Which life insurance is the right fit for you?

Yoel Yitzchok Bodek lives near Monsey, New York, and is the founder of Brokers Central, a company that offers brokers comprehensive information on all the life insurance products available on the market. He says he always loved finance, but freely admits that he initially had no desire to enter the life insurance field.

Twenty-three years ago, a MetLife recruiter picked up a résumé he had posted on an online job forum. He told the recruiter he wasn’t interested in the field at all, but let himself be convinced to come down to the Bay Ridge office for a conversation. By the end of the interview, he’d been successfully convinced to give it a try.

The team reframed the industry for him, upending his vision of agents trying to close a deal pushing a product that is difficult to sell. “It’s about financial planning, and helping families prepare for the future,” they told him.

He soon learned that life insurance isn’t a financial plan, and a financial plan that doesn’t incorporate life insurance isn’t a very sound one.

He decided to give it a try, and 23 years later, he’s still at it.

Yoel Yitzchok doesn’t actually sell life insurance to individuals; he’s a wholesaler — an interesting description for an industry in which no physical products are sold. “We don’t have warehouse stacked with boxers of insurance products,” he clarifies.

Instead, he and his team advise brokers in the field, so they can best guide their clients.

While many life insurance brokers typically deal directly with one company, sometimes a client needs something different. In cases like these, Yoel Yitzchok uses his broad knowledge of the spectrum of insurance products to guide them toward the right fit for that particular client.

Why do people need life insurance?

One word: responsibility. Prior to the Covid pandemic, people didn’t connect with the need on an immediate level. When I spoke to Rabbi Paysach Krohn, he put it this way: “Everyone thinks it only happens to the other person. But you don’t realize that to someone else, you are ‘that other person.’ ”

Covid made people realize the necessity of having a plan in place in case the worst happens, and also that things can change on a dime — pushing it off is not the right thing.

On a practical level, life insurance is financial assurance. On a broader level, it’s dignity. It’s dignity for people you love. It’s dignity for your own children. If a father or mother passes prematurely, not only is the family dealing with a terrible sorrow, they’re also exposing themselves to the shame of needing a collection.

During Covid, someone pooled all the community fundraisers and tallied them. It was about $24 million, which is incredible when you talk about individual donations. However, there were about 60 campaigns on that page. The average family walked away with only around $400,000. That’s barely enough to keep a frum family afloat for more than a couple of years.

And that’s aside from the fact that some of the fundraisers are conducted in a way that’s a modern form of torture. A child lost his father — and on top of that his face needs to be plastered on the streets? The one thing these kids need — and deserve — is a normal life. If you use their faces to fundraise, you’re stealing that from them.

People always ask, “But they need money. What should we do?”

Simple answer? Life insurance.

It’s not as exciting as a fundraiser, but any responsible family who cares about the future and dignity of their children should invest in this.

Are there any people you don’t recommend purchase life insurance? Is there any category of people you can think of who wouldn’t need it?

Of course, there are going to be instances where a person doesn’t need life insurance. Someone with no dependents, perhaps more mature families who aren’t supporting as many kids, people who have outside considerable assets, or somebody who’s single. But even in those cases, you can argue that having the right type of life insurance could still help.