The LASER Fund is Doug Andrew's brand name for a maximum funded indexed universal life policy, and the product itself is ordinary and legal. What matters more is separate: Idaho securities regulators named him in a 2022 complaint over two outside investments his firm sold alongside those policies.
- The LASER Fund is a maximum funded indexed universal life policy, and other agents can build the same thing.
- Idaho's regulator alleged Live Abundant sold roughly $134 million of Future Income Payments product for $8.4 million in commissions.
- Both outside investments collapsed. The SEC called Woodbridge a $1.22 billion Ponzi scheme.
- Clients were allegedly told to pay insurance premiums from those investments, so one failure broke both.
- The Idaho claims are allegations in a contested case. The SEC judgments against Live Abundant and Aaron Andrew are not.
- A 2011 class action over home equity sales settled for $5.3 million, with no admission of liability.
Most people who look Doug Andrew up are trying to answer one of two questions. Either they are about to buy a LASER Fund and want to know if it is legitimate, or they heard something about a lawsuit and want to know whether their policy is in trouble. Both questions have real answers, and neither is served by the two kinds of content that dominate this search: his own marketing, and anonymous forum posts.
We sell life insurance, including indexed universal life, so read this with that in mind. We also went and pulled the actual filings instead of repeating what other people said about them, and we link every one of them at the bottom.
The product and the conduct are two different questions.
Almost every article about this collapses them into one, and that is why nobody gets a straight answer. A maximum funded indexed universal life policy is a legal, ordinary contract that we ourselves sell. What a state regulator alleged has nothing to do with whether that contract is legal. Keep them separate and this gets much clearer.
01 / The PersonWho Is Doug Andrew?
Douglas R. Andrew is the founder of 3 Dimensional Wealth and of Paramount Financial Services, which did business as Live Abundant. He is best known for the Missed Fortune books, which put the idea of tax-advantaged cash value life insurance in front of a mass audience roughly twenty years ago, and more recently for The LASER Fund. He has run a radio show and speaks at seminars.
Give him the credit he earned. Missed Fortune did more to popularize the idea that a life insurance policy can be a serious financial asset than almost anything else published in that era. A lot of people in this industry, us included, are working in a market he helped create.
The Idaho Department of Finance described his role this way in its complaint: "Live Abundant was a Utah business owned by Douglas Andrew, who is a frequent speaker and marketer regarding wealth strategies. Douglas Andrew has a radio show and speaks at various seminars where he endorses indexed universal life products."
02 / The ProductWhat Is the LASER Fund?
LASER stands for Liquid Assets Safely Earning Returns, and in his own words on X it is "a properly structured, max-funded Indexed Universal Life policy." That is the whole product. It is a branded name for a design, not a proprietary contract.
Mechanically it has the same three parts as any max funded indexed universal life policy:
- Index crediting with a cap and a floor. Your cash value earns interest tied to an index, usually the S&P 500, capped on the upside and floored at zero on the downside. You do not own the index and you do not get its dividends.
- Minimum death benefit for the premium. The policy is built with the smallest death benefit the tax code allows, so more of each dollar becomes cash value instead of insurance cost. This is the correct way to build a policy for capital, and it is not controversial.
- Tax-free access through policy loans. You borrow against the cash value rather than withdrawing it, which is why the income is described as tax free. That part is ordinary tax treatment available on any properly structured policy.
None of this is unique to him, and a buyer should know that before paying a premium to any one agency for it.
03 / The RecordWhat Did Idaho Regulators Allege?
Nobody writes this part up, so here it is with the docket number attached.
On July 22, 2021, the Idaho Department of Finance issued an Order to Cease and Desist and Notice of Opportunity for a Hearing against five respondents. On January 12, 2022, it filed an Administrative Complaint in Docket No. 2017-7-15-F that added three more. The eight named respondents are Douglas Reid Andrew, Paramount Financial Services Inc. doing business as Live Abundant, Aaron Reid Andrew, Marcus Kent Maxfield, Jeremy Alma Watson, Gregory Duckwitz, J. Scott Reynolds, and Leland Whiting.
The complaint alleges violations of Idaho's Uniform Securities Act over the sale of two outside investments: Future Income Payments LLC and the Woodbridge Group of Companies, doing business as Woodbridge Wealth. In the Department's words, "Both Woodbridge and FIP were eventually revealed to be fraudulent schemes, with Woodbridge filing bankruptcy and FIP forced into Receivership."
Two things have to be said plainly about this, in both directions.
It is an allegation, not a finding. The five originally named respondents requested a hearing, which made this a contested case rather than a settled one. One respondent, Marcus Maxfield, later resolved his part by stipulated order "without admitting or denying any factual allegations asserted by the Department." We looked for a public order resolving the matter as to Douglas Andrew himself and did not find one. If you are reading this and you know of one, we will link it.
It is not about the insurance. The unregistered securities at issue were the Future Income Payments and Woodbridge investments, not the indexed universal life policies. Nobody alleged the policies were illegal.
04 / The MechanismHow the Two Products Were Sold Together
The complaint puts it this way:
"Live Abundant convinced many of its clients to invest their funds in the FIP Pension-Stream Product and to use the returns from the FIP Pension-Stream Product to fund the indexed universal life product. Live Abundant and its agents, its insurance producers, received commissions on both the FIP Pension-Stream Product and the universal life insurance policy. When FIP went into receivership and stopped paying promised returns, many of the Live Abundant clients were also then unable to fund their universal life insurance products."
The allegation is not simply that a bad investment was sold. It is that the investment and the insurance policy were wired together, that commissions were earned on both, and that when the outside investment failed the client lost the ability to keep funding the policy they had also been sold.
The Department alleges the same pattern repeated with Woodbridge starting around 2015, roughly $25 to $30 million of it, with funds "intended to be liquidated to annually fund the universal life product."
The complaint also states that "Live Abundant and its producers did minimal and inadequate due diligence regarding the FIP and Woodbridge products and they ignored numerous red flags regarding the products."
A policy that depends on an outside investment to stay funded has two ways to fail instead of one.
That is the transferable lesson, and it applies no matter whose logo is on the illustration. If the plan requires a second asset to perform in order for the first one to survive, you own the risk of both.
05 / The JudgmentThe Part That Is Not an Allegation
One piece of this story has already been decided, and it belongs next to everything above.
The SEC sued Live Abundant and Aaron R. Andrew on December 18, 2018 over their Woodbridge sales, in the Central District of California. On January 21, 2021 the court entered final judgments. Live Abundant was ordered to pay $850,664.31, made up of $647,197.41 in disgorgement, $103,466.90 in prejudgment interest and a $100,000 civil penalty. Aaron Andrew was ordered to pay $231,127.50 on the same date. The Idaho complaint states that as of its filing neither judgment had been paid.
Those judgments are against the company and against Aaron Andrew. They are not against Douglas Andrew personally. The Idaho complaint separately alleges he was the sole owner of Live Abundant and is responsible for its violations, and that part remains an allegation.
06 / The Earlier CaseThe 2011 Class Action
There is an older matter people half remember, and it is worth stating accurately because it usually gets described wrong.
In July 2011, Eddie L. Cressy filed a putative class action in the Central District of California, Case No. 2:11-cv-05871, later refiled in Los Angeles Superior Court as Case No. BC514340. The allegations included misleading sales presentations, describing indexed universal life policies as investments, and encouraging customers to take a mortgage or home equity line on their residence and use the proceeds to buy the policies.
The federal claims were dismissed with prejudice in May 2013. In April 2014 the carrier, by then Fidelity & Guaranty Life, agreed to pay $5.3 million to settle on behalf of a nationwide class of people who owned its indexed universal life policies issued between January 2007 and March 2014.
What that settlement is: money paid by an insurance carrier to end a case. What it is not: a finding that any individual did anything wrong. Class settlements routinely include no admission of liability, and this one resolved claims against the carrier.
07 / The QuestionIs the LASER Fund a Scam?
No, and using that word here actually hides the thing you should be worried about.
The policy is a real contract with a real carrier and real guarantees on the floor. If you own one, it does not evaporate because of anything in this article. Calling the product a scam is wrong and it lets the real issue slip past.
The real issue in the public record is what else got sold in the same conversation, by people earning a commission on both sides of it, with due diligence the regulator described as minimal.
That is a question you can ask any advisor in ten seconds, including us. We apply the same standard to our own side of the industry in our piece on whether infinite banking is a scam.
08 / The ProductIs a Maximum Funded IUL Actually Bad?
No, and we would lose credibility pretending otherwise, because we sell them.
A max funded indexed universal life policy is a reasonable tool for a specific person: someone with a long horizon, stable high income, and a clear-eyed view that the carrier controls the cap and the cost of insurance. It has genuine advantages, including a floor that keeps a bad market year from cutting your cash value. We go through the trade-offs in detail in our IUL vs whole life comparison.
The honest criticisms of indexed universal life are narrower than the internet suggests, and they are real:
- The cap is not guaranteed. The carrier sets it and can lower it, and your illustration assumed it would not.
- Cost of insurance rises with age. In a universal life chassis the internal cost climbs, and it climbs most in the years your cash value is largest.
- Illustrations are not contracts. The projected column is a hypothetical. The guaranteed column is the promise. Most buyers are shown the first and sold on it.
- It punishes underfunding. The whole design assumes you keep paying at the maximum. Stop, and the math turns against you quickly.
09 / The ComparisonThe LASER Fund Versus Whole Life
| Question | LASER Fund (max funded IUL) | Dividend paying whole life |
|---|---|---|
| Growth engine | Index crediting with a cap and a zero floor | Guaranteed interest plus a non guaranteed dividend from the general account |
| Who controls it | The carrier sets the cap, the participation rate and the cost of insurance | The carrier sets the dividend, but the guaranteed floor is contractual and cannot fall |
| Cost over time | Internal cost of insurance rises with age | Level premium, costs built in from day one |
| Best case | Higher crediting than whole life in strong market years | Slower, but the number you are shown is closer to the number you get |
| Illustrated on $10,000 a year for 30 years | About $790,000 at 6% credited. That is gross crediting, before the cost of insurance comes out, and the cap that produces it is not guaranteed | About $561,000 if the policy held 4% net across all thirty years. It will not: the early years run well below that, so treat it as the top of the range |
| What it is for | Maximizing projected tax-free retirement income | A stable capital base you borrow against to fund things outside the policy |
Those two numbers are not on the same footing, and it would be dishonest to show them as if they were. The indexed figure is gross crediting, before the cost of insurance comes out of it. Ours is net of costs. Ask anyone who shows you a projection which of the two you are looking at.
We are not going to pretend whole life wins every column. In a strong decade an indexed policy can credit more. What whole life gives up in upside it takes back in the one thing this whole article is about: fewer moving parts that somebody else controls.
10 / The TestFive Questions Before You Buy From Anyone
Use these on him, on us, on whoever is across the table. The answers tell you more than any review does.
- "What are you paid on this, and are you paid on anything else in this plan?" One commission is normal. Two commissions on two products that depend on each other is the pattern in the Idaho complaint.
- "Does this plan require any outside investment to perform so the policy stays funded?" If yes, walk. That is the specific failure mode documented above.
- "Show me the guaranteed column, not the projected one." Every illustration has both. The guaranteed column is the only thing the carrier is obligated to.
- "Which carrier is this, and can another agent sell me the same contract?" If the answer is no, ask why not, and verify it.
- "What happens if I stop funding this for two years?" Ask for it in writing from the carrier, not from the agent.
We Will Read Your Policy With You
Bring your annual statement and your original illustration. On a 30-minute call we compare the cap you were shown against the cap you hold now, and tell you where you actually stand.
Worth a Call If
- You own a LASER Fund or any indexed universal life policy
- Your premiums depend on an outside investment paying out
- You have never compared your current cap to your illustration
- You were told the design was available through one agency only
Not Worth a Call If
- You want someone to confirm the policy is fine
- You are shopping on illustrated numbers alone
- You have no intention of funding it consistently
11 / Our NumbersWhat We Tell People, Including the Unflattering Part
It would be cheap to publish all that and not put our own numbers next to it.
- A well built whole life policy reaches roughly a four percent net internal rate of return over a long holding period. That is not the dividend rate. The dividend rate is a gross number and it is not what you earn.
- The first several years look bad. Cash value lags premium at the start. Anyone hiding that is selling an illustration, not a contract.
- The policy is not the investment. It is where capital sits so you can use it for something that produces a return.
- We tell people not to buy one regularly. No productive use for the capital, or no ability to fund it consistently, means it is the wrong tool.
FAQCommon Questions About Doug Andrew and the LASER Fund
What Does LASER Fund Stand For?
Liquid Assets Safely Earning Returns. In Doug Andrew's own description it is "a properly structured, max-funded Indexed Universal Life policy." It is a brand name for a policy design, not a distinct financial product.
Was Doug Andrew Sued?
His firm and the carrier were named in a 2011 putative class action, Cressy v. OM Financial Life Insurance Company, which alleged customers were encouraged to draw on home equity to buy indexed universal life. The carrier settled for $5.3 million in 2014 with no admission of liability.
Did a Regulator Take Action Against Doug Andrew?
The Idaho Department of Finance named Douglas Reid Andrew and Paramount Financial Services, doing business as Live Abundant, in an Administrative Complaint in Docket No. 2017-7-15-F, alleging violations of Idaho's Uniform Securities Act over the sale of Future Income Payments and Woodbridge investments. Those are allegations in a contested case. We found no public order resolving the matter as to Douglas Andrew himself.
What Were Future Income Payments and Woodbridge?
Two outside investments the complaint says Live Abundant sold. Future Income Payments bought pension income streams and ceased operating in April 2018 owing close to $300 million. Woodbridge sold real estate backed promissory notes, and the SEC alleged it was a $1.22 billion Ponzi scheme. Both collapsed.
Is the LASER Fund a Scam?
No. It is a real insurance contract with real guarantees. The concerns in the public record are about what else was sold alongside those policies, not about the policies themselves.
Is My LASER Fund Policy Still Safe?
Your policy is a contract between you and the carrier, and it is unaffected by disputes involving an agency. What matters is whether it is funded and whether the current cap and cost of insurance still support what you were shown. Pull your annual statement and compare it to your original illustration.
Can Another Agent Sell Me the Same Thing?
Generally yes. A maximum funded indexed universal life policy is available through many agents appointed with the same carriers. If someone tells you a design is available only through them, verify it before you pay a premium.
Is Live Abundant the Same as 3 Dimensional Wealth?
They are separate names connected to the same person. Paramount Financial Services operated as Live Abundant and is the entity named in the Idaho complaint. 3 Dimensional Wealth is the brand Doug Andrew publishes and speaks under.
Who Should Not Buy a LASER Fund?
Anyone who cannot fund it at the maximum for decades, anyone whose plan depends on an outside investment to cover the premiums, and anyone buying it as their only asset. The design punishes underfunding.
Is Whole Life Better Than a LASER Fund?
They do different jobs. An indexed policy chases higher crediting with a cap the carrier controls. We use whole life as a capital base to fund things outside the policy, and we expect roughly a four percent net internal rate of return from the policy itself over a long holding period.
- Idaho Department of Finance, Administrative Complaint, Docket No. 2017-7-15-F, the primary document for every allegation quoted above.
- Stipulated Order Resolving Administrative Complaint re Respondent Marcus Kent Maxfield, resolving one respondent's part without admitting or denying the allegations.
- Idaho Department of Finance securities enforcement orders, the public index where both documents are published.
- Fidelity & Guaranty Life FY2014 Form 10-K, the filing that records the $5.3 million Cressy settlement and its terms.
- IUL vs Whole Life Insurance, our side by side on the two contracts underneath this.
- Curtis Ray and MPI, reviewed, the same treatment applied to the other big indexed universal life brand.
I founded BetterWealth to treat life insurance as the capital tool it actually is, not the product most people get sold. Our team has structured more than 2,000 policies across all 50 states, and we have told plenty of people not to buy one. I wrote The And Asset and host the BetterWealth and The And Asset YouTube channels. If you own an indexed universal life policy and want an honest read on it, book a discovery call.