Ohio National Financial Services Review

When you’re shopping for insurance, one of the biggest decisions you’ll need to make is which company you’re going to choose.

You can probably name about 10 carriers off the top of your head. Just because you know their name, doesn’t make them the best choice.

What should you look at when you’re comparing companies? There are a dozen different categories.

To save you time and trouble, we’ve done the work for you.

At Good Financial Cents, we pride ourselves on being able to give our readers the information they need to make the best decisions for their insurance needs.

For this article, we are going to focus on Ohio National Financial Services. If you haven’t heard of Ohio National, you might be missing out on the best insurance company for you.

History of Ohio National Financial Services, Inc.

Let’s talk about the start of Ohio National. They are over 100 years old. They celebrated their centennial in 2009, meaning they were established in 1909. They were originally opened as a stock company but were converted to a mutual company in 1959.

Through the years, they’ve hit a lot of milestones and experienced a lot of changes. They sold their first insurance plan in 1910. More than 40 years later, in 1954, they decided to start selling group life insurance.

4 years after that, in 1959, they officially reached more than $1 billion in active life insurance policies.

Shortly after, in 1961, they started selling disability insurance. They wanted to give their customers more protection beyond what was offered by their life insurance.

9 years later, in 1970, they expanded their products even further by adding variable annuities. In 2012, they had over $34 billion in assets managed.

In March 2022, Constellation Insurance Holdings Inc., based in New York, acquired Ohio National for $1 billion and subsequently renamed the holding company to Constellation Insurance Inc.

Rates, Finances, and Grades

One of the best ways to look at the quality of a company is to review the grades from other sources.

You may not know this, but there are several companies out there that rate companies based on their own scales.

Before you buy an insurance policy, you should check out these companies to see the grades.

The three main companies are Standard & Poor’s, A.M. Best, and Moody’s. All of these companies have years of experience grading insurance companies, looking at a number of a company’s financial habits, history, and outlook to determine their stability.

Let’s look at the grades for Ohio National:

• Moody’s: A1

• A.M. Best: A+

• Standard & Poor’s: A

As you can see from the grades, Ohio National has excellent rates from just about every third-party company out there.

Another source you should check before buying a policy is the Better Business Bureau (BBB). They are one of the biggest “watchdogs” out there, and they have reviews of millions of companies.

From the BBB, Ohio National has an A+ and they have been BBB accredited since 1938.

You can trust a company that has held accreditation for that long. The company is still going strong, maintaining its accreditation, consistently receiving high scores, and growing its client base.

Products From Ohio National

One of the shining parts of Ohio National is all of the options they have. There are some companies out there that specialize in one specific type of protection.

Ohio National gives you dozens of options and products you can choose from. We are going to look at some of their key insurance plans.

Life Insurance

To start, let’s look at their life insurance options. Life insurance was one of their first products, and they have plenty of choices.

Life insurance is the best safety net you can ever invest in. Your family is going to be responsible for your debts, and life insurance gives them money to settle those debts.

Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance is the traditional type of coverage. These policies are the cheapest and most cost-effective way to get life insurance.

Ohio National offers term life insurance policies in 10, 15, and 20-year terms. Their plans come with either a “basic” conversion option or a “plus” conversion option.

With the basic option, you’ll have a window of opportunity to turn your term policy into the whole life option. With the plus plans, you can convert your policy into a universal life or variable universal life.

Whole Life

If you don’t want to ever lose coverage, then whole life insurance should be your go-to plan. Keep paying your premiums and you have coverage.

When it comes to whole life from Ohio National’s whole life, you’ll have four options:

• Prestige Value III – if you’re looking for the most affordable whole-life plan from Ohio Nation, this is it. It gives you protection as well as the cash-value component.

• Prestige Max II – with this policy, it’s designed to be paid up by the time you turn 65 (or 10 years after you buy the plan). The goal of this policy is to make the most of the savings and get the highest dividends possible.

• Prestige 100 – With this policy, you’ll pay premiums until you turn 100, but it gives you lifetime coverage. Regardless of how old you are, you’ll always have insurance.

• Prestige 10 Pay – If you don’t want to pay premiums for the rest of your life, you can cram them all into 10 years with this plan. Pay a level premium for the first 10 years, and then never pay another dime for your coverage.

Indexed Universal Life Insurance

Indexed universal life is another type of whole life insurance but has some extra perks a traditional policy doesn’t offer.

With the Virtus Indexed Universal Life plan, you can get flexibility with the death benefit as either a level sum or an increasing amount. You’ll build cash value, and you can use that value as a loan or withdraw.

Universal Life Insurance

The advantage of universal life insurance policies is the flexibility they offer. With these policies, you aren’t bound to any of the benefits of premiums. It allows you to change the plan as your life changes.

Ohio National sells two universal life insurance policies:

• V-Pro UL – this policy gives you universal coverage at an affordable price.

• Virtus Basic – this policy is built for parents wanting to buy coverage for their children. These policies can give up to $100,000. These plans can be converted to a universal life insurance policy.

These policies let you choose when you pay premiums, you can use the money built up, and you can also either increase or decrease the payout from the policy.

With Ohio National, you’ll get a guaranteed interest rate on the cash value. You’ll earn at least 2.5%, but according to past performance, you’ll get more than that.

Variable Universal Life Insurance

The Virtus VUL earns returns based on the market activity of the portfolio where you put the premium payment. Unlike the other policies, this plan doesn’t give you a guaranteed return on the cash value.

The advantage of these policies is they can earn you much more than the other options, but you don’t have guaranteed returns.

No risk, no reward.

Disability Insurance

Life insurance protects your family if you were to pass away, but that’s not the only thing you have to be worried about.

What if you were to fall and injure yourself? You’re out of work for a month or more.

If you can’t go to work, you aren’t going to get paid. This is why you should consider buying a disability insurance policy.

If you ever find yourself unable to work, this plan can help replace some of your lost income.

Ohio National sells disability insurance policies for individuals and small-business owners, and they are fairly competitive with other disability insurance companies around the nation.

Their individual plans work for just about any occupation out there.

They sell two personal plans:

• ContinuON Income Solutions Guaranteed Renewable

• ContinuON Income Solutions Non-Cancellable

In addition to their individual policies, they also sell the small-business plans:

• ContinuON Income Solutions Business Overhead Expenses

• ContinuON Income Solutions Business Buy-Sell

To help you understand the importance of disability insurance, we are going to outline each of these plans for you to determine which one is best.

ContinuOn Income Solutions Guaranteed Renewable

This plan is targeted towards the working class. People who have manual labor jobs or skilled technicians.

These plans can give you benefits for 1 year to 5 years with a maximum benefit of up to $5,000 every month.

ContinuON Income Solutions Non-cancellable

This policy is built for the “white-collar” workers. Unlike the other individual plans, the premiums are never going to go up.

You can get benefits for up to 5 years, or until you turn 70.

If you’re a doctor, then you’re going to get the “own occupation,” definition. This means you can get the payout from the plan, even if you’re still able to work another job.

ContinuON Income Solutions Business Overhead Expenses

This plan will give your business the money to remain open if you’re ever disabled. If you’re the owner, and you can’t work because of injury or illness, you would probably have to shut the doors.

Not if you have a disability plan. If you have less than 20 employees, then you can get one of these plans which can provide benefits for up to 2 years.

ContinuON Income Solutions Business Buy-Sell

The idea of this plan is to give the business partners the money they need to keep the business open and fund a buy-sell agreement.

You can get benefits for up to 5 years or in one lump payment. If you buy one of these plans, you can get up to $2,000,000 in benefits.

Riders

Not only do you have several disability options, but there are several riders you can attach to your policy. They have a long list of additional coverage areas:

• Guaranteed insurability rider

• Cost of living rider

• Catastrophic benefit rider

• Recovery benefit

• Recurrent disability

• And more

Obviously, the more riders you have on your plan, the higher the premiums are going to be. If you’re worried about suffering from an injury and not being able to work, these policies can ease your fears.

Annuities

In addition to its insurance products, Ohio National sells a handful of different annuity options. Annuities can help fund your retirement.

They sell three different kinds:

• Fixed annuities

• Fixed indexed annuities

• Variable annuities

Each of them has different pros and cons you’ll need to consider when you’re planning your retirement.

Fixed annuities will guarantee you have a source of income in your retirement. A lot of seniors are worried about not having enough money as they enjoy retirement, these annuities can solve this problem.

Ohio National sells both single-premium annuities and flexible premiums. Each of these can help you enjoy your retirement without having to worry about your savings account.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Ohio National

Every company is going to have areas where they excel and other parts where they lag behind. Ohio National is no different. To help you pick a company, here are some of the things you should be aware of.

One of the downsides of the carrier is their underwriting.

Their underwriting seems to be stricter than some of the other companies out there. If you’re not in the best health, you might end up paying more for life insurance with Ohio National.

On the flip side, if you’re in good health and don’t have any major health problems, they do have good rates for life insurance and disability. For most applicants, their rates are very competitive.

Getting the Best Insurance

Regardless of what kind of insurance you’re looking for, it’s important to find the perfect company. Each company is different, they all have different plans, rates, coverage, and services.

You could spend months picking through companies until you find the best plan and carrier combo. Who wants to spend hours on the phone?

Thankfully, we’ve reviewed all of the best insurance carriers out there.

If you don’t want to take the plunge alone, feel free to keep reading some of our reviews. If you have any questions or comments, please be sure to let us know.

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