Everyone hates paying for insurance until they actually need it.

That’s true for health and auto policies, but the picture for life insurance is more nuanced. Increasingly, these products are getting a seat at the table during client meetings, and some advisors see insurance as core to their process. Others agree that insurance can play an important role, but it’s crucial for policy purchasers to know exactly what kind of protection they’re getting and why. To turn the old adage on its head, life insurance policies should be bought, not sold.

“I’ve seen the devastating impact on families when the primary breadwinner passes away without life insurance,” said Jeffrey Walters, founder of Advisia Financial Planning. “In many cases a cheap term insurance policy could have been purchased while the breadwinner was healthy, but was not, due to unawareness or inertia.”

Real Insurance Talk

Sure, insurance is important, but clients still need to be wary. Asking a commission-based insurance agent what type of insurance to buy is like asking a jeweler what type of stone to get in a necklace: The financial incentives are strongly in favor of an expensive, complicated policy. Fortunately, term life policies for healthy people under 50 are often affordable, offering protection from the worst-case scenario described above.

“Where and from whom someone learns about insurance products is often more predictive of what they end up owning than what actually fits their needs,” said Skee Orr, co-founder of Kinetic Wealth. That’s unfortunate, advisors agreed, but people who avoid the conversation entirely can end up underinsured. The best outcomes begin with fiduciary financial planning that clearly defines what protection a family needs. From there, advisors can recommend working with independent brokers who can shop the market for fitting products.

Another consideration is disability, according to Michelle Crumm, financial planner at Belle Eve Financial. “For younger clients, they are statistically more likely to become disabled during working years than to die prematurely,” she said. “A high-quality, long-term disability policy that covers a client’s own occupation can be one of the most important protections in a financial plan.”

Randy Bruns, founder of Model Wealth, agreed. “Nearly every retirement plan depends upon one enormous assumption: that you’ll remain able to work and earn an income,” he said. “An accident or serious illness can change that instantly.”

When Insurance Isn’t Needed. “A two-income family where either single income is enough to support the family may not need insurance at all,” said John Bernstein, founder of Bernstein Financial Advisory. “Contrast that against a single-income family where the spouse is a stay-at-home parent caring for children.”

At minimum, that family should carry enough insurance to pay off the mortgage and cover childcare costs until the surviving spouse can find adequate employment. If the preference is for the surviving spouse to remain at home, the policy has to be much larger to replace lost income indefinitely.

The DINKs are feeling like a couple of duds right about now.

No kids means no college payments, no extra mouths to feed and no ludicrous schedule of baseball, travel soccer, clarinet recitals, ballet and (sigh) Fortnite lessons. Interestingly, though, childless Americans are feeling a bit more worried about their retirement than all the moms and dads out there. Some 72% of American parents feel confident in their ability to meet their savings goals for retirement, compared with just 54% of those without kids, according to an Allianz survey.

Not that advisors are pushing clients to start families, but it often acts as a wake-up call for many. “Having children naturally gives us a longer-term, multi-generational outlook on life,” said Jeffrey Walters, founder of Advisia Financial Planning. “It causes clients to start planning earlier and more comprehensively.”

The Parent Trap?

Today, it costs more than $300,000 to raise a child over the course of 18 years. It’s figures like that, along with rising inflation and the high cost of long-term care, that’s causing a lot of Americans to delay starting families. However, not having kids could actually be worsening people’s financial anxieties and retirement preparedness.

The survey also found:

• Some 62% of Americans without kids do not have a written financial plan. Meanwhile, more than half of parents do have a plan.

• There is a bell curve, though, to the number of kids parents have in relation to their retirement confidence. Parents with one to two children are more likely to feel confident versus those with three or more.

Adults Just Want to Have Fun. Parents will often say something like: “I haven’t gone to the movies since I’ve had kids,” and there is truth to that. Despite some good saving habits, Thomas Rindahl, an advisor with TruWest Wealth Management, noted that his childless clients tend to spend more freely and have more luxurious lifestyles than his parent clients. “The question becomes whether they can maintain that lifestyle,” he said.

Not having kids may lighten the load now, but it could create concerns as clients approach retirement, said Bryan Byrer, founder of Millennial Financial Planning. “Sometimes we have trouble thinking about our future selves, but it’s hard to ignore the gray hairs or how your body feels,” he told Retirement Upside. At that stage, people start worrying who exactly they can lean on both financially and socially. “People say, ‘When my friends pass away, I’ll always have family,’ but what happens when you don’t have kids?” Byrer said.

It’s been more than eight years since Johnny Poulsen and Justin Fitzpatrick, both former Jackson National executives, founded Income Lab. Their original concept was to make retirement planning “dynamic rather than static,” the duo recently told Retirement Upside, including by facilitating the use of guardrails-style strategies that could tell retirees when to adjust spending and by exactly how much.

Fast forward to 2026 and Income Lab has evolved from a niche retirement income software startup into a broader, advisor-facing retirement planning platform. The firm’s evolution has mirrored the entrance of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities into wealth management, especially in the past 12 to 18 months.

“We’re currently building out tools that we couldn’t even have dreamed about just a year or two ago,” Poulsen said. “Because of AI, the cost of developing new capabilities is coming down dramatically, so it’s really exciting to think about the future of this space.”

One example of this is the recent launch of Penny, an AI paraplanner combining a natural language AI interface with deterministic calculation engines to avoid fuzzy math and hallucination risks. The tool helps advisors analyze issues pertaining to Medicare, estate planning and other key topics directly inside the software, and there’s a lot more like that coming, the founders said.

Retirement Upside sat down with Poulsen and Fitzpatrick to talk about big trends in retirement planning, AI development, advisor growth and more.

RU: Justin, can you start by reflecting on the pace of innovation in the wealth management industry here in 2026? AI is the word, at the moment, and that seems likely to continue.

JF: Yeah, it’s a dynamic time. Like other firms out there, we’ve been hard at work launching our first AI-powered features. One thing that we’ve been really excited about is the ability to reduce or even eliminate most manual data entry on our platform, for example. That’s always been one of the biggest hurdles to more advanced financial planning at scale, and getting rid of it makes your life as an advisor so much better. For so long, a big part of the job of being an advisor has been about typing information into little white boxes on a screen and porting data between disconnected platforms. Those days are over.

Moving forward, there are just so many ways that AI can help with very practical things and just running the business as an advisor. Our clients are advisors running their own busy and dynamic businesses serving real clients, and so that’s always our big focus. How can we make their lives easier and elevate their work?

RU: Johnny, what’s your view on AI’s entrance into wealth management? And what are some of the features that are making the biggest difference in the lives of advisors and their clients today?

JP: I agree with Justin, and I’ll point to one example, which is the way the platform can now help advisors do more advanced planning around Medicare and how to manage income around that. Your typical advisor out there generally doesn’t know much about how to deal with Medicare, and certainly not how to file an appeal when their clients are hit with Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount surcharges that they shouldn’t have to pay.

I was talking to an advisor in Des Moines, Iowa, a few months back, and they were explaining to me that they had an $8 million client who had retired last year. This person used to make $600,000 a year, but in retirement he now has taxable income of less than $150,000. This client was expecting to have to pay high Medicare surcharges because IRMAA is set using marginal adjusted gross income from the tax return two years prior to the premium year. But when the advisor put the plan through Income Lab, the tool automatically flagged the fact that this person could appeal those surcharges, because retirement is an official qualifying life-changing event for reducing or eliminating Medicare IRMAA surcharges. In the end, the AI features were able to help this advisor save the client almost $14,000 in unnecessary IRMAA surcharges alone. That’s before we even get to things like tax-loss harvesting and strategic income planning.

That’s just one example of how AI is improving the way advisors handle complex financial planning topics. The same is true in areas like estate planning, which has also been challenging for the average advisor out there.

RU: Justin, we frequently hear that advisors’ biggest issue isn’t demand for their services. It’s time, capacity and resource restraints on their end. Is AI helping close that gap?

JF: Without a doubt. AI resources let advisors do a lot more for more clients and get around that bottleneck. It reminds me of another important theme, which is the potential advisor shortage we all hear about as older advisors leave the industry en masse in the coming decade.

We believe there’s no end in sight to the value an advisor can provide when empowered with modern technology. They’re able to be so much more efficient, especially when it comes to what we have described as going from strategic, high-level planning down to actual tactical advice implementation where the rubber hits the road.

RU: Johnny, any other thoughts on your end?

JP: To me, this is such an exciting time. AI’s entrance into our space is more exciting than when Monte Carlo planning was introduced back in the late 1990s. For a long time, advisors could have great tax conversations with their clients, but they struggled to actually help people manage their taxes in a proactive and ongoing manner. Modern tools are bringing so much value creation to the advisor-client relationship, and that’s going to continue to be the case. The execution of tax-aware planning is going to be so much more profound.