Insurance & Estate Planning
Life insurance is the cornerstone, not the safety net
An estate plan written without knowing the mortgage, and a mortgage taken without knowing the estate plan, is how families end up selling in a hurry. Here they are the same conversation, with the same person, on the same afternoon.
Six questions. No payment, and no account needed to see it.
One advisor. Every chapter.
Most people assemble their financial life from strangers who never speak: a realtor, a banker, a broker, an insurance agent, and an attorney brought in at the end to tidy up what the other four did without consulting each other.
Richard holds all of those licences. Which means the property you buy, the financing you take against it, the cover that protects it and the structure that passes it on are four parts of one decision, made by one person who can see all four at once.
Twenty-five years advising Jamaican families and business owners on property, financing and estate — including families whose assets, or children, are no longer all on the island.
- Licensed across real estate, mortgage brokering and insurance
- Cross-border planning for the diaspora
- Coordination with your attorney and accountant, not around them
What this actually covers
Living benefits
A policy you can draw on while you are alive
Most people file life insurance under money their family gets afterwards. The cash value inside a properly structured policy is an asset on your balance sheet now — one you can borrow against, at rates a bank will rarely match, without selling anything or explaining yourself to a credit committee.
Wealth transfer
So nobody sells the house in a hurry
Probate in Jamaica is slow, and the bills do not wait for it. Cover paid directly to a named beneficiary lands outside the estate and within weeks, which is what stops a family selling a property at a discount to cover duties, debts and a mortgage that did not pause.
Business continuity
The business survives losing you
Key-person cover replaces the revenue that walked out with the person who generated it. A funded buy–sell agreement means your partners can buy your share from your family at a price everyone agreed while everyone was still talking — instead of your spouse inheriting a business partner they have never met.
Retirement planning
Capital positioned before it is needed
Tax-advantaged capital, arranged so that what the estate will owe is already funded rather than found. The point is not the product; it is knowing the number, and knowing it early enough that the number is still movable.
For over 25 years, the same question: what is this actually for, and who does it belong to when you are gone.
Richard Thelwell — Kingston, Jamaica
While your file is with us
The financing is one part of the decision
Most people arrive here for a mortgage and leave having sorted the property and the estate side too. They are the same decision, handled by the same person — but they are handled by different companies, so each link below leaves this one.