and Accident & Sickness Insurance Agent. Under the Financial Professionals Title Protection Act nobody may use the title Financial Planner or Financial Advisor without an approved credential. Verify the licence in the public register and ask how the person is paid.

Shift work in this city means income that varies with overtime and turnaround seasons. Size the base premium against the year without them. Cash surrender value stays below cumulative premiums for many years, commonly more than a decade, so an early exit is a loss. Nothing on this page is advice. No assessment has been made of anyone reading it, and the author is not a neutral party: he is licensed to sell the contracts this strategy uses and is paid a commission when one is placed. Ask which company, and check Assuris yourself.