Click the book above for a shocking
bibliography of America's life-insurance industry.		 Financial Recovery

Stewart Ogilby

Hundreds of copies of Financial Recovery (published in 1980) were sold to insurance agencies and to licensed agents throughout the country (previously trained by the industry), for their own information and enlightenment by means of a full-page advertisement and its resulting reviews published in Life Insurance Selling magazine.

Its popularity was largely responsible for the creation of "Universal Life Insurance", a more difficult "savings-plan" or "investment" product to analyze than "whole-life" insurance. Sold as a flexible and confusing combination of saving and insurance, UL contains an underwritten payout calculated by actuaries based on mortality tables. That is the feature which enables it to be marketed as life-insurance. The savings feature is obligatory, payable in the premiums and, of course, strongly touted by company trained salespersons.

This 2023 online copy of Financial Recovery increases the number of life-insurance books from the fifteen listed in the Appendix of its 1980 copyright edition to nearly one-hundred (below).

A major reason that Financial Recovery was effective in 1980 was that it was marketed to licensed insurance agents for their consideration when dealing with their customers, including friends, neighbors, and their own families.

These books and publications expose the shocking strategy of an industry, the primary responsibility of which is to provide an accountable financial product (insurance) for the financial protection of survivors, especially children, impacted by the unexpected death of a family bread-winner.

The industry responded in 1981 by designing and promoting a new variety of savings-account (cash value) "insurance" that they named Universal Life Insurance. Unlike auto insurance and homeowners insurances, cash-value policies require obligatory overcharges ("forced savings") to the cost of the insurance itself along with what Venita VanCaspel (see below) calls the "funny banking rules" inherent in cash-value life-insurance policies and inadequate cost disclosure.

For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull. — Ralph Nader
(In testimony before the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly)

Massive Corporate Misrepresentation

The following books primarily explore and expose the fallacy of using life insurance as an investment. Note that this is far from new. The author of the first book on this list, Elizur Wright, was the first insurance commissioner of the State of Massachusetts.

After reviewing this new bibliography (below), READ Financial Recovery

  1. 1877 "Traps Baited With Orphans" Elizur Wright
  2. 1901 "The Economic Theory of Risk and Insurance" AIlan H. Willett
  3. 1905 "Business of Life Insurance" O.P.
  4. 1906 "How To Buy Life Insurance" O.P.
  5. 1907 "The Story of Life Insurance" Burton J. Hendrick
  6. 1916 "Life Insurance for Professors" Univ. of Calif. Publications in Economics, Vol.4, No.2
  7. 1917 "A License To Steal" Philander Banister Armstrong
  8. 1925 "Life Insurance Digest" Robert NI. Messick
  9. 1929 "Life Insurance Simplified" Lewis R. Tebbetts
  10. 1930 "The Money Value of a Man" L.I. Dublin and A.J. Lotka
  11. 1933 "How Safe Is Life Insurance?" L. Seth Schnitman
  12. 1934 "Your Insurance" S.B. Cyzio
  13. 1936 "Life Insurance, A Critical Examination" Edward Berman
  14. "Your Life Insurance and What to Do About It" David Gilbert and Jim Sullivan
  15. "Life Insurance, A Legalized Racket" Mort Gilbert & E. Albert Gilbert
  16. 1938 "Life Insurance, Americas Greatest Confidence Game" J.D. Kidder
  17. "Life Insurance — Investing in Disaster" Mort & E.A. Gilbert
  18. "Life Insurance Exposed" Daniel D. White
  19. "Gouge" John Franklin Gaskill
  20. 1944 "You Pay and You Pay"
  21. 1946 "A Century of American Life Insurance" S.D. Clough
  22. 1947 "How to Buy Life Insurance" Phillip Gordis
  23. 1948 "Insurance and Your Security" E. Albert Gilbert
  24. 1948 "Personal Estate Planning in A Changing World" Rene Wormser
  25. "Personal Finance and Investment" Wilford J. Eitman
  26. 1955 "Insurance without Exploitation" Edwin C. Guillet
  27. "Your Insurance and How to Profit By It" Michael H. Levy
  28. "Life Insurance from the Buyers Point of View" 1955-68 Bureau of Economic Research
  29. 1958 "The Grim Truth About Life Insurance" Ralph Hendershot
  30. "Your Pocketbook Is Leaking" K.P. Chartier
  31. 1960 "Common Cents in Investments and Insurance" Gerald Fitzgerald
  32. "Vice President in Charge of Revolution" Murray Lincoln
  33. "Behind the Fine Print" Gayle E. Richardson
  34. "Money You Can Keep" David Gilbert
  35. 1962 "Life Insurance, A Study in Delusion" Dermis L. Anderson
  36. "Use and Abuse of Statistics" W.J. Reichmann
  37. 1963 "A View of Life Insurance" Wayne C. Knigge
  38. "Whats Wrong with Your Life Insurance" Norman F. Dacey
  39. 1964 "Life Insurance — Benefit or Fraud?" J.J. Brown
  40. 1965 "Life Insurance" Graduate School of Business, Indiana University
  41. 1966 "The Great Misconceptions" Analytical Service, Inc.
  42. "The Retail Price Structure in American Life Insurance" Joseph M. Beth
  43. "This Is Where Your Money Goes" Robert F. Kahroff
  44. "Pay Now, Die Later" James Gollen
  45. 1967 "Why Waste Your Money on Life Insurance" J.E. Stowers
  46. "The Consumer Union Report on Life Insurance"
  47. "A Study of Mutual Life Insurance Dividends" Frank Mcintosh
  48. 1968 "How to Avoid Being Overcharged by Your Life Insurance Salesman" Pawlick
  49. "The Mortality Merchants" G. Scott Reynolds
  50. 1969 Houston Law Review Vol. 6 Pg. 878 — "A Legal Analysis of the Sale of Life Insurance", Randal A. Hendricks
  51. "The Life Book of Family Finance" Time-Life Books
  52. "Stop Wasting Your Insurance Dollars" Dave Goodwin
  53. 1970 "Consumers Guide to Insurance Buying" Vladamir P. Chernik — Changing Times
  54. 1971 "Getting All the Life Insurance You are Paying For?" Thomas McSwain, M.D.
  55. "How to Pay Lots Less for Life lnsurance" Max Fogiel — Moneysworth
  56. 1973 Senate Subcommittee on AntiTrust and Monopoly — 93rd Congress — 1st Session, Feb. 20th 1973
  57. 1974 "Consumer Report" Jan., Feb., March
  58. "Term or Straight — Which Is Best for You?" Everybodys Money, Spring
  59. "Lets Understand Life Insurance" Consumers Digest July/Aug.
  60. "The Bottom Line — A Little Straight Talk About Life Insurance" Dirks/Grass — Playboy, May 1974
  61. 1975 Congressional Record — July 8, 1975, Senator Philip Hart
  62. 1975 "Money Dynamics", Venita VanCaspel — Containing the famous Chapter #13, "Life Insurance — The Great National Consumer Fraud" (obliged to change last word to "Dilemma" in subsequent editions of "Money Dynamics"
  63. "The Consumers Guide to Life Insurance" J. Tracy Oehlbeck
  64. "How to Save Money on Your Life Insurance" — Assn. for Truth In Life Insurance
  65. 1976 "The Search For the Hidden Treasure" Mitchell Educational Services, Inc.
  66. 1976 "The Life Insurance Conspiracy" Peter Spielmann & Aaron Zelman
  67. 1977 "Where Women Should Invest Money" Venita Van Caspel
  68. "What is Happening to Life Insurance Dividends?" Consumer Report. March
  69. 1977 "The Consumers Union Report on Life Insurance"
  70. "Dreams of Immortality" Max Apple — Mother Jones Magazine
  71. 1978 "Life Insurance: Myths and Facts" Consumer Digest Nov/Dec.
  72. "False Advertising" Howard J. Ruff, The Ruff Times, Oct. 15
  73. "Must Replacement Be A Dirty Dirty Word?" The National Underwriter, Oct. 7
  74. "Dollars & Sense" C. & Associates
  75. "The New Money Dynamics" Venita Van Caspel
  76. "The 250 Billion Dollar Consumer Problem?" (Cash Value Life Ins.) J.V. Pruitt
  77. "If You Need Help in Planning Your Finances" U.S. News and World Report
  78. 1979 "Insurance Industry Feels the Federal Lash". U.S. News & World Report
  79. 1979 Federal Trade Commission — July 10th
  80. "Consumers are Losing Billions Yearly by Ill-informed & Inappropriate Life Insurance Choices", FTC Staff Says
  81. 1980 "Financial Recovery" Stewart Ogilby — The Replacement of Cash-Value Insurance Policies
  82. 1986 "Consumer Reports" Aug. 1986 "Universal Life, The Chameleon Can Bite"
  83. 1987 "Thats Life, The 3rd Annual Dumber Than Dirt Award" Springville Herald, April 22nd 1987
  84. 1988 "Buyers Guide to Life Insurance" State of New Jersey — Governor Thomas H. Kean
  85. "The Games & Scams of Cash Value Life Insurance" John J. Pepin PHD
  86. 1990 "How Your LIfe Insurance Policies Rob You" Arthur Milton
  87. 1991 Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Aug. 12th, 1991 — "Many People Waste Money Buying Wrong Insurance"
  88. 1992 United States Senate, June 23rd, 1992 — "Life Insurance — A Shell Game of Premium Padding and Savings Schemes", Senator Howard Metzenbaum — Chairman
  89. Newsweek, July 13th, 1992 "Buyers Beware"
  90. 1994 "Worth", April 1994, "Dont be Sold the Wrong Life Insurance"
  91. Business Week, January 17th, 1994, "Policies of Deception"
  92. 1995 "Money", August 1995, "The 8 Biggest Rip Offs in America" "Never Buy a Whole Life Policy"
  93. 2016 Financial Services Consumer Alliance Universal Life Class Action
  94. 2018 The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19th, Universal Life Insurance, A 1980's Sensation, has backfired

  95. More recent: 2023 The New York State Department of Financial Services — UNIVERSAL LIFE INSURANCE
    96.

146 YEARS. ENOUGH IS ENUF!

THE SOLUTION: Buy only TERM LIFE-INSURANCE.

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