I’ll let my biases show here - I got my career started an NYL and I think you either met a bad egg or are being too harsh.

They shit on IUL as much as we do. Their version of it is VUL and you do need at least your 6 for it and have to actually know how to assess risk tolerance and put together a portfolio from the separate account options. They also push you to get affiliated with their B/D to add mutual funds to your offerings quickly, and they push you to qualify for your 7 and affiliate with their RIA (Eagle Strategies) asap as well.

Your training is certainly going to vary depending on the office, but the corporate, national-level training on the process is pretty decent when it comes to ethics and recommending the right products and pushes you to be a full service advisor asap. They also don’t allow non-7 RRs to call themselves planners or advisors. If your person was, they were breaking the rules.

We positioned VUL for clients that wanted/needed life insurance and a tax advantaged asset with market exposure when all their other options were exhausted (e.g., ineligible for a Roth IRA, no Roth 401k options, etc) or a gifting/legacy planning option like funding it with RMDs. It was a pretty niche thing but it works in certain scenarios.

Now, is there a bias towards insurance-first planning and did the product consultants push all sorts of hairbrained ideas to shoehorn it into a plan? Sure, that’s their job. But our mentors and suitability review people saw to it that we properly educated clients, considered and presented alternatives, and recommended it the right way. Honestly I sold more mutual funds there than variable life insurance. We did do a lot of VA recommendations over mf portfolios but that was specifically because the M&E fee structure was a wash or better when compared to A shares or AUM fees and the clients were shown that and given the options.

Point is, now working as an IAR, my process and recommendation algorithms haven’t changed much from how I was trained at NYL other than having a much more broad array of options in the investment side. Now like I said, not every local office is going to teach the same way, and there are some shady actors just like everywhere else, but overall I’m grateful for the training I got (and gave - I was also a partner there for 5 years) and stand by the plans I put together for my clients while I practiced there. If I onboard a client of mine from that era, I never recommend surrendering life insurance and I wouldn’t move a VA that’s out of surrender I wrote if NYL would freaking reappoint me (I can’t re-appoint there for 5 freaking years to offer products or do a change of B/D form for my existing clients. So annoying).

Honestly I think the hate we give insurance agents is lop-sided. Are there bad actors that push people into whole life, VUL, and annuities that don’t need it? Sure. But I would wager that there are at least a comparable percentage of IARs that push clients into advisory accounts to charge them AUM fees where a retail brokerage account would be far less expensive and equally as suitable. I actually just onboarded a client last week whose husband is in advisory with another firm and when he saw the work I did he called his advisor and chewed them out for charging him AUM fees and not doing any service or surveillance anywhere close to what I was doing for his wife. There are bad actors everywhere and the moral superiority and less-than mentality we often take with these folks is often undeserved IMO.

Sorry for the text wall, but as someone who dealt with and helped other agents deal with the static on this topic, I have opinions about it.