How do I request an in force illustration from the insurer?

How it works

if one is missing the answer is no

Four things required before anything else

1. 01Durable surplus cash flow, in an ordinary year
2. 02A horizon measured in decades rather than years
3. 03A place in the household's wider position
4. 04A clear purpose for the contract itself

The owner of a contract is entitled to deal with the company that issued it. A written request naming the contract, the owner and the scenarios wanted is usually enough, and most companies deliver in a few working days. A representative can submit the same request for you.

Behind the scenes, a request like this is routed to the insurer's in force or policyholder service team, who feed the contract's current values into the same illustration software used at issue and instruct it to project forward under whichever scenarios were named. Nothing about that process requires the representative who originally sold the contract to be involved, although a currently assigned representative can submit the same request on the owner's behalf and sometimes gets a faster turnaround simply because the file already sits on their desk.

The cost or the catch

the cycle a contract is used through

Funding, drawing and repaying

1. 01Premium funds the contract on the agreed schedule
2. 02Value accumulates under the terms of the contract
3. 03The insurer advances against the cash value
4. 04Interest accrues to the insurer while a balance stands
5. 05Repayment restores the capacity that was used

A request that names no scenarios comes back as one run at the current scale, which is the least useful version of the document. The scenarios are the point. One run at a reduced scale and one with the optional deposits stopped will tell you more than ten pages at the hoped for figures.

Asking for an electronic copy and not paper, where the insurer offers it, speeds delivery and makes it easier to compare against the illustration received at issue.

To be accurate about it. Not every insurer will deal with the owner quite this freely in practice. Some route every request through a licensed representative and will not produce the document directly even when the owner asks first, and a request from someone who is not the recorded owner is refused regardless of how reasonable the request sounds, which is correct but still surprises people acting in good faith on a family member's behalf. Nothing here promises the document is free either: most insurers charge nothing for a routine request, but that is administrative practice and not a term written into the contract, and it can differ, or change, without the contract itself changing at all.

What varies by insurer, province and year

Provincial rules add a further layer of variation beyond what any single insurer decides. In Quebec, a representative handling the request is bound by the Autorité des marchés financiers' own conduct rules, which shape how quickly and how completely a request must be answered once it reaches a licensed intermediary. In Ontario the same conduct obligations sit with the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, and in British Columbia with the Insurance Council of British Columbia, and each regulator's expectations of a licensed representative differ slightly even where the insurer behind the contract is the same national company.

The insurer itself is the larger source of variation in practice. Some companies process every in force illustration request through a single national service centre with a published standard turnaround; others route requests through regional offices whose response times can differ from one file to the next depending on volume. A request made in a busy season, often near a calendar year end when many households are reviewing contracts at once, can take longer than the same request made at a quieter time, and no single number describes every insurer at every time of year.

The contract's own age changes what the illustration can show as well. A contract issued decades ago may run on illustration software the insurer no longer uses for new business, sometimes producing a document with an older format or fewer scenario options than a contract issued last year would generate, and a representative unfamiliar with an older series may need to ask the insurer's own actuarial department and not the general service line to get every scenario a reader might want run.

How the request is even framed differs by insurer too. Some companies offer a short online form that lets an owner specify scenarios directly and receive a document within days; others require a written letter describing the scenarios in prose, which the insurer's own staff then translates into inputs for the software, introducing a step where a poorly worded request can produce a document that answers a different question than the one actually asked.

None of this variation is something a reader can anticipate from outside the file. The only reliable way to know how a specific insurer will actually handle a specific request is to ask that insurer directly, in writing, and to keep the answer on record for the next time the same request needs to be made.

A second opinion from another licensed representative, unconnected to whoever sold the original contract, is one more way to confirm a request was handled correctly, since a second set of eyes reading the same in force illustration sometimes catches an assumption or a scenario the first reading missed. Nothing about asking for that second opinion requires ending the relationship with the first representative, and a household is free to gather more than one professional view of the same document before deciding what, if anything, to do about what it shows.

What to ask, and of whom

four settled, then one question

What comes before any product

1. Accessible cash for something unexpected
2. High interest debt repaid before anything accumulates
3. Protection verified by a needs analysis, not an assumption
4. Capital, which has to exist before it can do anything
5. Then where it is held, and how many jobs each dollar does

Four details, gathered before the request is sent, avoid most of the delay that follows an incomplete one. The insurer's own service telephone number and written address, taken from the contract and not from a search result, the exact contract number, and the name in which the contract is registered are the minimum the service department will ask for regardless of how the request arrives.

Two further questions are worth putting to the insurer directly rather than assuming an answer: whether it will accept the request by secure message or by mail as well as through a representative, and what, if anything, it proposes to charge before the request is submitted rather than after.

Who this matters to most

declared annually, never guaranteed

How a policy dividend is decided

1. 01A distribution from the insurer's participating account
2. 02Declared annually at the discretion of the board
3. 03Based on investment results, claims experience and expenses
4. 04It is not interest and it is not a return
5. 05It is never guaranteed, in any year of the contract

This matters most to an owner who suspects a contract is not performing as illustrated at issue and wants current figures rather than a memory of old ones, and to anyone weighing whether to keep, reduce or stop funding a contract, since that decision is only as good as the numbers behind it.

It matters less to an owner who reviews the annual statement carefully every year and has no open question the statement itself does not already answer, since an in force illustration adds forward looking scenarios that a routine review does not usually require.

What this page will not tell you

This page describes how to obtain the document. It does not, and cannot, say what the figures inside it will show for a particular contract, since that depends entirely on the design, the funding history and the scale declarations specific to that file.

Reading the resulting document against the guaranteed values in the original contract, and deciding what it means for a specific plan, is work for the representative servicing the contract or for a second opinion from another qualified professional, not something this page can do in advance. Slow decisions age better than fast ones.