The Advice & Counsel Newsletter was developed by Advice Company's Founder & CEO, Gerry Goldsholle, who invented the Retained Asset Account while he was serving as Head of Investment and Fiduciary Services at MetLife. The Newsletters now are prepared by a team of experienced counselors and editors headed by Suzanne von Lengerke, and continue to be written in a highly readable manner that resonates with beneficiaries.

For over 20 years leading financial services and insurance companies including Chase, ING, Modern Woodman, ReliaStar, and Voya mailed a print copy of the Advice & Counsel Newsletter each month to over 100,000 of their valued customers, primarily recent beneficiaries of life insurance and annuity products. From a monthly print publication with a physical mail circulation of over 100,000, the Advice & Counsel Newsletter is now distributed electronically every quarter as an integral part of the normal quarterly statements sent to beneficiaries who have been paid through Retained Assets Accounts, now having saved our clients tens of thousands of dollars annually.

Decades of experience, backed by focus group and additional research conducted by the publisher and others have shown that beneficiaries frequently are pressured — more quickly than they are comfortable with — by family and friends into taking highly inappropriate action with their proceeds. Too often, such such actions result in far too many beneficiaries wind up losing or being defrauded out of large portions of their insurance proceeds.

There are countless tales of beneficiaries who received a significant amount of insurance money that had been intended to protect their financial security for decades. Instead succumbed to subtle and not so subtle pressures, guilt, fear and/or greed and wound up "investing" and then losing their proceeds in risky schemes. Countless others were pressured to inappropriately gift away their proceeds, thereby severely damaging them financially.

The best financial advice generations of counselors have given beneficiaries after a death is to keep their money safe until they have regained their equilibrium. Well-intentioned counselors and clergy strongly caution beneficiaries to take their time making important decisions, to avoid risk or taking precipitous action in all aspects of their lives.

The Advice & Counsel Newsletter strongly concurs with this universal advice, and in every issue helps beneficiaries understand why it makes sense to delay non-essential decisions, to avoid inappropriate risk, while keeping them in control of their own money. Retained asset accounts enable beneficiaries to take the time to decide while earning a highly competitive rate – typically a rate that is higher than what they could earn with any other savings vehicle offering similar degrees of safety, access and control. This also enables the sponsoring insurance company to extend the duration of the accounts, maintain a relationship with the beneficiary and her family while earning a small spread on the proceeds retained in the accounts.

For more information about the Advice & Counsel Newsletter, contact its Editor in Chief, Suzanne von Lengerke at Suzanne@advicepublications.com or write to her at Advice & Counsel Newsletter, P.O. Box 203, Essex Fells, NJ 07021