Every life insurance policy has three names attached to it. The person insured. The person or company that owns it and pays for it. And the one who gets paid when the insured person dies. When I review a physician's structure, the policy is rarely the problem. The names are.

Own a policy personally and you pay the premiums with personal dollars, the most heavily taxed dollars you have. Own it inside your corporation and the premiums are paid with corporate dollars, taxed at a much lower rate. When the death benefit is paid to the corporation, most of it can then flow out to your family tax-free through the capital dividend account. Same policy, same coverage, very different result, decided entirely by which name sits in the owner box.

The traps are in the details. Put the owner and the beneficiary in two different corporations and the tax-free amount can shrink. Hold the policy in the wrong company in your group and you create tax where none was needed. Buy it personally when it should have been corporate, or the reverse, and you pay for the mistake for decades. None of this shows up on a policy statement. It only shows up when someone lays the whole structure out and reads the names.