let's talk about investment options available under universal life we talked about the cost of insurance and the fact that we needed to determine the Nar to determine our cost of insurance uh we then said the remaining money that's in there uh we invest that money and in fact as a consumer we can choose how to invest that money and Under Universal Life policies insurance companies give us lots of flexibility of course we have certain plans that give us guaranteed returns when we talk about guaranteed returns we talk about things like gic's investment certificates daily interest accounts these types of Investments give us a guaranteed return now because they're guaranteed we're taking no risk our returns tend to be fairly conservative fairly low however in a universal life policy a consumer can pick a daily interest account option they can pick the guaranteed investment option where they may pick put their money into 1 three five or 10 year uh terms so that's similar to investing in a GIC that you may purchase at a bank uh in addition to that we have some products that allow the customer the opportunity to invest in variable return plans these are plans where your returns are not guaranteed uh similar to for example in investing in a stock market where you're buying a portfolio of stocks your returns are not guaranteed it's a your return is based on how well those stocks perform and did you pick the right ones or not but under universal life we have a choice of what we call variable return plans not guaranteed return variable return and so those options may be an indexed fund so this is uh the money that you have in your Universal uh policy is invested in a portfolio of stocks it might be uh tied to a certain index it may be a bond index might be the tsse uh 300 index could be the S&P 500 these different indices around the world that represent a pool of stocks and so with your universal life policy you can decide to put some all or some of your money into an indexed Fund in addition to that some companies allow you to invest in a mutual fund however it is not the actual mutual fund it is the same mutual fund that's been duplicated in the insurance policy so the insurance company might go to a mutual fund manager and say my universal life investors would like to invest in your fund and so the fund company would create a separate fund it would be owned by the insurance company and that way as a universal life policy holder you can actually put your money into that fund which is managed by the same individual that manages the money for the mutual fund company and so you have guaranteed returns and variable return options and you can take combinations of these you can change them at any time very very flexible