Dakota Advisor
Winter 2008
 Presidents Message
by Ted Haugan, CFP, LUTCF
Welcome to the midpoint of our association year as our
calendar year comes to an end. December, annually, is an
important month in that several associations present continuing
education in conjunction with a membership blitz, that have worked
quite well. IFAPAC and Freedom Builder Fund contributions
numbers are recorded for the year. I thank all members who have
worked very hard this year to make contributions and help our
association members see how important these funds are to the
future of our industry. Publicly thanking our contributors
during an association meeting encourages newer and additional
members to join us in the future.
Membership recruitment is difficult work without a membership
recruitment system. The Minot association has built a systematic
plan whereby non members receive mailings about such topics as
"Pay Go" & "The Gathering Storm", gathered from the National web
site. This system is now on the state web site and I encourage
every local membership committee to use this system to attract
non members to your local association. This system was
implemented in September 2008 in Minot and has produced seven
new members to date with more new members anticipated in the
future. The obstacles presented on the federal level can become
membership recruitment opportunities if we choose to use this
information in this manner.
January 2009 marks the beginning of a new legislature. NAIFA-ND
is preparing to support legislation that would provide a $250.00
tax credit to purchasers of a tax qualified partnership long
term care policy on the short form of the North Dakota state
income tax form. Our members and their clients need to support
this legislation by calling, emailing and writing their
respective legislators expressing support of this bill.
February 2nd is the beginning of our state convention at the
Radisson Hotel in Bismarck. Our convention starts that Monday at
noon with a legislative reception that evening, with the
legislators. On Tuesday we are scheduled to sit with a
representative or senator for one hour to experience the
legislative process. This is the first ever state convention and
legislative reception combination so your attendance is
critically important. Your attendance of the convention and time
spent with your respective legislative representative will
impact the future of North Dakota. Please remember to thank the
convention committee.
As I end this communication to our membership, I have yet
another request. If you have any questions or concerns, please
express them to your local leadership, your state leadership,
Nancy; our exceptional state executive or to me, serving as your
state president. This has been a difficult year for the world
but we make the world a better place, one client at a time. Use
the obstacles we all face to grow your business, seek out
financial solutions to our clients' problems and enjoy the
success you deserve. I thank you all for your support and look
forward to seeing you at our state convention.
Happy New Year!
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[Sponsor]
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NAIFA-ND 2009 State Convention Update
The theme for this year's
convention is "The Agents Role in Today's Economy." We will have
representatives from the Commerce Department and Tourism
Department speaking in addition to the legislative update. Our
first ever "Day on the Hill" will take place on Tuesday,
February 3rd, where members will have the opportunity to sit on
the House floor with their representatives during the session.
We are grateful for this opportunity and thank Representative
Jim Kasper for coordinating this effort. Early
registration ends on January 18th, which is also when we need to
know what district you are in to arrange seating for the
session. We have an outstanding program lined up and hope that
you are making plans to attend. You can register on line by
clicking here or mail in your registration from
the
brochure.
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Local Association Reports
NAIFA -
Fargo Moorhead
by
Traver Silbernagel, President
I want to began by wishing all of NDAIFA
a very merry holiday season. Fargo/Moorhead has been rigorously
putting together our year end awards banquet. Special thanks to
Judy Lundstrom, Julie Phillips, Parker Vanderwal, Don Zerr,
Jason Middaugh and Rick Greener on all of their efforts. We are
winding down the IFAPAC year and have been meeting every Tues.
pooling our thoughts and energy making that final push. Thank you
to Phil Haug, Greg Ohmdahl and Jay Burgad for of their help.
Membership is always on the front burner and we will be starting
a new LUTC course in early 09.
NAIFA-Minot Report
by Rick Wallace, President
December has been a very busy month for
NAIFA-Minot. My report will mention three items; “Angel Tree
Project”, Annual CE Blitz, and Membership Drive.
Angel Tree Project: Thanks to Sue
Sjaastad and Kari Hansen, our Public Relations committeepersons,
they were responsible for working with Community Action and
getting our local involved in the Angel Tree project. As a
group we contributed cash donations at our membership meetings
from November through December 15th. Once money was collected,
we put our request to Community Action for a family to sponsor
for Christmas. Our association was able to raise over $500 to
make another family’s Christmas come alive this year.
Annual CE Blitz: December 12th
marked our annual CE blitz. We provided six hours of continuing
education to members and nonmembers and included ethics, income
engineering, property and casualty, and an insurance update from
deputy insurance commissioner, Rebecca Ternes. We had several
comments from our members saying this was one of the best
continuing education events NAIFA-Minot has held in quite some
time.
Membership Drive: Last but not
least, several members met on December 1st to have a
calling session and make appointments with non members to
present the NAIFA story to them. The membership drive has been
very successful. As a result of the calling session and
follow-ups, as of December 18th, we have added six
new members, plus an additional member in October for a total of
seven to date. There are two more additional prospects that are
expected to be signed up before December 19th. We
expect at least three more new members just after the first of
the year as a result of this drive. We are up over 10% in new
members this year and our goal is to end up the 2008-2009 year
at a total of 73 members. This will be an increase of
approximately 18% over last year or a net increase of twelve new
members.
NAIFA -
North Valley
by Gregg Webster,
President
We invited a local legislator to each meeting
this past quarter. Legislators were
selected based upon their appointment to either IBL or Human
Services committees. The legislator was asked to make a
presentation and participate in a forum.
Our plans for next quarter will entail
Membership promotion.
NAIFA -
Roughrider
by LeeAnn Galster,
President
As always we are holding monthly meetings with one hour of CE -
we have about 33% member attendance which we would like to see
around 50-60%. We have discussed some incentives and also have
sent out a survey as to why members are not attending (schedule
conflict, lack of benefit, other). The most common reason was
schedule - so a follow-up survey is being sent to see if there
is a better time and day to accommodate more members. We have
had some great CE topics - P.A.C.E. Program, Veteran's Affairs,
K.I.D.S. Program, St. Luke's Home New Construction plans.
We held our annual Toys for Tots Event November 21 and had 12
members show up. We invite local legislators too but this year
no one was able to attend. We used this event as a way to
increase our IFAPAC donations. We held a raffle with 2 $50
dinners certificates and 2 bottles of wine being given as
prizes. We raised $140 for IFAPAC. This put our local over its
goal for the year.
In December we hosted the annual CE Day with speakers from
Medicaid, State Insurance, local attorney, local accountant, and
Norbert Mayer offered the ethics. We had a super response - 13
members and 10 non-members attending.
We are always actively recruiting for new members. We have one
new member in December and one transfer member also in December.
We are working on several applications and one more transfer so
it looks really good for reaching our goal of 40!!
NAIFA – Missouri Slope
By Carroll Holmen, President
Greetings fellow NAIFA Members:
NAIFA
– Missouri Slope has been keeping busy the last few months. We
recently held our Annual CE Day on December 8th.
Attendance was not quite as high in recent years, however it
still went relatively well. We had applied for and received 5
hours of Continuing Ed credits, 3 of which were Ethics.
Our
membership is down from last year, however we still have 6
months to go to get it back in line with our goal. We have set
a Blitz day for January 16th to attract more
members. Missouri Slope has also contracted to have a
‘calling-tree’ service to contact members prior to the meeting
to increase attendance and awareness of the benefits offered.
FBF and IFAPAC contributions was also a focus this month.
We
look forward to 2009. As a legislative year, we will continue
our efforts to bring the focus to our members on what a value
the association is and hope to attract new members to help with
the issues facing us.
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AHIA
by Pat Saltsman, Chair
December 23, 2008 was the day that President Bush signed into
law H.R. 7327, The Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act,
which temporarily suspends the IRS tax penalty that would
otherwise apply to seniors over the age of 70 1/2 who fail to
take the minimum required withdrawal from their retirement
account in 2009. The law is designed to prevent seniors from
having to make the required withdrawals from retirement accounts
which have been hard-hit by the current economic crisis.
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APIC
by Jim Simons, Chair
I am still missing some of the APIC
reports. If you haven’t turned yours in, please do so ASAP. I
have sent out a list of Legislative Forums from the City
Chambers of Commerce who replied to my request. Make sure that
your members take advantage of speaking to their legislators
when they return home for the weekends. You will start building
strong relationships with them. I was just speaking to a member
of the house who mentioned to me how impressed he has been with
the information provided by NAIFA members from across the
state. Let’s keep up the good work of advocating for our
citizens of North Dakota.
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Government
Relations
by Norbert Mayer, Chair
The 61st ND Legislative Assembly
opens in Bismarck on Tuesday, January 6th. Dave
Klemisch, Nancy Buechler and I will serve as the NAIFA-ND
Lobbyists. These are the only individuals who speak on behalf
of NAIFA-ND. Each of you is welcome and encouraged to contact
Senators and Representatives that you know, but please remember
that you speak on your own behalf.
Nancy will again track and monitor those
bills selected by our Executive Board. A weekly status report
will be e-mailed to our leadership, and will be on our website
at:
http://www.naifa-nd.org/Advocacy/legislation.html. We
encourage you to check it often. Additional information
will be available for your review at
www.legis.nd.gov.
We are now aware of the following issues to
be addressed in this session.
LTC Premium Tax Credit - Representative
Todd Porter will introduce a bill at our request to provide for
a $250.00 tax credit on the ND (short) Tax Form 1 for those
individuals paying premiums on a Partnership Qualified Long Term
Care Plan purchased after the effective date of the ND Revised
Medicaid Plan, dated January 1, 2007.
Producer CE reporting and license
continuation - This bill will provide for a biennial report of
your continuing education by the end of your birth month. This
will replace the current biennial report with due dates based
upon your last name and due by January 31st. The
renewal fee will remain at $25.00. It will also provide an
option to do this renewal through the National Insurance
Producers Registry with a pass through fee of $5.00.
Additionally, there may be a higher financial penalty for any
agents that violate the producer licensing laws. Right now, it
is a bit unclear but reads like the maximum penalty is $1,000.
So in other words, a producer could steal or defraud clients out
of any amount of money and all the department could fine would
be $1,000. With the added activity in this area, they are
looking at raising the amount to $10,000 per incident.
Rule of 85 – This will eliminate the rule
of 85 (age plus years of experience) exemption from filing CE.
Those already meeting this rule will be grandfathered.
Surplus Lines and Consultant License
issuance and renewal fee change – This will change the fee for
issuing this license from $10.00 to $100.00 and renewal fees
from $10.00 to $25.00.
Unfair Compensation of Insurance – This
clarifies that companies can not compensate based on
cancellations, denials, quotas or limiting claim amounts.
Collections –This allows the ND Insurance
Dept. to collect overdue judgments through tax refunds.
Credit Scores – This specifies that
companies’ filing of underwriting criteria related to credit
scoring is confidential.
When each of these bills is introduced you
will be able to read the entire bill at “www.legis.nd.gov.”
Please mark your calendars for the State
Convention on February 2-4 and the Legislative Reception on
Monday evening, February 2nd.
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Membership
Report
by Jason Middaugh, Chair
I’ve told many people I talk to – if you
show me a professional organization that does as much or more
for me and my clients in protecting the products I sell as NAIFA
does I will sign up today. As another year passes we need to
get out and talk to those people working within our industry who
are not current NAIFA members.
It looks like we could be in a fight with
some of the tax advantaged products we sell in the upcoming
years. With the pay as you go rules established within Congress
our Senators and Representatives are going to be looking at
various ways to raise more revenue (increase taxes) to fund
their various projects. It’s time to get proactive instead of
reactive. We need to get the word out to potential members as
to why we need their support more than ever.
Invite a potential member to lunch, if you
don’t want to solicit him/her give their name to your local
membership chair.
We are having a contest among the seven
locals starting January 1st ending June 30th.
The winner will be the local with the highest increase in
membership between those dates. Your starting number is the
number of current members you have at December 31st
at midnight. So if you have 100 members on December 31st
and add 10 it is a 10% increase. Those are the only two numbers
I will look at. The local that increases the most of that time
will win an auctioned off item of their choice at the state
convention. We are auctioning off various items at the state
convention; we should have 5-6 different items. They are going
to be events instead of things; an example would be day fishing
on the Red River with another NAIFA member.
The prize will be given to the local
membership chair. The local chair can give it to anyone within
his/her local.
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Afghanistan Relief
(Loading packages to be shipped to Afghanistan)
Dear NAIFA Members,
I am happy to report that after 8 months my husband is home from
Afghanistan. Running this program provided us great topics for
discussion. The common bond helped us while he was gone. He
continues to give me advice in matters and help with the
project. Recently he helped organize a volunteer day when Airmen
from his Maintenance Group, 91MXG will volunteer sorting and
packing donated items. We are hoping to make this a bi-monthly
event. The Airman’s Attic continues to provide me with storage
space and materials. Many of their volunteers helped me with my
last shipment when they had some free time. They have been a
real blessing. I was very excited about our last shipment. It
was filling a request from an Airman from Minot. His wife (who
had previously deployed to Afghanistan) helped with planning and
shipping. He is in an area the VCR does not serve (Kandahar).
The aid we sent will be given out at a special party they are
planning for the local residents. It included school supplies,
clothing and toys. The village is made up of the Afghan police
force (and their families) working with our military. They live
in this area (not their homes) to be protected from the Taliban.
This made me especially grateful that we could help. We all too
often forget others who have their lives put at risk (and not
just soldiers, but family members). In all, we sent over 27
boxes ranging from 3-30 lbs. It was extremely exciting to have a
very generous donation from our Minot Scheel’s Store sent with
this shipment. They donated 10 soccer balls and a soccer net. I
know the children will be thrilled. A big “THANK YOU” goes out
to Don Doescher (Fargo) and Kelly Bossert (Minot) of Scheel’s
Sporting Goods for their generous donation. Their donation and
yours, allowed me to send a shipment far beyond the Airman’s
expectations. I am promised that their will be pictures! I hope
everyone has a great holiday and thank you once again for
allowing me to have this amazing opportunity.
Cindi Bair
(Lt Col Bair separating boxes from North Dakota at Camp Eggers,
Afghanistan)
Trustee Corner
 Trustee Corner
Now More Than Ever Before….
Juli McNeely, LUTCF, CFP, CLU
Most of us
are feeling the stress of the last few months with the
rollercoaster ride of the markets. I believe that now
more than ever before our clients need us. They need us
to calm their fears. They need us to review their financial
plan or in some cases start a financial plan. Now more
than ever before we need to be in front of our clients
doing what we have been trained to do – help them! This is the
time that we earn our commission or fees.
I also
believe that now more than ever before we need
NAIFA. With more and more bail out dollars being promised every
day, it becomes pretty clear that the federal government will be
looking for revenue from any source they can get it. We all
know that the products that we provide to our clients carry with
them some significant tax advantages. There is a very good
chance that we will have the target on our backs. We need NAIFA
to protect our products and the tax advantages our clients
enjoy. We need NAIFA and its grassroots presence to protect our
industry interests.
Lastly,
now more than ever before NAIFA is providing more
benefits that will impact your bottom line. If you haven’t been
to
www.naifa.org
for a while, check it out. You will be amazed and impressed by
the new offerings. Just a few items to check out…..
·
Virtual Library
-
As a member of NAIFA, you now have free, unlimited 24/7 access
to the NAIFA Virtual Library. Whether you are a new advisor or
agent, or an experienced producer, the NAIFA Virtual Library is
your key to a myriad of sales support tools and resources that
will help you grow and succeed in your business.
Check out the link for more information:
http://www.naifa.org/benefits/vsa/index.cfm
·
Professional Development System
- The new NAIFA Professional Development System has been created
to provide NAIFA members, at every stage of their career, with
the resources they need to succeed! NAIFA’s rich array of
professional programs and products are designed to enhance
member’s knowledge and skills, provide value-added business
services, and create critical networking and mentoring
opportunities—when, where and how you want them! Check out the
link for an online tutorial about PDS:
http://www.naifa.org/benefits/pds/index.html
·
Communications Corner
- provides members with access to an extensive online toolbox
that includes NAIFA-branded templates, searchable databases of
media outlets and self-directed communications and public
relations training. Members also have access to professional
graphics and media relations support, as well as communications
tips and proven best-practices. All of the resources are
specifically tailored to serve the needs of NAIFA’s state and
local associations, as well as individual insurance and
financial planning professionals. Check out the link for more
information:
http://www.naifa.org/benefits/commcorner/index.cfm
NAIFA has
heard its members and is responding in a big way so that you
will be convinced that now more than ever before
NAIFA is a must for any insurance agent or financial advisor.
And the really great news is that there is MORE TO COME!!!!
I am excited
to be your Trustee Liaison for 2008/09. Please feel free to
contact me at 715.659.4255 or
juli@mcneelyfinancial.com
with any comments or concerns. Here’s to a great year for NAIFA
and for each of you in your practices!
Volunteers Wanted - No
Experience Necessary
Volunteers are at the heart of NAIFA-ND’s existence. The only
way we can fulfill our promise to provide exceptional value and
service is because of the time and knowledge volunteered by
members like you to serve your colleagues and to further the
insurance and financial services profession.
Volunteer opportunities with NAIFA-ND exist within many
different areas of interest and on varying levels of commitment:
from participation with short term projects, to our highest
level of commitment as an active member of a NAIFA-ND state
committee or state officer.
If
you would like to see what opportunities we have available,
please visit our web to learn about committees and other
organizational activities to which you can volunteer your time,
or visit with a current officer of the association.
We
would welcome your expertise and enthusiasm and hope you will
take the time to participate as a volunteer - you will discover
the many rewards of volunteering. If you would like someone to
contact you, please complete this
form
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NAIFA-North Dakota - 1811 East Thayer Avenue - PO Box 5010 -
Bismarck, ND 58502 (701) 258-9525 info@naifa-nd.org
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