Northwestern Mutual likes to think of itself as a storied American institution offering specialized financial advice. The 168-year-old financial giant, ranked 109 on the Fortune 500, and regularly anointed one of the World’s Most Admired Companies by the magazine, describes its financial advisers as “expert listeners” or a “trusted partner who helps you continue to reach goal after goal”.
It also tops Forbes’s list of Best Employers for New Grads, a title that makes it attractive to hundreds of college students desperate for an internship that could launch them into a career in financial services. Each year they file into Northwestern’s glassy offices across the country for a three-month internship that they hope could change their lives. There, they are slotted in beside thousands of full-time “financial representatives”, many of them recent graduates themselves.
In the corridors of US colleges and business schools, Northwestern recruiters push the dream of a blue chip career in finance. Posters appear with slogans like: The Career You Want at a Company You’ll Love. Recruiters in polo shirts sit at tables asking students if they would like to be financial advisers. Job ads for these positions, posted on sites like LinkedIn, describe “performance-based pay” and “uncapped earnings for the entrepreneurial”, phrases that shimmer with vague promises of potential wealth.
When Jeremy Biar, a senior at Texas A&M University, spotted one of these booths, one with a big laminated placard that read Northwestern Mutual, he was relieved. He had yet to organise a summer internship and was glad when the recruiters began courting him.
After expressing his interest, Jeremy attended an event organised by Northwestern at a nearby Hilton hotel. Inside a carpeted conference room, 50 or so students huddled around cocktail tables, nibbling hors doeuvres, lining up for headshots. Speakers extolled the joys of being a financial adviser at such a coveted firm.
“They get you into the funnel of ‘let me sell you the dream,’” Jeremy says.
But when it came to the interview for his internship, the questions felt more like a fraternity recruitment. How big was his family? What did his parents do? Where did he go to high school? He was sent away with “market information surveys” to complete. The worksheets, seen by the Guardian, required Jeremy to interview 10 friends or family members about their finances – listing their names, occupations, phone numbers, and asking each of them to refer him to 10 more people he could contact about their financial planning.
It all struck Jeremy as odd, was that how blue-chip financial services firms operated? He wasn’t sure, it was his first-ever job interview. So he completed the surveys and was offered a spot interning at Northwestern’s office in College Station, Texas, with 20 or so other students.
On his first day, dressed in a navy blue suit and tie, he felt “hopeful and full of vision”.
The training began immediately, but there were no crash courses in mutual funds or market trends. Instead, the new recruits were told to take out their phones, open their contacts, and upload at least 200 names into company software.
Then start calling.
The goal: 40 dials a day, documents seen by the Guardian show. Friends, cousins, ex-roommates, teammates, anyone who might answer. Jeremy was told to leave 20 missed calls at a time so it looked “urgent”. When someone finally picked up, there was a script to follow: a cheerful announcement of his new role, followed by an invitation to meet and discuss their financial future.
If the person on the phone agrees to meet, their financials are input into Northwestern’s software, which spits out a financial plan. Invariably, it will recommend the most expensive life insurance product, known as “whole life”, according to internal documents and interviews with workers. A more senior adviser typically joins the call and gets half the commission. Reps have quotas for these meetings, according to 14 sources, and an internal document from the New York office, that requests five new bookings per week.
The Guardian spoke with 21 current and former Northwestern workers (plus five who interviewed to be and didn’t end up taking the role) across nine states, who told strikingly similar stories.
Recruitment, they said, is a decoy for harvesting contacts. Reps are not being groomed as future financial advisers, they claim, but pushed to sell life insurance to friends and family.
One graduate, George, recalls selling a life insurance policy to his teenage brother – then being scolded for not making it pricier. Sophomore Kyle* says he was urged to buy a policy himself just to meet quota. Max, a college junior, bought one, too – hoping it would boost his chances of winning a trip to New York. Another, Sarah*, drained her own savings to keep afloat as a rep for four months after college, long enough to sell a whole life insurance policy to her sister. Graduate Megan* was asked daily if she had sold to her parents yet. Refusing to, she would be asked in weekly meetings: do you not care about helping people?
“I felt gaslit,” she says, describing the culture as “cultlike”.
“I don’t believe they’re recruiting people to succeed in a career,” says David*, a Northwestern adviser of 15 years. He thinks they are instead using young students and graduates to get new sales leads: “It’s gathering immense data and not paying for it.”
Northwestern’s talk of big earnings is what draws reps in. The top quartile earn nearly $200,000 annually during their first three years, their job ads claim.
But despite Northwestern’s six-figure promises in their job ads, in reality, most reps earn little before dropping out, often leaving loved ones stuck with insurance policies they do not need.
Clint came across an ad while at business school in Michigan, where money had become a “toxic” obsession, with such influencers as Grant Cardone and Andrew Tate glamorizing passive income over a traditional salary. Against that backdrop Northwestern’s promise of hard work and high salaries felt like self-actualization.
“I was excited at first. I felt like there was a potential career in personal finance in front of me,” says Clint. “But the rose-tinted glasses quickly came off.”
A Northwestern spokesperson told the Guardian: “Our profession isn’t always easy, as it requires a tremendous amount of hard work, grit and perseverance. Understandably, it isn’t for everyone.” But, for those with “vision, drive and an entrepreneurial spirit” it can pay off. Reps receive “award-winning training” and 94% say the internship “helped them grow personally and professionally”, according to an internal survey.
Whether the recruits were misled or simply naive is open to debate. But there is also real concern for potential clients of Northwestern, the ones promised financial advice from “expert listeners” on the company’s website.
Should the largest life insurer in the US be sending students and recent graduates to sell complex financial products like they were boxes of Girl Scout cookies?
Jeremy, the Texas A&M graduate, stuck with his internship despite being asked to harass his friends and family. But over the course of the internship, the office grew quieter. Without warning, interns stopped coming in. After one month, about 80% had dropped out, says Jeremy. Those left standing would simply chalk it up to the others’ inability to “make it” as an adviser.
Even as numbers dwindle, Northwestern flames rivalry to keep reps dialling. “It felt like the survival of the fittest,” says Jeremy. At weekly meetings, rooms erupt with heckles, as a leaderboard ranks reps by policies sold, meetings booked and calls made. “Public shamings,” David calls them.
Those who failed to hit quota look dejected, recalls former adviser Cole*, who worked at Northwestern for four years. With their eyes turned to the table, they would commit to trying harder next week, he says. The top performers were rewarded with trips, dinners and baseball tickets, he adds. Reps were also pressed to “prove conviction” by buying policies themselves, four sources said.
Jeremy rapidly established himself as his class’s alpha. He wasn’t squeamish about hounding his contacts. He wasn’t earning anything close to a living wage, but his dogged approach meant he was able to sell life insurance to seven college friends – including one $6,000-a-year plan. And that put him in a league of his own.
By the end of the internship, he was the only one left standing and accepted an invitation to stay on as a full-time rep after graduation.
But surviving Northwestern came at a price.
“You’re not making any money and you can’t afford to live. You’re either racking up debt, or you’re living with parents,” he says. “It’s easy to get pretty desperate, pretty quickly.”
Financial precarity coupled with a fierce sales culture left Jeremy feeling shameless. Every interaction a friend had with him carried the risk of a sales pitch. Friday night plans became less frequent. People at his church avoided eye contact. “Most of your friends end up blocking your number,” he says.
Finding himself at the margins, Jeremy dug deeper into his echo chamber. “Trust the training and direction of Northwestern,” was his mantra. Topping the leaderboard became his north star; dial, book, sell, refer and it would all work out, he told himself.
“You turn into a stoic human being. You really have to choose your Northwestern career over the friendships that you used to have.”
The golden goose of life insurance
What exactly do Northwestern want young guns like Jeremy to sell? While working as a Northwestern looks similar to a lot of insurance sales gigs, the product reps are particularly complex: whole life insurance.
Whole life insurance offers lifelong coverage with fixed premiums (monthly payments). Policyholders also pay into a cash pot that generates tax-free interest (like a traditional investment account). This makes whole life policies expensive – you are paying for the policy and the pot. Monthly payments are about $440 for a healthy 30-year-old, according to industry averages.
But annual returns on the cash value are underwhelming. An investment in the S&P 500 in 1990 will have grown about 3,700% while a Northwestern policy would have yielded just 44% over the same period (based on its current dividend rate of 5.5%). So, a stock market investment will have grown about 85 times more than the cash value in a whole life policy. Inflation since 1990 is around 146% so the Northwestern investment would have lost value in real terms.
Worse, it’s easy to lose money on these products. A Northwestern policy viewed by the Guardian shows it takes 16 years before the cash pot is greater than the premiums paid. Cancel before then, and you will net a loss.
“Whole life is not terrible for everybody; it’s just terrible for mostly everybody,” says Clark Howard, a bestselling personal finance expert.
One adviser, Ben*, who has been with the company for a decade, says whole life accounts for about 80% of Northwestern’s premiums, citing internal data.
Insurers stand to make a lot of money from these policies because cancellation rates are high. A study by the American Economic Review found that a quarter of policies lapse within three years, reaching 40% within a decade. In those cases, the insurer owes no death benefit and has already invested the premiums. Should a customer keep the policy for life, the death benefit is substantially smaller than traditional, fixed-term life insurance.
“I despise the life insurance industry,” says Howard.
For agents, whole life pays a juicy first-year commission: typically 100% of the annual premium. Except, at Northwestern, reps only receive about half of this, with the rest paid out over a decade. Plus, if a customer cancels within that year, reps must pay back the commission, regardless of whether they still work there. For Jeremy, it was a high school friend. When they backed out, he had to pay $1,400 back to Northwestern. “It can screw a lot of students because the attrition rate is insane,” says Clint.
The reps we spoke with claimed that the only part of financial planning they had learned about was insurance sales. A two-week training schedule from a New York office, seen by the Guardian, shows just one 30-minute session on “securities”.
Twenty sources said they were told to always recommend whole life insurance. Training materials seen by the Guardian tell them to make whole life the “foundation of every plan”. This includes step-by-step pitches, one urging a hypothetical prospective client called “Briana” to commit $600 a month despite her debt and lack of dependents.
“[Young kids] will believe everything they hear in training, specifically how whole life insurance is a good fit for everyone,” says former rep Steve*. “They’ll repeat it and try to sell it to everyone and anyone that they have a relationship with.” It felt like “brainwashing tactics for the young and naive”, he says.
They are also taught to pull on heartstrings with “personal death claim experiences”.
This summer, intern Katie* was encouraged to talk about her father: a Northwestern policyholder who died a few years ago. The office director took particular interest in her, she says, and offered her a leadership role in college recruitment.
“Maybe so that I could spew my own experience and try to get more people involved,” she says. “I felt a little used.”
What did this focus on whole life insurance feel like for the people on the other end of the phone? At 23, Michael Denning was persuaded to buy a whole life policy from a frat friend, despite barely making ends meet at the time. “I really trusted him as a person, and so I agreed to do that,” Michael says. But a year on, he was struggling to afford the premiums, so sought out a qualified financial adviser. The advice: get out sooner rather than later. He lost about $2,400 in total.
“It was really painful to know that the small amount of money I was saving, I’d lost,” he says. He has had no contact with his friend since, but holds no resentment. “I don’t believe he had any idea what he was doing.”
Jeremy says ex-reps often feel shame about pushing these policies. Friends stop replying, convinced they were misled. “They’ll have close friends that won’t respond due to Northwestern coaching,” he says.
One reason Northwestern might push for whole life more than its rivals, is because it is a mutual company – customers own it, instead of external shareholders. This means policyholders receive a dividend in the form of an interest rate. Guaranteeing this dividend – and growing it – is a big reason why it boasts top ratings from credit agencies. These scores and its dividend are at the heart of Northwestern branding itself, “the strongest company in the industry”.
Whole life policies are great for growing the dividend because Northwestern can invest the cash component. Almost 90% of this year’s dividend will be generated via whole life.
In 2004, regulators fined Northwestern $1m after a trainer portrayed whole life “in an unbalanced and inappropriate way” for years without discipline. The reps the Guardian spoke to all worked at Northwestern in the years following this fine.
“We believe that life insurance provides the foundation for a comprehensive financial plan. That does not mean we recommend it to every client,” a Northwestern spokesperson said.
‘Insurance runs the show’
It may seem like Northwestern is pushing wide-eyed students to engage in a business model that feels predatory, but in the eye of the law, it’s legal.
This is partly because of the very careful way Northwestern combines its two main businesses: insurance and financial advice. Financial deregulation towards the end of the 20th century saw insurers and investment firms overlap their services. In 2000, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company rebranded as “Northwestern Mutual”, and agents became “financial advisers”.
Yet, insurance premiums still generate more than 60% of revenue. Adviser David estimates a quarter of Northwestern’s 8,000 advisers run viable financial planning businesses – the rest rely on insurance, dropping out in their first five years.
“Insurance runs the show. Everything else is a facade,” says former adviser Cole. “Their commercials and recruitment process pitch financial planning like crazy, but everything internally is based on insurance, and anyone who says otherwise is lying through their teeth.”
Yet reps often do not mention insurance when they call people up, presenting themselves as advisers. They say things like “I’d like to show you the type of work I do to help people achieve their goals,” and “I work with a lot of accountants and investment firms,” according to a script seen by the Guardian.
Northwestern can refer to its agents as “advisers” because it’s a marketing term that anyone can adopt; the title does not have a single legal definition in the US. But to actually sell investing advice requires certain securities licences, which legally mandate advisers to act in their client’s best interests, known as “fiduciary duty”.
Only a fraction of Northwestern’s 8,000 “advisers” actually hold these licenses, filings show. Less than a third are licensed investment advisers, and only one in five holds the gold standard certified financial planner (CFP) credential.
One small office listed eight staff: there are four advisers, but only two are licensed to sell investment advice. The rest are reps billed as planners, but are only qualified to sell insurance.
By referring to its contractors as “advisers,” when a client meets with a Northwestern rep, it seems as if they are credentialed to make a financial plan that will calculate the best route to retirement. In reality, they are an insurance agent making a sale.
Northwestern provided a list of the licenses reps must obtain in order to use the title adviser – but regulatory filings suggest many fall short.
But what if the client does get matched with one of the qualified advisers?
I decided to book a call with a Northwestern adviser to find out and did not reveal I was a journalist. His email signature contained the letters “CFP” – the gold standard of certification. I could not have hoped for a better match.
“Late 20s,” I said down the phone. “No dependents. Hovering just above the median New York City salary. A four-figure purse of savings which I’d like to grow.” By our second call, my financial plan flashed on the screen. Its “top recommendations” were a Roth IRA, an investment account and whole life. The last would charge an annual premium of $1,476. “I usually recommend it for our young clients,” he said.
One page of the plan shows a bar graph denoting increasing degrees of retirement planning. The first three bars are grey. The final one throws whole life into the mix, and turns blue. “100% need covered,” it read.
James Dahle, author of the the White Coat Investor, a blog dedicated to helping doctors with their finances, considers the advice to be “financial malpractice”, having reviewed the graph.
“There is no circumstance when a twentysomething without kids or a spouse should buy a whole life policy,” adds Howard.
Howard says that if no one depends on my income, there is little need for a fast payout should I die. Plus, for a young person with limited savings but no financial obligations, any money leftover after paying into a Roth IRA should go into an investment account buying indexes.
But the person on the other end of the phone was not under legal obligation to act in my best interests, despite the call being about financial advice. “There’s really zero chance that the average person is going to read through a 60-page packet and pick out where I am selling to them and where I’m acting for them,” says Brendan, a certified adviser who formerly interviewed at Northwestern. “We’re being completely compliant, but it’s problematic.”
Selling students a dream
Northwestern is not the only life insurer that has remarketed itself as financial planning. Nor is it the only one where agents are encouraged to tap their contacts for sales, and burn out fast.
What distinguishes Northwestern, sources say, is how aggressively it recruits students and graduates, and how the job is presented as a pathway to becoming a financial adviser.
New leads are the lifeblood of life insurance – especially whole life, which has high cancellation rates. Northwestern must keep finding more people to buy something that is hard to sell. The company wants to recruit 5,000 reps and advisers this year, knowing that most will not stay long.
Northwestern says about half of full-time reps drop out in year one. However, 19 sources estimated that the majority exit before then, including three advisers who said turnover was upwards of 90%.
In the same way that Northwestern benefits from potential customers’ understandable confusion about the difference between insurance and financial planning, it also benefits from confusion among potential employees and interns.
There are more than 900 job ads currently listed on LinkedIn to work at Northwestern as a rep, which are headed as “Financial Advisor”. They gloss over insurance: of the 400-word job description in one ad, the word “insurance” appears once. Of the 250 Northwestern subsidiaries listed on student job site Handshake, less than a third are listed as insurance companies.
Many life insurers use titles like “Financial Professional” to recruit agents, but the quantity of these ads on job boards are a fraction of Northwestern’s.
Finding life insurance agents willing to cough up their network is not easy. Northwestern knows this. That is where college students – hungry to break into a competitive field – come in. They provide access to college-educated parents, relatives and friends who would otherwise put the phone down.
The thinking is: “Let me get a bunch of people that went to this relatively prestigious university, and let me meet the wealthiest people that [they] know,” says Jeremy.
“I have a real problem with the way that they market themselves to college students. I find it predatory,” says Luke Wonnacott, who applied for the internship after passing a booth in the business school of Brigham Young University in the hopes of becoming a financial adviser. Yet when he was handed the surveys requesting contact details of his network at his interview, alarm bells went off. He did not come back.
Luke and Jeremy both say they would not have spoken with recruiters if they knew it was insurance sales. The students attending Northwestern’s swanky recruitment dinners are all thinking, “I want to be a prestigious financial adviser,” says Jeremy. “That’s the pool of people they’re recruiting.”
Northwestern recruiters also dangle six-figure salaries.
Megan received a “revenue projection” during her interview, seen by the Guardian. It forecasts annual earnings of $120,000 in year one, age 24, climbing to $1m by age 32.
David says his office claims average earnings of $750,000. But internal sales data, seen by the Guardian, show the top 3% of advisers in his office have collected two-thirds of this year’s premiums, as of August.
“The number of people in their first five years earning a living wage is close to zero,” says David. Jeremy estimates he made $5.50 an hour, below Texas’s minimum wage at the time.
When a Northwestern rep sells a policy, about half of the commission is paid out over the next decade – only if they continue to work for Northwestern. However, during their first year, reps partake in a system called “joint work”, where a more senior adviser joins their meetings to help close a deal, who they split the commission with. This is common practice in the life insurance industry but it means that Northwestern reps often see just over 25% during the first year. If reps leave, their residual commissions are absorbed by the corporate home office.
These contracts are designed “to incentivize people to fail”, says Ben.
During Clint’s Zoom interview, when a girl asked about the pay structure, one of the financial planners told her to “think of it like a pyramid”, he says.
“What we advertise is representative of the average earnings for financial advisers who meet the expectations of the career,” a Northwestern spokesperson said. First year average earnings are $61,000 but “premiums do not represent the full picture of compensation” as reps can also earn “allowances and bonuses”, they continued.
However, this figure only includes contractors who have been full-time for a consecutive calendar year (January – December), thus excluding those who may have worked partial years and those who began the year as interns.
One office’s internal sales data shows that the average earnings during the first eight months of this year, among reps hired since 2024, was $20,000. Most reps we spoke to said they received a sign-up stipend of up to $2,000 – conditional on sharing contacts and booking meetings – and $1,000 for every 10 policies sold.
Intern Kyle says the company’s commitment to “entrepreneurial spirit” has kept him dialing, despite making less than half of Arizona’s minimum wage. His parents moved to the US from Mexico without college degrees. They instilled in him the importance of getting an education to achieve something – learn a skill, perfect it, build a brand, but most importantly, make money. He chose finance because it sounded prestigious.
“I know it’s hard work, but I’m going to continue pushing it,” says Kyle. “I can make this work out.”
Becoming a Northwestern success story requires grit and charisma, reps are told. In reality, many advisers struggle to run profitable businesses, so they sign “leadership contracts” after a few years. This means earning bonuses off the sales of reps they recruit.
Ben says it is often nicknamed “the darkside” among advisers. Or as David calls it: “a deal with the devil”.
‘Wolves in sheep’s clothing’
There is no sign Northwestern is reconsidering its business model. But some lawmakers are trying to force them to.
This blurred identity – financial planner or insurance agent? – is at the core of what experts call the industry’s “two-hat syndrome”. Advisers must act in clients’ best interests when selling investments, but that duty vanishes when selling insurance. “People think they’ve hired a fiduciary, when that’s only partially true,” says personal finance expert Howard. “That’s a terrible problem.”
Without stronger oversight, regulators say clients remain vulnerable. Northwestern and its affiliates have faced at least 41 regulatory actions, settling all but two of them, coughing up more than $19.5m.
The industry has fought to keep it that way. Since 1998, insurers have spent nearly $4bn lobbying, according to OpenSecrets. Northwestern alone spent almost $3m last year. “They have the best lobbyists in the world,” says Georgetown professor James Angel. “They’ve forestalled federal regulation for a century.”
Even reps are expected to support lobbying efforts. They receive a minute-by-minute template for how to lobby their local legislator to keep life insurance tax-deferred, internal documents show. Some describe being auto-enrolled into donations for an insurance trade group without consent, according to two sources from different states, and emails seen by the Guardian.
The Department of Labor last year finalized a rule expanding fiduciary duty to cover anyone giving retirement advice for a fee, but it has stalled amid lawsuits from trade groups. The labor department has sought multiple extensions from the court this year, as it decides whether to continue defending the rule.
Corey Frayer, director of investor protection at the consumer federation of America, says it’s “plausible” that the agency will drop it, as courts have “shifted dramatically to the right”, this year when it comes to financial deregulation.
For now, the main legal challenges to Northwestern come from their customers.
Susan*, a twentysomething with no kids, was contacted by a rep after someone referred her. In their meetings, the rep “aggressively” pushed whole life, she says. “I’m always looking out for your best interest, and please remember, I’m a fiduciary,” she recalls him saying.
In under five years, she paid about $100,000 into insurance she later felt she was unsuitable for. Once the premiums became unaffordable, she lodged a complaint. It took her six months to recover the money.
“I feel terrible that people’s lives are ruined by this, people who don’t have a support system and a lot of money,” she says. “These people are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
As a new college year begins, Northwestern offices welcome a new class of interns. But the former interns the Guardian spoke to would recommend interested students think twice.
Jeremy, once the last intern standing, eventually broke too. He had sold more than 50 policies to clients which he knew often did not serve their best interest. Guilt caught up with him. Just over a year after that hopeful spring morning, he quit. He spent the next couple of years working in his church’s ministry. After slowly rebuilding trust with his community, he eventually opened his own planning practice. He estimates whatever he earned at Northwestern, the company will have since made tenfold.
“You’re not going to be able to financially afford a career at Northwestern,” he says, “but also emotionally, you might not be able to afford it either.”
*Use of a pseudonym
