An unbelievable story about an attempt to obtain insurance and the resulting botched attempts by multiple premiere insurance companies to correct the matter. Our resulting advice to those seeking life insurance to help you avoid fraud and get the greatest value for your hard working dollar.
My wife and I wanted to purchase life insurance for our daughter, start a 529 savings account, and start a policy for my wife. As both my father and brother have made life long careers out of the insurance industry, I first contacted them to gather well respected advice. Both my dad and brother have sold me insurance in the past and if laws didn’t prohibit them from selling it to me again (albeit out of state), I would have just had my brother do the whole thing and be done with it. However, I couldn’t do this so my first option was to seek out the insurance company my brother works for - New York Life (NYL) .
 New York Life’s website is a mess, and contacting an agent is not straight forward. I ended up going through several levels of menus and then leaving an email clearly explaining my needs and including my full contact information. After waiting for 3 months with no answer, I went to the extent to leave a voice mail. However, 1 month later, I called my father to ask who else he would suggest I talk to in light of New York Life’s failure to return either my email or my voice mail. He suggested Northwest Mutual Life (NML) might be a good alternative - it was his experience that they were a good company with a long history in the business.
Things started out great with Northwest Mutual Life , I was able to leave a voice mail for an agent who contacted me within a couple days. They guy who contacted me (Josh) seemed a little green on the phone and when we set up our first meeting he showed up with someone else (Trevor) who seemed to have a better understanding of things. After explaining exactly what I wanted, they proceeded to try to sell me other things. I stayed firm, and asked we proceed along the lines I requested. In the second meeting I asked that they bring all the materials they needed to complete the requested insurance and 529 accounts and I would make sure all parties were present to sign the documents to get things going.
A week later, this meeting took place and we signed all the items, gave checks to the agents to start the policies and initially fund the 529. The agents made clear that the checks for the policies and 529 went to different places and thus needed to be two separate checks. My wife had blood drawn as required by the insurance and in the mean time Trevor called to ask how we wanted funds in the 529 account invested among some limited selection of funds. Some time later, the policies had all come back and the two agents presented the policies to us. We asked about the status of the 529 and they said all that was needed was to set up the automatic funding so we completed some form that allowed money to be drawn from our checking account to fund both the 529 and the policies. This form was completed at this time.
A month later we heard from New York Life via email which asked how they could help us, albeit more than 6 months after we sent the email. I elected not to respond as it was a little late!
A year later, I asked my wife if we had received any statements from Northwest Mutual Life. While we could see that they were drawing money from our checking account, we also noticed that it wasn’t the amount we specified. We also noticed that we had never received final paperwork from Northwest Mutual Life on the 529 for tax purposes. I called the phone number I had for our agent (Josh) and left a message. I ended up leaving successive messages for the agent over a few weeks but never hearfrom him - mean while Northwest Mutual Life continued to draw from our checking account. After over a month of not hearing back, I asked my father how to handle the matter. He had seen that some life insurance agents actually pocket initial checks and mislead customers so he encouraged me to contact the home office of Northwest Mutual Life immediately to ask for help. I did just that.
The home office introduced me to the manager of the local branch office as well as transferred me to someone in Wisconsin to help resolve the 529 which seemed to be another matter.
Turns out Trevor had now left the company, and while Josh was still with the company he was no longer taking calls and claimed to have no recollection of our talking to him or ever meeting us - which was strange as it was our impression that he was our “agent”. Northwest Mutual Life had no record of us ever requesting a 529 through these agents and because we paid $250 with a money order rather than a personal check we couldn’t show them a cancelled check for the down payment. Essentially this was Northwest Mutual Life’s way of saying, sorry but this is now your problem and we will not help you further.
Northwest Mutual Life local branch office asked if there was anything else they could help us with - to which I suggested that a year end statement would be a good start. They said it was company policy to not send any statements to policy holders unless it was absolutely necessary. The three envelopes we received from Northwest Mutual Life during the last three years of the policy were all notices that our policies were being assigned to yet another new agent - we have had 3 agents in the past 3 years and have only received one account statement for the policy - but for that we had to beg.
The only policy I have with Cuna Mutual which Josh and Trevor had a chuckle about when I presented it, sends out quarterly statements like clockwork.
My advice to those seeking life insurance is to FIRST reach out to people you know. I would definitely NOT recommend Northwest Mutual Life. They call themselves the “quiet” company (perhaps because once you sign up with them you never hear from them again) and if you inquire about your purchase its hard to find anyone around who will admit they either know you or remembers helping you in the past. In my book, these guys still owe me $250 - yea Josh and Trevor, we are still waiting for our check back (please include interest from 2005).
Some of the best insurance I’ve ever had is my current policy handed by Cuna Mutual and home, car, and term life insurance from a super State Farm agent in Saint Paul Minnesota (Chris Budzius). It is hard for me to believe that in a “pure” service industry like insurance that a company could get by with really poor customer service. While I believe there probably are super sales people who work for Northwest Mutual Life who have worked there for many years and never miss a beat in taking care of their customers. The problem is, with no quality control in hiring new agents, and no follow through at the home office you end up with overall very poor customer service throughout the company. Quality customer service cannot just be an individual thing that bubbles up to the top - rather it’s a corporate wide vision that is clearly evident in everything a company does.
I’m surprised Northwest Mutual Life didn’t just make things right with us in spite of their agent and internal communications troubles. However, they pushed that responsibility onto me to find the source of the missed communication and fraud rather than taking any responsibility or initiative to find out what happened, correct their internal policies or educate their staff, and make good with the customer. I still may file a claim to the consumer protection agency on this matter.
File a complaint to:
Federal Trade Commission (Bureau of Consumer Protection)
Note, individual states also have their own consumer protection agencies which could also be of use to you in similar matters.
