Fee-only advisors also want the ability to retain their relationship with the client through the process of seeking, writing and closing a policy, says Brian Peterson, a senior consultant at TIAA-CREF. They're reluctant to have a client deal with a commissioned sales representative alone and then come back with a policy that was put together without their involvement, he adds.

Peterson says TIAA-CREF's low-load insurance services are structured as a "back-office support agency" for advisors and their clients. The company provides the advisor and client with policy comparisons and analysis, as well as all application and underwriting work, often through a conference call that includes both the advisor and client, Peterson says.

"Were acting on their behalf, and they know exactly where their client is," he says. "It's still their client, and that's what they really latch onto."

Indeed, the clash between the commission-based culture of the life insurance industry and that of the fee-only advisor is one of the primary reasons so few companies offer low-load products, says Nancy Kenneally, a senior consultant with Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, an actuarial and management consulting firm in New York City.

"One of the issues is that companies have not been able to penetrate the nontraditional insurance agents," she says. "It takes a fairly large investment from an insurance company's perspective for training and for simplifying the business process."

There's also the fact that variable universal life was designed as an alternative to fixed premium whole life insurance-essentially a product for people with a need for life insurance, with the added benefit of cash value in the form of flexible subaccounts. From a fee-based advisor's perspective, however, the added investment "perk" of variable universal life has been of dubious value, even considering the fact that the products provide tax-deferred capital growth.

Maczuga of the Fee Planners Network, however, says some advisors are finding the tax-deferred growth to be a boon when it comes to rebalancing a portfolio. Some advisors, he says, are using variable universal life policies to hold some of the more volatile components of their clients' portfolios to facilitate frequent rebalancing. And unlike a qualified savings plan, he says, "there are no strings attached to withdrawing the capital."

John Morvay, an advisor with Questar Capital Corp. in Canfield, Ohio, started using low-load variable universal life products from Ameritas about seven months ago. Introduced to the products through the Fee Planners Network, Morvay says he's "batting 100%" when it comes to clients following his advice to use them.

In one example, Morvay says he had a 32-year-old male client who wanted to open up a Roth IRA with a $3,000 initial investment. The client, as it turned out, was planning to buy term life insurance. "I combined it into a variable universal life policy," Morvay says. He ended up writing up a policy with a $150,000 death benefit and using the client's $3,000 as a premium for the low-load contract. The client ended up with a first-year cash value of $2,715, he says. "So the insurance was costing them about $300," he says.

The most difficult part of dealing with low-load life, Morvay says, is the fact that most clients are not used to having to pay a fee for buying life insurance. "That's the hardest part and the scariest part," he says. Although his fees can vary depending on the complexity of a client's case, Morvay says he typically charges $2,000 for the work involved in developing and finalizing a variable universal life policy for a client. Annual reviews of the contract cost $150 an hour, he adds. "I bring a value to them, and that's what I'm selling," he says.